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拍品专文
Dating from the height of Alexander Calder’s practice, the present work is an exquisite example of his standing mobiles. A constellation of six yellow orbs blooms organically from a red and blue base, their forms suspended in delicate harmony upon a sinuous wire branch. Executed in 1956, the work stems from a period of extraordinary international acclaim, during which Calder undertook major projects across the world and realised some of his most ambitious creations. Against this backdrop, though, he never lost sight of the fundamental spirit of his art: a hymn to form and motion, born in the crucible of 1920s Paris and animated by the dynamism of the universe. Within this practice, the standing mobiles occupied a category all of their own, combining elements of the stabiles and hanging mobiles to create serene, otherworldly apparitions. Originally owned by Dr Robert Schnell—the esteemed Zurich-based collector of abstract and Surrealist art—the present work has remained in the same private collection for six decades.
The son and grandson of sculptors, Calder originally studied painting at the Art Students League in New York. Early inspiration presented itself to him during a brief period serving as a fireman aboard the H. F. Alexander, which sailed from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. One morning, he woke early on deck and witnessed ‘the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other … it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (quoted in J. Davidson, ed., Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, pp. 53–55). This epiphany would remain with Calder throughout his studies at the Art Students League, and subsequently during his years in Paris, where he found affinity with artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Spheres and circles would come to dominate his formal language, with works such as the present calling to mind the mysterious flux of unseen energies.
It was a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, however, that ultimately signalled Calder’s shift to abstraction. He was impressed by the overall environment, especially the coloured cardboard rectangles pinned to a wall, which he suggested could be made to oscillate. Back in his own studio, he set about painting abstractions and soon turned to using wire and sheet metal. Some of his earliest creations largely relied on mechanical motion, while in others, movement was determined purely by their surrounding environment. The first works of this new type were in fact standing mobiles, including the seminal Object with Red Discs (1931). While his oeuvre would quickly diverge into hanging ‘mobiles’ and non-kinetic ‘stabiles’—terms proposed by Duchamp and Jean Arp respectively—the standing mobiles continued to offer him the greatest expressive freedom, allowing him to combine static and dynamic elements with extraordinary degrees of variation.
By the 1950s Calder had reached the height of his powers. In 1952 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. The following year he acquired a house in France and began to spend increasing amounts of time back in Paris, forging close friendships with fellow Americans living there including Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly. During this period he began to work on a new monumental scale, undertaking major commissions for sites including Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport in New York as well as the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. His fame led him across the world to extraordinary on-site projects in Beirut, Ahmedabad and Caracas between 1954 and 1955. A product of this fertile and exhilarating period, the present work distils the grandeur of his new ambitions to a vision of succinct elegance. Perfectly proportioned and yet ever-changing in form, it conjures the free-spirited effervescence that Jean-Paul Sartre famously described as ‘a little local fiesta … a pure stream of movement’ (‘Les mobiles de Calder’, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exh. cat., Galerie Louis Carré, Paris, 1946, p. 10).
The son and grandson of sculptors, Calder originally studied painting at the Art Students League in New York. Early inspiration presented itself to him during a brief period serving as a fireman aboard the H. F. Alexander, which sailed from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. One morning, he woke early on deck and witnessed ‘the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other … it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (quoted in J. Davidson, ed., Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, pp. 53–55). This epiphany would remain with Calder throughout his studies at the Art Students League, and subsequently during his years in Paris, where he found affinity with artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Spheres and circles would come to dominate his formal language, with works such as the present calling to mind the mysterious flux of unseen energies.
It was a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, however, that ultimately signalled Calder’s shift to abstraction. He was impressed by the overall environment, especially the coloured cardboard rectangles pinned to a wall, which he suggested could be made to oscillate. Back in his own studio, he set about painting abstractions and soon turned to using wire and sheet metal. Some of his earliest creations largely relied on mechanical motion, while in others, movement was determined purely by their surrounding environment. The first works of this new type were in fact standing mobiles, including the seminal Object with Red Discs (1931). While his oeuvre would quickly diverge into hanging ‘mobiles’ and non-kinetic ‘stabiles’—terms proposed by Duchamp and Jean Arp respectively—the standing mobiles continued to offer him the greatest expressive freedom, allowing him to combine static and dynamic elements with extraordinary degrees of variation.
By the 1950s Calder had reached the height of his powers. In 1952 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. The following year he acquired a house in France and began to spend increasing amounts of time back in Paris, forging close friendships with fellow Americans living there including Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly. During this period he began to work on a new monumental scale, undertaking major commissions for sites including Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport in New York as well as the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. His fame led him across the world to extraordinary on-site projects in Beirut, Ahmedabad and Caracas between 1954 and 1955. A product of this fertile and exhilarating period, the present work distils the grandeur of his new ambitions to a vision of succinct elegance. Perfectly proportioned and yet ever-changing in form, it conjures the free-spirited effervescence that Jean-Paul Sartre famously described as ‘a little local fiesta … a pure stream of movement’ (‘Les mobiles de Calder’, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exh. cat., Galerie Louis Carré, Paris, 1946, p. 10).