Alexander Calder’s1964 Mobile: Sculpture in Motion

This mature work by the American artist is exemplary of his research into movement. In this mobile, we find the color work that led him to abstraction…

In 1964, Alexander Calder had nothing left to prove. At a time when a cycle of retrospective exhibitions was being organized, starting at the Guggenheim in New York and ending at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the artist had succeeded in gaining recognition for his work on both sides of the Atlantic. New York critic John Canaday wrote: “There is nothing unexpected here, and yet there is all the freshness of the first solo exhibition of an exceptional new talent”. Calder had already been honored with an exhibition at MoMA in 1943, but his work remained as relevant as ever. With the dual patronage of the admiring Marcel Duchamp and the sarcastic Jean Arp, who dubbed his works “mobiles” and “stabiles”, the idea of sculpture in motion gained ground. The terms have entered common parlance, imitations proliferate on the market, and a new generation of kinetic artists is inspired by his work. Calder tirelessly pursued his research, exploring the interplay of scale, and developed it further from his new studio in Saché, his adopted village in Indre-et-Loire. The most French of American artists had a new studio built there in 1962. Its size lent itself to the creation of monumental works, all the more so since Calder could count on the proximity of his foundry in Angers. From the 1930s onwards, the sculptor experimented with installing his pieces in public spaces, in relation to architecture, but without ever making this the exclusive focus of his practice. The artist, who retained a particular attachment to drawing and painting, was also developing his jewelry work, as a continuation of his early work in wire. Calder was always playing with scale, equally comfortable with small intimate pieces as with monumental works of quasi-industrial proportions. Trained as an engineer, the son of artists, his father a sculptor and his mother a painter, he accepted and cultivated the deviations that contributed to the vitality of his art. This Polychrome on Brass Wave, from 1964, is a work of smaller dimensions (35.5 x 66 x 8.9 cm) but no less representative.

Recorded in the archives of the Calder Foundation in New York, it recalls, with its restricted color palette the artist’s decisive encounter with Piet Mondrian.

Calder, A Radical Inventor

In this sculpture of sheet metal, copper, wire and paint, we find the artist’s favorite materials, which he can easily manipulate and, if need be, transposed into different dimensions — although it doesn’t seem that our work is a model. Recorded in the archives of the Calder Foundation in New York under application number A08063, it recalls, with its restricted color palette — black and white, but also blue, red and yellow — the artist’s decisive encounter with Piet Mondrian, who introduced him to abstract art. Calder’s visit to the De Stijl pioneer in 1930 has been the subject of many biographies and commentaries. Seeing the colored rectangles, which the painter intuitively moved around to compose his paintings, stand out against the white walls of the studio bathed in light, the sculptor recognized the shared affinities with his artistic practice and suggested that he make his flat projections oscillate. Although Mondrian categorically rejected this proposal, we can see the impact it had on Calder’s work, a radical inventor adored by all the French avant-garde artists, from the Cubists to the Surrealists, not forgetting the abstract artists and, later, the kinetic artists. As Elizabeth Hutton Turner reminds us in her article “Alexander Calder and Radical Invention”, from childhood he was left free to experiment. While invention manuals for young people prepared an entire generation for modernity, Calder retained a certain mindset. His first wire objects, his animals and his zoo reflect, in addition to a delight in form, a roundness and a genuine stylization of gradual challenges. In this way, he sees art as a kind of empiricism, a punctual response to real formal and almost metaphysical questions, as pointed out by Sartre: how to make something stand upright, give it movement, existence. The artist developed a kind of physics in the first sense of the word, a study of nature that would not be naturalistic, but would instead be mimetic. Observing the movement of a tree’s leaves, a peacock’s feathers or a spider’s legs are all resources for the sculptor, who gives his mobiles the ability to move according to the circulation of air or visitors, or even the action of performers and musicians. The artist left room for indecision and, until 1964, most of his titles were, like this one — meaning “polychrome on brass wave” — very prosaic. As Arnauld Pierre analyzes in his book Calder – Mouvement et réalité (ed. Hazan, 2009), the Guggenheim Museum retrospective played a major role in the artist’s awareness of his own work, which translated into a more developed use of titles to induce analogies. Perfectly traceable, sold by the Perls Gallery (New York) and then the Kornfeld Gallery in Bern, and since then in a private collection, Polychrome on Brass Wave, with its curved base, might suggest a tree taking root. A modernist tree whose every leaf is a challenge to gravity, and whose oscillation is an eulogy to grace, to use the dichotomy dear to the philosopher Simone Weil.

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