Lot Essay
The present sculpture is a testimony to two fundamental developments in Calder's career that took place in the 1930's and that would shape the course of his life's work. Stylistically this work could almost be used as a step by step teaching aid to explain the evolution of his mobiles from mechanically geometrical to free forms in space. Secondly, 1937, the year in which he gave the work to the Finnish Architect, Alvar Aalto, marks Calder's first involvement with the architects and designers who would not only grant him future commissions but whose advice and professionalism he would seek to answer many technical and structural problems.
In Paris during the early 1930's Calder began to feel restricted by the set geometrical patterns created by the motor driven or hand cranked mobiles that he had been working on. Consequently, Calder began a search for freer natural movement, more organic materials, the substitution of formal patterns for rhythmic variety and the use of space to give an object its volume.
In this mobile we can see how the artist began to interpret his new ideas. Previously severe geometrical forms are replaced by organic forms - in this case long stemmed primitive flowers - which are brought to life by the unpredicability of movement. The graceful spinning of the flowers is permitted by a new hanging freedom, allowing the buds to find their own relationship in space. The aesthetic of the unfinished, of suspense and surprise, shown in this work was the main stay of his later works, while the conscious avoidance of technical finish is one of the qualities of these early experimental works. The schematic representation of flower buds and the crude lead weights provide an organic living quality which if more finely executed would have no resonance.
In 1937 Calder returned to Paris and it was here that an opportunity arose to draw full advantage of the three years spent back in America researching ways to adapt his new ideas to large scale scupture. Not only was Calder asked to create a fountain (The Mercury Fountain) for the Spanish Pavillion at the Paris Exposition of that year, he would meet the designers and architects that he would collaborate with on many great future commissions. Of the architects he met (Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Paul Nelson) it was with Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino, that he would have the longest and most personal relationship. Like Calder, Aalto was intent on discovering unconventional uses for common materials and shared a desire to combine a sense of freedom and changing relations of form and space within a limited construction. Soon after their first meeting, Aalto organized an exhibition at Artek in Helsinki in November 1937 of work by both Calder and Ferdinand Leger and where it is believed that the present mobile, among five other scupltures, was exhibited. The following year both Aalto and Leger attended Calder's first major retrospective at the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts. For many years to come the two families would share a warm relationship, visiting each other in their respective countries and attending each others' most important events and shows.
Calder's relationship to architects, technicians and workmen is a major key in the understanding of his work. As explained in the introduction to Robert Osborn's article, Calder's International Monuments: "At heart Calder has always been an engineer, he has clothed the forces of his engineering with his joyful imagination and his lithe sense of beauty. The well spring of his art remains the thrusts, the tensions, the stress loads, the balances, the forces of gravity, which he the engineer, proceeds to adjust and join." (In: "Art in America", no. 2:32, March-April 1969.)
In Paris during the early 1930's Calder began to feel restricted by the set geometrical patterns created by the motor driven or hand cranked mobiles that he had been working on. Consequently, Calder began a search for freer natural movement, more organic materials, the substitution of formal patterns for rhythmic variety and the use of space to give an object its volume.
In this mobile we can see how the artist began to interpret his new ideas. Previously severe geometrical forms are replaced by organic forms - in this case long stemmed primitive flowers - which are brought to life by the unpredicability of movement. The graceful spinning of the flowers is permitted by a new hanging freedom, allowing the buds to find their own relationship in space. The aesthetic of the unfinished, of suspense and surprise, shown in this work was the main stay of his later works, while the conscious avoidance of technical finish is one of the qualities of these early experimental works. The schematic representation of flower buds and the crude lead weights provide an organic living quality which if more finely executed would have no resonance.
In 1937 Calder returned to Paris and it was here that an opportunity arose to draw full advantage of the three years spent back in America researching ways to adapt his new ideas to large scale scupture. Not only was Calder asked to create a fountain (The Mercury Fountain) for the Spanish Pavillion at the Paris Exposition of that year, he would meet the designers and architects that he would collaborate with on many great future commissions. Of the architects he met (Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Paul Nelson) it was with Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino, that he would have the longest and most personal relationship. Like Calder, Aalto was intent on discovering unconventional uses for common materials and shared a desire to combine a sense of freedom and changing relations of form and space within a limited construction. Soon after their first meeting, Aalto organized an exhibition at Artek in Helsinki in November 1937 of work by both Calder and Ferdinand Leger and where it is believed that the present mobile, among five other scupltures, was exhibited. The following year both Aalto and Leger attended Calder's first major retrospective at the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts. For many years to come the two families would share a warm relationship, visiting each other in their respective countries and attending each others' most important events and shows.
Calder's relationship to architects, technicians and workmen is a major key in the understanding of his work. As explained in the introduction to Robert Osborn's article, Calder's International Monuments: "At heart Calder has always been an engineer, he has clothed the forces of his engineering with his joyful imagination and his lithe sense of beauty. The well spring of his art remains the thrusts, the tensions, the stress loads, the balances, the forces of gravity, which he the engineer, proceeds to adjust and join." (In: "Art in America", no. 2:32, March-April 1969.)