Alexander Calder

Perls Galleries, New York
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris (acquired from the above in 1960)
Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles
Betty Freeman, Beverly Hills (acquired from the above in March 1962)
Christie's, New York, May 13, 2009, Lot 13 (consigned by the above)
Private Collection (acquired from the above)
Sotheby's, New York, November 13, 2012, Lot 6 
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above) 
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charles Hayden Memorial Library, New Gallery, Calder, December 1950 - January 1951
Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Calder - Miró, October - November 1951, cat. no. 19
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Alexander Calder Mobiles, March - April 1953

Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at (212) 606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Wilson Conservation. The Calder Foundation has provided recommendations for appropriate conservation treatment to this work. Please contact Michael Macaulay in the Contemporary Art Department for further information.
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.

A spray of fifteen pure white circular elements rests in absolute equilibrium atop a pointed precipice. Encouraged by the slightest breath of air, they move in perfect unison, a constant play of balance and counterbalance, an image of the cosmos realized in sculptural form. Seeming to float in the space that they exist in and dance through, these fifteen spheres are ultimately grounded by the gravitational pull of an elegantly curvilinear black base; the stunning result is a feat of both compositional genius and technical mastery that is thoroughly archetypal of the very best examples of Alexander Calder’s iconic standing mobile corpus. Immersed in the earliest years of his prodigious career in the creative world of 1930s Paris, Calder was keenly aware of and attentive to the most avant-garde aesthetics of that critical decade, yet these influences liberated his own ingenuity rather than simply co-opting his aesthetic practice. Although he joined Mondrian, Arp, Delaunay and others in the Abstraction-Création group by invitation in 1931, Calder ultimately chose to give birth to his own revolution and changed our idea of sculpture in the process. One of the Twentieth Century’s most prolific artists in terms not only of the breadth and diversity of his oeuvre but also in the boundless wealth of his sculptural inventiveness, Alexander Calder was solely responsible for the creation of a new sculptural dialect, of which Gypsophila on Black Skirt is a consummate example.

Known today as one of the seminal anecdotes of twentieth-century art, Calder’s arrival at what would become his inimitable technique, inspired by a 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio, has become a legendary origin story in the narrative of western art history. Famously, he was motivated to discover a three-dimensional art form that would embody the reductive palette and spatial inventiveness of Mondrian’s neo-plastic paintings and bring these modernist elements into the viewer’s experience and space.  The aerial complexities of his mobiles would follow and the architectonic stabiles would be placed on the gallery floors so as to commingle with the viewer. Ultimately, the two would inspire a hybrid form that captured both the stationary elegance of the stabiles with the choreography and movement of the mobiles, all of which is so playfully and gracefully on display in Gypsophila on Black Skirt. Created in 1950 and installed that same year in Calder’s retrospective at MIT in Cambridge that was installed under the supervision of James Johnson Sweeney, Gypsophila on Black Skirt exhibits Calder’s fertile and inquisitive mind filtered through the prism of his extraordinary affinity for balance and engineering.

The title of the present work testifies in dual fashion to Calder’s brilliance for organic form which assures that both figuration and the lush dynamism of nature would not disappear from his work. Leaves, petals, hanging boughs and sinuous vines had long been a delicately seductive influence on the undulating lines of Calder’s mobiles from the earliest black monumental mobiles such as Eucalyptus (1940) and S-Shaped Vine (1946, The Broad Museum, Los Angeles) to other standing mobiles such as the sumptuous Bougainvillea (1947). Gypsophila is a plant native to the Mediterranean regions and may have been familiar to Calder from his many years living and traveling throughout Europe. Characterized by small pink or white flowers, also known as “baby’s breath,” gypsophila is a wonderfully paradigmatic motif that combines Calder’s proclivities toward the organic and the architectonic. The minute “petals” are here suspended on delicate wire stems, allowing for an equally delicate movement determined by the air around them as they interact with their three-dimensional space. The monochromatic palette of both the floral hanging elements and the more figurative base also highlight Calder’s focus on form and movement as the essential sculptural component. The soft undulation of the black base is evocative of the lithe animals and creatures that would populate Calder’s oeuvre, but the title reference to female attire, brings an added sense of movement to the work, as if a woman’s skirt gently wafts in the breeze. Springing forth in graceful and dancing arcs of horizontal and vertical depth, Gypsophila on Black Skirt attests to Calder’s unique and endlessly compelling success in bringing form, color and line out into the space inhabited by the viewer.