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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A11457.
Josephine Baker was the succès de scandal of Paris in the late 1920s. Hailed as the "Black Venus", the sexy American performer was celebrated in the French press for her near-naked Jazz musical extravagances. She was the epitome of a decadent Jazz age that was fascinated with the exotic, the thoroughly modern and the daring. Alexander Calder was just one of many young artists who fell under her seductive spell. Calder would choose Josephine Baker as the perfect subject for an entirely new medium of sculpture made of wire, whose elegance of line combined exquisite draftsmanship with technical virtuosity.
Femme Couchée, based on the Josephine Baker prototype, was executed in Paris in 1930. Although a native of Philadelphia, Paris was the city of Calder's artistic birth. Paris was then the Mecca for any aspiring artist, and Calder thrived in this creative caldron. Arriving in the French capital in 1926, and thanks in part to his larger-than-life personality, his wit and charming American optimism, this unknown artist soon found himself firmly within the inner circle of the Paris avant-garde. His reputation was further advanced among the Montparnasse set as word got out about the magical performances of his miniature circus sculptures, the Cirque Calder. Witnessed by an illustrious audience that sometimes included Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Le Corbusier, Calder acted as boisterous ringmaster to small performers constructed out of ephemeral materials such as wire, cork and cloth. It was Calder's ability to imbue his flotsam circus figurines with an amazing sense of life, pathos and humor that made his performances so spectacular.
At the suggestion of a fellow American artist, Clay Spohn, Calder began to experiment with sculpture made exclusively from wire. The first work in this revolutionary new medium was a hanging portrait of Josephine Baker with spiral breasts and Afro curls. Wielding his pliers, Calder literally drew his subject in space. "This was a new development," wrote his friend and curator James Johnson Sweeney. "The tiny articulated circus performers had taken a new scale and a new character. These figures were no longer merely toys wittily contrived from chance materials. They were now three-dimensional forms drawn in space by wire lines--much as if the background paper of a drawing had been cut away leaving only the lines. The same incisive grasp of essentials, the same nervous sensibility to form, and the same rhythmic organization of elements, which are virtues of a drawing, were virtues of this new medium." (J. Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, New York 1951, pp.19-20)
Sweeney praised Calder's nobility of style and the simplicity of his technique, his forms and his expression. In this, Calder's sculpture mirrored the main developments and pre-occupations of other Modern pioneers such as Matisse, Picasso, and Miró, who looked to the simplicity of line and the reduction of form as a means to achieve a new-age classicism. Calder's wire calligraphy resembles the arabesque line of Matisse's Odalisques or Picasso's Ingre-like portrait drawings.
Calder stated that his sculptures were "spaces carved out within the surrounding space, the universe." Sweeney saw Calder's fluid use of line to define volume as the logical extension of Cubist and Constructivist thought. "The Paris Cubist painters had felt that a volume could be more truthfully rendered by making its form transparent. The Constructivist sculptors carried the theory a step further, employing such transparent materials as glass and celluloid for the same purpose. Transparent surfaces led to surfaces actually non-existent, but indicated by lines--wires, strips of wood--or merely implied by other planes. These surfaces defined "empty" or more precisely, virtual volumes." (Ibid, p.8). Whereas the Constructivists' vision led to an art that was largely scientific and impersonal, Calder's wire sculpture used similarly modern materials with a new vitality and humanism, without compromising a representational approach.
Calder produced five known sculptures of Josephine Baker between 1926 and 1930. He obviously enjoyed the exciting and sensual nature of his subject, and her African features and sexuality are lightly caricatured in several of these sculptures. The naked 'Black Venus' of Femme Couchée, 1930, is based on the Josephine Baker prototype, but Calder is less concerned by her comic possibilities than her exotic beauty. He presents her as a reclining Venus, updating a classical model to express his new ideas and forms.
Traditional sculpture had been largely the interpretation of mass. But, in wire sculptures like Femme Couchée, a contemporary critic wrote, "Calder dissociates the physical and corporeal notion from the entirely mental notion of volume. His statues are diagrams of form without weight, without density, graphics of thought or elliptical signs of conventional language."
One can imagine Calder making this elaborate sculpture out of a single length of wire, moving his pliers with such speed and facile dexterity, rather like a birthday magician producing balloon dogs out of the air. Femme Couchée is in fact a fabulous spatial illusion. As with many of his early sculptures, Calder relies on a flat frontal perspective to create what appears to be a convincing three-dimensionality. Essential planes are marked by contour lines, more like a concept of form rather than physical form. Move to the side and the illusion is broken - wire no longer magically takes the shape of a modern-day goddess but simply looks like bent wire.
Josephine Baker was the succès de scandal of Paris in the late 1920s. Hailed as the "Black Venus", the sexy American performer was celebrated in the French press for her near-naked Jazz musical extravagances. She was the epitome of a decadent Jazz age that was fascinated with the exotic, the thoroughly modern and the daring. Alexander Calder was just one of many young artists who fell under her seductive spell. Calder would choose Josephine Baker as the perfect subject for an entirely new medium of sculpture made of wire, whose elegance of line combined exquisite draftsmanship with technical virtuosity.
Femme Couchée, based on the Josephine Baker prototype, was executed in Paris in 1930. Although a native of Philadelphia, Paris was the city of Calder's artistic birth. Paris was then the Mecca for any aspiring artist, and Calder thrived in this creative caldron. Arriving in the French capital in 1926, and thanks in part to his larger-than-life personality, his wit and charming American optimism, this unknown artist soon found himself firmly within the inner circle of the Paris avant-garde. His reputation was further advanced among the Montparnasse set as word got out about the magical performances of his miniature circus sculptures, the Cirque Calder. Witnessed by an illustrious audience that sometimes included Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and Le Corbusier, Calder acted as boisterous ringmaster to small performers constructed out of ephemeral materials such as wire, cork and cloth. It was Calder's ability to imbue his flotsam circus figurines with an amazing sense of life, pathos and humor that made his performances so spectacular.
At the suggestion of a fellow American artist, Clay Spohn, Calder began to experiment with sculpture made exclusively from wire. The first work in this revolutionary new medium was a hanging portrait of Josephine Baker with spiral breasts and Afro curls. Wielding his pliers, Calder literally drew his subject in space. "This was a new development," wrote his friend and curator James Johnson Sweeney. "The tiny articulated circus performers had taken a new scale and a new character. These figures were no longer merely toys wittily contrived from chance materials. They were now three-dimensional forms drawn in space by wire lines--much as if the background paper of a drawing had been cut away leaving only the lines. The same incisive grasp of essentials, the same nervous sensibility to form, and the same rhythmic organization of elements, which are virtues of a drawing, were virtues of this new medium." (J. Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, New York 1951, pp.19-20)
Sweeney praised Calder's nobility of style and the simplicity of his technique, his forms and his expression. In this, Calder's sculpture mirrored the main developments and pre-occupations of other Modern pioneers such as Matisse, Picasso, and Miró, who looked to the simplicity of line and the reduction of form as a means to achieve a new-age classicism. Calder's wire calligraphy resembles the arabesque line of Matisse's Odalisques or Picasso's Ingre-like portrait drawings.
Calder stated that his sculptures were "spaces carved out within the surrounding space, the universe." Sweeney saw Calder's fluid use of line to define volume as the logical extension of Cubist and Constructivist thought. "The Paris Cubist painters had felt that a volume could be more truthfully rendered by making its form transparent. The Constructivist sculptors carried the theory a step further, employing such transparent materials as glass and celluloid for the same purpose. Transparent surfaces led to surfaces actually non-existent, but indicated by lines--wires, strips of wood--or merely implied by other planes. These surfaces defined "empty" or more precisely, virtual volumes." (Ibid, p.8). Whereas the Constructivists' vision led to an art that was largely scientific and impersonal, Calder's wire sculpture used similarly modern materials with a new vitality and humanism, without compromising a representational approach.
Calder produced five known sculptures of Josephine Baker between 1926 and 1930. He obviously enjoyed the exciting and sensual nature of his subject, and her African features and sexuality are lightly caricatured in several of these sculptures. The naked 'Black Venus' of Femme Couchée, 1930, is based on the Josephine Baker prototype, but Calder is less concerned by her comic possibilities than her exotic beauty. He presents her as a reclining Venus, updating a classical model to express his new ideas and forms.
Traditional sculpture had been largely the interpretation of mass. But, in wire sculptures like Femme Couchée, a contemporary critic wrote, "Calder dissociates the physical and corporeal notion from the entirely mental notion of volume. His statues are diagrams of form without weight, without density, graphics of thought or elliptical signs of conventional language."
One can imagine Calder making this elaborate sculpture out of a single length of wire, moving his pliers with such speed and facile dexterity, rather like a birthday magician producing balloon dogs out of the air. Femme Couchée is in fact a fabulous spatial illusion. As with many of his early sculptures, Calder relies on a flat frontal perspective to create what appears to be a convincing three-dimensionality. Essential planes are marked by contour lines, more like a concept of form rather than physical form. Move to the side and the illusion is broken - wire no longer magically takes the shape of a modern-day goddess but simply looks like bent wire.