Alexander Calder

Galerie Maeght, Paris
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1976)
Perls Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Florida
Sotheby's, New York, November 10, 1988, Lot 69 (incorrectly titled Boomerang and Polygons)
Private Collection, Los Angeles (acquired from the above)
Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
Chalk and Vermillion Fine Arts, Greenwich
Russeck Gallery, Palm Beach
Acquired by the present owner from the above in September 1999

Greenwich, Bruce Museum, The Mobile, the Stabile, the Animal: Wit in the Art of Alexander Calder, September - December 1995
New York, Beadleston Gallery, Calder - Miró: Colors and Contours, October - November 1997

This sculpture is in very good condition. There are some light handling marks on the yellow element, a very thin and faint diagonal rub mark to the black element, and three small areas of retouching to the topmost red element. There is some wear to the rods and hanging loops, with more minor wear to some of the hanging discs, as is to be expected from a sculpture of this date.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In keeping with Calder's works of the 1970s, Un Noir et un Jaune is a delicate balance of size and levity. Conceptually and visually, Un Noir et un Jaune is a classic example of a Calder hanging mobile. In spite of its large scale and solid materiality, Un Noir et un Jaune floats with all of the humor and childlike wonder present throughout Calder's oeuvre whether the scale of a work is intimate or commanding. And yet, the visual delights provided by the continually rotating elements are a byproduct of Calder's serious and definitive contribution to 20^th century art. Calder's work freed sculpture from the pedestal, allowing a new transformative experience of a once static medium. Beyond mere formal concerns, Calder was acutely aware that his sculptures inhabited the world, not just the museum, and so produced work that reached beyond its own superb structural composition. Thus, Un Noir et un Jaune activates the entirety of its surroundings. The play of shadows created as the sculpture moves rivals the dramatic sloped suspension of the floating red elements Calder chose as its anchors. The unpredictable contortions and fluid resolutions of the balance as they persistently intertwine, punctuated by the single black and yellow elements, are a mesmerizing quality of Calder's large-scale work.

Calder's fascination with movement pervades his mature oeuvre. While present in the early wire works, the possibility of movement was heightened when Calder moved from figurative sculptures, like those he created for the Circus, to working with abstract form. This shift to abstraction occurred around 1930, at which time Calder also began to associate with a number of French artists who were on the cutting edge of avant-garde art including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Piet Mondrian. Although Miró is arguably the most influential of the afore-mentioned artists in respect to Calder, in terms of both friendship and artistic dialogue, Calder's reaction to visiting Mondrian's Paris studio in October 1930 is fascinating with regards to works like Un Noir et un Jaune some four decades later. From the 1930s onward, Mondrian's studios were famously spartan, consisting of a nearly all-white environment in which colored squares and rectangles seemed to float in relation to one another. "Many years later, he [Calder] recalled that sunlight streamed into the atelier from two large side windows, creating a beautiful crosslight. He was impressed that in the studio where strict neo-plastic principles prevailed, even the Victrola was painted red. From the standpoint of Calder's future development as a sculptor, his response to the studio is fascinating: he wanted to see the colored rectangles move." (Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., The National Gallery of Art, Alexander Calder 1898 - 1976, 1998, p. 57). The conjured image of Mondrian's squares and perfectly balanced compositions that Calder would set in motion speaks to the interconnectedness of Calder's work with the artists of the Parisian avant-garde and the lasting influence of those early Paris years on his work.

Bearing witness to the development of sophisticated artistic development in Europe became a key underpinning of Calder's sculptural works, yet theory never overtakes his sculptures' visual play. Rather, Calder produced sophisticated lines of theoretical questioning concerning composition, balance, speed and temporal characteristics that melded his engineering background with his artistic concerns. In 1933 Calder queried, "Why not plastic forms in motion? Not a simple translatory or rotary motion, but several motions of different types, speeds and amplitudes composing to make a resultant whole." (Ibid. p. 329).  It is no wonder that his early concepts resonate through to later works like Un Noir et un Jaune. When World War II broke out, Calder returned to America from his European sojourn and, even though Calder was intensely involved in the New York art world from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, his work was not aligned with the introspective anguish and emotional turmoil evinced by the New York School artists of that time. While some of Calder's sculptures engaged themes of the cosmos and the infinite, overall his work retained the joie de vivre and agility that continued as a hallmark throughout the rest of his career.

From the 1960s onward, and particularly during the 1970s, Calder was engaged with projects that allowed him to work on a massive scale. In 1960 Calder said, "There's been an agrandissement in my work. It's true I've more or less retired from the smaller mobiles. I regard them as a sort of fiddling." (Ibid, p. 279). This renders Un Noir et un Jaune as characteristic of Calder's large-scale work during the period. The stabiles and mobiles produced during this last decade of his life have continued to be some of the most visible and accomplished works of his career. Among these major works, Un Noir et un Jaune 1972 is a resplendent example of an American sculptor working at the height of his mastery with a human scale in mind. Powerful while also endearing, Un Noir et un Jaune is an ode to the legacy of European sophistication and American ingenuity as embodied by the works of Alexander Calder.