Lot Essay
Executed in 1950 Black Peacock is a spectacular testament to the creative imagination and engineering elegance of this American artist.
Part mobile, part stabile, it mixes revolutionary avant-garde principles with a playschool sense of innocence and delight. As such, the work is a development of the experimentation first tested by Calder in his balancing and kinetic sculpture of the 1930s, which took the biomorphic abstraction of Arp and Miro and the primary colours of Mondrian, and set them to motion. The subject of the peacock meanwhile recalls the same whimsical charm demonstrated by Calder's famous wire circus animals.
Now the favourite toy of every nursery, Calder's invention of the mobile brought lightness and movement to a medium normally characterised by its monumental solidity. On one hand his work represented miniature universes, whose constellations of floating forms revolved according to a physical logic that was determined by the arrangement of the suspended wires. On the other hand, the mobile's ability to continuously reshape its spacial relationships depending on the random movement of air currents, introduced to sculpture the Dadaist notion of chance.
Calder was typically modest about his achievement. On being asked how he achieved the subtle balance in his work, he responded disarmingly: "You put a disc here and then you put another disc that is a triangle at the other end and then you balance them on your finger and keep on adding. I don't use rectangles - they stop. You can use them; I have at times but only when I want to block, to constipate movement." (Interview with Katharine Kuh, The Artist's Voice)
Part mobile, part stabile, it mixes revolutionary avant-garde principles with a playschool sense of innocence and delight. As such, the work is a development of the experimentation first tested by Calder in his balancing and kinetic sculpture of the 1930s, which took the biomorphic abstraction of Arp and Miro and the primary colours of Mondrian, and set them to motion. The subject of the peacock meanwhile recalls the same whimsical charm demonstrated by Calder's famous wire circus animals.
Now the favourite toy of every nursery, Calder's invention of the mobile brought lightness and movement to a medium normally characterised by its monumental solidity. On one hand his work represented miniature universes, whose constellations of floating forms revolved according to a physical logic that was determined by the arrangement of the suspended wires. On the other hand, the mobile's ability to continuously reshape its spacial relationships depending on the random movement of air currents, introduced to sculpture the Dadaist notion of chance.
Calder was typically modest about his achievement. On being asked how he achieved the subtle balance in his work, he responded disarmingly: "You put a disc here and then you put another disc that is a triangle at the other end and then you balance them on your finger and keep on adding. I don't use rectangles - they stop. You can use them; I have at times but only when I want to block, to constipate movement." (Interview with Katharine Kuh, The Artist's Voice)