Alexander Calder

Gift of the artist to the present owner in 1970

Turin, Calder, Palazzo a Vela, July - September 1983, cat. no. 285, p. 161, illustrated
New York, Van de Weghe Fine Art, A Modern Definition of Space: Calder, February - May 2003, cat. no. 7, p. 2 and p. 6, illustrated in color (installation views at Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York) and p. 47, illustrated in color
Dallas, Gerald Peters Gallery, The Whimsical World of Alexander Calder, September - October, 2003
New York, 590 Madison, Large Scale Calder at 590, May 2004 to the present

Exh. Cat., Lodève, Musée de Lodève, Calder Gouaches, Sculptures, Dessins, Tapisseries, November 2003 - February 2004, p. 42, illustrated (in a group installation)

Alexander Calder is included in the canon of Twentieth century masters as an innovative genius who expanded the boundaries of modern sculpture with his creation of new forms and genres within the realm of three-dimensional art. Over his long and distinguished artistic career, Calder was unique among his contemporaries in his combination of engineering skill and aesthetic refinement.  Whether twisting a single length of wire into a sinuous and witty portrait head or achieving the grand and vaulted proportions of his steel stabiles, Calder was the complete master of his medium. The monumental outdoor standing mobiles such as Untitled II stand as a testament to his technical skill and his imaginative creativity in organic composition. The marriage of fluid form with Herculean scale appears ironically effortless for Calder, and his influence on subsequent artists of large outdoor sculptures, such as Richard Serra, is paramount.

Formal creativity abounds in Untitled II, illustrating the magical alchemy Calder could achieve. Unarguably a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1933 gave Calder impetus away from static figurative wire sculptures toward oscillating compositions of primary color abstractions. Motion entered into Calder’s oeuvre, giving rise to one of his two great inventions in sculptural form, the `mobile’ – a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in a visit to Calder’s studio in 1931.  The other innovative form was the `stabile’, a term suggested by Jean Arp in 1932 to describe the non-motorized standing sculptures included in one of Calder’s first exhibitions at the Galerie Percier, Paris in 1931.  Soon, Calder created a hybrid of these two innovations with the standing mobile, opening up a world of new abstract forms which, in turn, created a productive tension between the abstract and the representational, the static and the dynamic in his work.

Calder avoided the traditional sculptural base for his works, preferring to make the pedestal an integral part of the composition.  Calder’s exposure to Surreal art in Paris in the mid to late 1930s inspired more fluid shapes in his sculptures, and the stabile elements of his early standing mobiles were suggestive of plant and animal life. The soaring arches and striding legs of Black Beast (1940), one of Calder’s earliest masterpieces in his monumental stabile form, was a forerunner for a myriad of pyramidal and angular bases for his standing mobiles. The ascending peaks of the black triangular forms retained the biomorphic references to nature and figuration while providing the physical core of the composition. The hanging elements of the standing mobiles introduced the sinuous linear quality that gave Calder’s work its lightness and motion. Allowing Calder to `draw’ a three dimensional form or motion in space, the hanging elements give a contrapuntal flexibility to contrast with the static presence of the stabile base.

Due to shortages in metal during World War II, a few years passed between the creation of stabiles such as Black Beast (1940) and Calder’s resumption of large-scale sculptures in the post-war era.  But the return of economic prosperity and the boom in civic pride and projects in the 1950s and 1960s created opportunities for outdoor sculpture on an unprecedented scale. Whether designing for a private sculpture garden or an expansive urban space, Calder was the foremost choice for collectors, architects, curators and public institutions in the creation of large-scale sculptures, and he left a remarkable legacy of dynamic sculptures in a wide range of locales from Spoleto, Italy to Saché, France to Mexico City and in the United States (New York City, Chicago, Washington, D. C. and Detroit).

As the scale of Calder’s sculptures grew to much larger proportions in the 1960s and 1970s, his abilities as engineer and artist allowed Calder to create monumental compositions that were both rigid and flexible, existing as mass as well as motion.  Having earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919 from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, Calder was well equipped to combine the prosaic with the poetic. Beginning with Whale (1937), his earliest stabile in large scale, Calder worked with the aid of a maquette to determine his composition on a small scale. As he began to use heavier gauge steel with later works, ironworks technicians enlarged the maquettes to larger scale and assembled the sculptures under Calder’s supervision. Beginning in 1959-1960, Calder worked with the Société Biémont, a steel-manufacturing plant near Tours, France. According to Jacques Bazillon of the Société Biémont, Calder supervised each stage of the work and ``His main concern, and he insisted on respecting it, was with building (the sculpture) without using any mechanical or automatic devices. Thus, the finished work recalled in its execution the feeling of craftsmanship, and `the scars of workmanship’ remained visible.’’ (Y. Fischer, ed., Calder: the Jerusalem Stabile, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1980, n.p.)

In 1939, Calder was asked to discuss the nature of his work, and he focused on the juxtapositions in his hybrid inventions. ``Each thing that I make has, according to its degree of success, a plastic quality which includes many things – the mass or masses; the sinuosity; the contrast of lightness and mass; the contrast of black to white; the contrast of somberness to color; whatever element of movement there is in the object…’’ (Margaret Breuning, ``Calder mobiles and stabiles’’, American Magazine of Art, 32, June 1939, p. 361).  A classic example of Calder’s greatest standing mobiles, the vivid colors and pure geometry of Untitled II demonstrate the dynamic balance and harmonic forms of Calder’s organic genius that belies the weight of the material and the sheer size of the elements. In a delightful contradiction related to a masterful interplay of positive and negative space in the round, Untitled II is given the unique visual buoyancy that is the hallmark of Calder’s monumental work.