Alexander Calder

Galerie Maeght, Paris

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris

Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above circa 1963)

James Goodman Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in 2002)

Russeck Gallery, Palm Beach (acquired from the above in 2002)

John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (acquired from the above in 2006)

Acquired from the above in May 2006 by the present owner

Santa Fe, Gerald Peters Gallery and Dallas, Gerald Peters Gallery, The Whimsical World of Alexander Calder, 2003

San Francisco, John Berggruen Gallery, Alexander Calder: Sculpture and Works on Paper, 2006

Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau, dirs., 8 x 8 A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements, 1957, 20:37 – 20:53, illustrated in color (video)

Hans Richter, dir., Alexander Calder: From the Circus to the Moon, 1963, 2:12 – 2:29, illustrated in color (video)

Three bright-yellow circles, hover in the air, suspended from a sinuous brass spiral that Alexander Calder precariously balanced atop a jet-black and crimson base. With apparent nonchalance, Untitled (1953) vaunts the artist’s technical ingenuity and conceptual ambition. Typical of his standing mobiles, this masterpiece in miniature unites movement, weight, line, and color. The wit of the gently oscillating orbs and swaying wires that shift in response to fluctuating currents of air, belie the exactitude of the sculpture’s composition and the precision of its making. Like Calder’s early and interactive Cirque Calder from 1926-1931, the present work offers a visual performance that unfolds in real time before the viewer. Calder himself can be seen observing Untitled in motion in Hans Richter’s 1957 film, 8 x 8 A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements.

The taught yet languorous spiral that crowns Untitled, is a recurring motif in the artist’s oeuvre, one that traverses his gouaches, stabiles, and mobiles alike. The brass component may appear as a snake or an outstretched arm—or even a pure line drawn in space—revealing that, for Calder, movement is also ever-present in the mind’s eye, in shifting shapes. The artist also appreciated the profound resonance of basic, universal forms: the circle, for example, evokes celestial bodies, balance and harmony; the spiral, coiled energy and perpetual motion.

By the time he created Untitled, Calder had synthesized the lessons of leading European modernists. Its distilled purity of color and silhouette, for example, is akin to the radiant simplicity and expressive clarity of Matisse’s Icare (1947) (see fig. 2). From Piet Mondrian he absorbed the rigor of abstraction and the power of black, white and the primary colors (see fig. 1). Joan Miró inspired the restlessness and wonderous allusions of his biomorphic shapes. Yet Calder made this pictorial influences his own, extending them into the three dimensions of sculpture and creating new forms—the mobile and stabile—in the process. As the artist himself famously declared, “Why must art be static?... The next step in sculpture is motion” (Alexander Calder quoted in: “Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It in Motion,” New York World-Telegram, 11 June 1932).

Having always expressed a delight in toys, their capacity for manipulation, imagination and joy, Calder infused his art with a similar spirit of play, especially evident handheld scale of Untitled. As Jed Perl writes, “Calder’s feeling for games and play is fundamentally classical in spirit. And what do I mean by this? This is a vision of games not as psychological and inward turning but as physical and outward flowing—play, in short, not as a critique of reality but as an engagement with reality. Play, for Calder, has nothing to do with the trickster or the con artist. Play is something strong, clear, forceful—a joyful responsibility” (Jed Perl, “Play Theory,” Exh. Cat., Seoul, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Calder, 2013, p. 55).

Untitled was produced in 1953, during a pivotal period of transition for the artist. That year, Calder acquired a property in the French town of Saché, which became his principal studio and the locus of extraordinary productivity for the remainder of his life. There Calder began to construct sculptures on a grand scale while continuing to create intimately scaled standing mobiles. Only a year prior, Calder represented the United States at the 1952 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture and was catapulted into worldwide fame. His newfound international recognition solidified Calder’s position as one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century.