Alexander Calder

Galerie Maeght, Paris
Dunkleman Gallery, Toronto
Sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 21 May 1975, Lot 191
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Aix. Sache. Roxbury 1953-1954, 1954, no. 6, illustrated
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Alexander Calder: Stabilen, Mobilen, 1959, no. 26, illustrated in installation
Rennes, Museé, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Gouaches, Tapisseries, 1962-3, no. 14, illustrated in installation
Toronto, York University, American Art of the Sixties in Toronto Private Collections, 1969, no. 5
Miami, Art Museum, Miami Currents: Linking Collection and Community, 2002-3

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. The elements move smoothly and freely suggesting a general structural integrity of the work. There are very light and stable hairline cracks to one side of the yellow element. There are a few losses on the red, yellow and blue element, which have been filled in. There are a few small spots of paint loss scattered throughout, mainly towards the joints of the bars, and a few handling marks to the second-biggest red element.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"When everything goes right a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, O'Hara Gallery, Alexander Calder: Selected Works 1932-1972, 1994, p. 3)

The imposing yet exquisitely delicate La Feuille Jaune superbly exhibits the iconic traits of Alexander Calder's revolutionary sculptural practice. Executed circa 1954, at the height of the artist's career, the present work poetically delivers a fluid choreography of dancing sculptural elements gracefully suspended and balanced in a perpetual state of flux. Articulated in Calder's signature gamut of primary colours and spanning an impressive two metres, La Feuille Jaune strikes a masterful equilibrium between delicacy and monumentality to exquisitely epitomise the corpus of complex large-scale hanging sculptures created during the mid to late-1950s. Indeed the decade of this work's creation represents a landmark for the artist: during this period Calder was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize and was subsequently commissioned to create colossal hanging mobiles for the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the John F. Kennedy airport, New York; and the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris. Representing a true summation of Calder's extraordinary achievements and heightened artistic confidence during these years, La Feuille Jaune authoritatively signifies Calder's groundbreaking contribution to the history of Twentieth Century art.

With extraordinary ingenuity and adroit technical skill, Calder forged a revolutionary genre of sculpture that made subjects of form and movement themselves. By traversing the boundaries of artistic precedent Calder's pioneering work demanded a new descriptive lexicon. As early as 1932 Marcel Duchamp gave consummate expression to Calder's mechanised wire works by bestowing the now famous appellation 'mobile' to their delicate hanging forms; while sometime later this was supplemented by Jean Arp when he coined the term 'stabiles' for Calder's free-standing structures. Based in Paris throughout the 1930s, Calder closely associated with the eminent avant-garde and bore witness to the radical creative development emanating from the contemporaneous artistic milieu. Indeed, the progression of Calder's work into the realm of the abstract can be traced to a pivotally influential visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930. Famously Spartan, the nearly all-white environment comprised numerous coloured squares affixed to the walls - this created an atmospheric effect in which the squares seemed to float in relation to one another. Calder's immediate reaction was a desire to see these chromatic components move; as the artist later explained: "I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of colour he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature. I told him I would like to make them oscillate - he objected" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Cologne, Galerie Linssen, Calder 1898-1976 Retrospective, 1987, p. 48). This moment of realisation prompted Calder's life-long inquiry into the play of movement through his iconic body of abstract constellations.

In 1947 the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul-Satre penned perhaps the most poetic and insightful appraisal of Calder's work ever written: "A 'mobile', one might say, is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. It is a flower that fades when it ceases to move, a 'pure play of movement' in the sense we speak of a pure play of light. I possess a bird of paradise with iron wings. It needs only to be touched by a breath of warm air: the bird ruffles up with a jingling sound, rises, spreads its tail, shakes its crested head, executes a dance step, and then, as if obeying a command, makes a complete about-turn with wings outspread" (Jean-Paul Satre, 'Calder's Mobiles', Buchloz Gallery, 1947 in: Exhibition Catalogue, Cologne, Galerie Linssen, Calder 1898-1976 Retrospective, 1987, p. 106). Satre's intuitive choice of language and natural allusions lyrically echo the way in which Calder's work liberated sculpture from the constraints of the pedestal. In allowing a new transformative experience of a once static medium, Calder's delicate sheet-metal and wire constructions invoke the play of shadows affected by the fluid and autonomous movement of the mobile's component parts. Anchored to a network of sloping armatures, the floating red, yellow and black elements together engender unpredictable contortions and resolutions of alternating balance as they continually move and intertwine. Inspired by elemental forms derived from the natural world, Calder also invites and isolates the forces of nature as determining factors in his sculptural creations: "You see nature and then you try to emulate it. ... The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by discs and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. Even my triangles are spheres, but they are spheres of a different shape" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, O'Hara Gallery, Alexander Calder: Selected Works 1932-1972, 1994, p. 3).

It was during the 1950s however, that Calder truly reached the summit of his groundbreaking achievement with his iconic assemblages. Having revelled in the challenges of harmonizing sculptural design within technical parameters, Calder won the Grand Prize in sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952 for his innovative and ingenious use of sheet metal to explore three-dimensional movement through the mobile format. Indeed, by the 1950s, Calder's sculpture became larger and more ambitious. His increasing confidence, recognition, sales and commissions, in addition to new, larger studios in Sache, France and Roxbury Connecticut, allowed him to expand the scale and complexity of the work. Testament to Calder's fortified creative confidence, the commanding sculptural presence of La Feuille Jaune exudes the technical precision and biomorphic kineticism redolent of the very finest works executed during this decade.

Alexander Calder's contribution to sculpture may be considered one of the great achievements of Twentieth Century art. Standing as feats of Calder's fertile mind and his extraordinary affinity for engineering, the mobiles present Calder at his most technically adept and conceptually inventive. Indeed, executed at the very height of Calder's creative and technical powers, La Feuille Jaune is a mature work in the most desirable and captivating format: the mobile. The diversity of balance and axis in this complex aerial position exudes subtle cadence and masterful dexterity of forms that are utterly unique to Calder's canon of suspended assemblages. Moving in a sublime metallic ballet of ever changing composition, La Feuille Jaune is an outstanding exemplification of Calder's unparalleled sculptural genius.