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Descriptif du lot
Offered from the prestigious Belgian collection of the connoisseurs Roger and Josette Vanthournout, Zigzag (1972) is an impressive example of Alexander Calder’s standing mobiles: hybrid works with a static sculptural base from which mobile elements are free to pivot and rotate, introducing the lyrical, ever-changing motion that defines the artist’s practice. Zigzag incorporates a large base formed of a single sheet of metal, with one face painted red and the other black. Its apex provides the pivot for a mobile of seven discs and one trapezoid shape—in yellow, blue, black and white—interconnected by red wire beams. The mobile’s largest element is a yellow disc, which acts as a counterweight to the combined mass of the other moving parts. The base itself is bent vertically in two places, creating the zigzag of the title. It forms a loose ‘Z’ shape when viewed from above. Seen from the side, its upper edge sweeps between two points in a crescent-shaped curve which cradles the motion of the mobile.
With a storied career behind him, Calder was still vigorously at work during the 1970s. His mobiles and stabiles could be seen in exhibitions and monumental public installations throughout the world. They had begun on a smaller scale in interwar Paris, where he had lived from 1926 to 1933 among avant-garde artists including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Le Corbusier and Joan Miró. Initially recognised for figurative works—including deft portraits in twisted wire and his Cirque Calder (1926-1931), a multiact body of performance art—Calder turned to abstraction after a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930. The environment featured coloured cardboard rectangles tacked to the wall for compositional experimentation. Calder suggested to Mondrian that ‘it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate’ (quoted in J. Davidson, ed., Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113). His first mobiles, made of materials including wire, sheet metal and wood, soon followed. As seen in Zigzag, Calder would use a palette of black, white and vibrant colours to express the principle of disparity that he explored for decades to come.
With his ingenious use of space, shape and motion, Calder was able to push Modernist sculpture into unseen new territory. He considered the viewing experience in multiple dimensions, designing his works—whether kinetic or static—to be observed ‘in the round’. In Zigzag, the appearance of the base alters dramatically depending on the position from which it is seen, with either its black or red face visible. Its concertinaed silhouette appears to expand and contract when seen from different angles. Such perspectival shifts are caused by the viewer’s own movement and interact dynamically with the dance of the sculpture’s mobile elements, which themselves are constantly creating new patterns in space. This aspect of the work is governed by chance—the creative force beloved of Calder’s Surrealist contemporaries.
While Zigzag is abstract rather than figurative, its construction might be seen in relation to the unseen forces of the natural world—its rhythms, balances, and laws of physics. The static base evokes a fixed feature in a landscape, with one side in shadow and the other illuminated, while the mobile elements move in response to atmospheric energies. The sun and moon had appeared together in a foundational moment for Calder in 1922, while he was employed on a steamship voyaging from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. ‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala,’ he remembered, ‘when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (ibid., pp. 53-55). The experience can be seen to inform the energised, near-animistic view of the universe’s dynamism later embodied by moving artworks such as Zigzag.
With a storied career behind him, Calder was still vigorously at work during the 1970s. His mobiles and stabiles could be seen in exhibitions and monumental public installations throughout the world. They had begun on a smaller scale in interwar Paris, where he had lived from 1926 to 1933 among avant-garde artists including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Le Corbusier and Joan Miró. Initially recognised for figurative works—including deft portraits in twisted wire and his Cirque Calder (1926-1931), a multiact body of performance art—Calder turned to abstraction after a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930. The environment featured coloured cardboard rectangles tacked to the wall for compositional experimentation. Calder suggested to Mondrian that ‘it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate’ (quoted in J. Davidson, ed., Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113). His first mobiles, made of materials including wire, sheet metal and wood, soon followed. As seen in Zigzag, Calder would use a palette of black, white and vibrant colours to express the principle of disparity that he explored for decades to come.
With his ingenious use of space, shape and motion, Calder was able to push Modernist sculpture into unseen new territory. He considered the viewing experience in multiple dimensions, designing his works—whether kinetic or static—to be observed ‘in the round’. In Zigzag, the appearance of the base alters dramatically depending on the position from which it is seen, with either its black or red face visible. Its concertinaed silhouette appears to expand and contract when seen from different angles. Such perspectival shifts are caused by the viewer’s own movement and interact dynamically with the dance of the sculpture’s mobile elements, which themselves are constantly creating new patterns in space. This aspect of the work is governed by chance—the creative force beloved of Calder’s Surrealist contemporaries.
While Zigzag is abstract rather than figurative, its construction might be seen in relation to the unseen forces of the natural world—its rhythms, balances, and laws of physics. The static base evokes a fixed feature in a landscape, with one side in shadow and the other illuminated, while the mobile elements move in response to atmospheric energies. The sun and moon had appeared together in a foundational moment for Calder in 1922, while he was employed on a steamship voyaging from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. ‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala,’ he remembered, ‘when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (ibid., pp. 53-55). The experience can be seen to inform the energised, near-animistic view of the universe’s dynamism later embodied by moving artworks such as Zigzag.