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拍品专文
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A07752.
Ever since the 1920s and his wire sculptures of circus performers, Calder had the extraordinary ability to capture with ingenuity and engineering elegance the very essence and movement of a natural being in his art. Calder's The Beetle remains a formal investigation of abstract forms, balance and motion, but the subtle shifting of its layered black plates and its mobile "antenna" mimics the lumbering movement of an insect perfectly. Calder has taken the biomorphic abstraction of Hans Arp and Joan Miró and the primary colors of Mondrian, setting them in delightful motion.
Now the favorite toy of every nursery, Calder's invention of the mobile brought lightness and movement to a medium normally characterized by monumental solidity in space. On the one hand, Calder's work represented miniature constellations of floating forms, which moved according to a physical logic that was determined by the arrangement of suspended wires. On the other hand, the sculpture's capacity to reshape its spatial relationships, depending on the random movement of air currents, introduced a Dadaist notion of chance. In his "standing mobiles" such as The Beetle, however, Calder merged the immovability of his land-based "Stabiles" with the free hanging forms of his mobiles. In doing so he created here a cute Surrealist monster akin to the small creatures that populated the paintings of Miró at this time.
Ever since the 1920s and his wire sculptures of circus performers, Calder had the extraordinary ability to capture with ingenuity and engineering elegance the very essence and movement of a natural being in his art. Calder's The Beetle remains a formal investigation of abstract forms, balance and motion, but the subtle shifting of its layered black plates and its mobile "antenna" mimics the lumbering movement of an insect perfectly. Calder has taken the biomorphic abstraction of Hans Arp and Joan Miró and the primary colors of Mondrian, setting them in delightful motion.
Now the favorite toy of every nursery, Calder's invention of the mobile brought lightness and movement to a medium normally characterized by monumental solidity in space. On the one hand, Calder's work represented miniature constellations of floating forms, which moved according to a physical logic that was determined by the arrangement of suspended wires. On the other hand, the sculpture's capacity to reshape its spatial relationships, depending on the random movement of air currents, introduced a Dadaist notion of chance. In his "standing mobiles" such as The Beetle, however, Calder merged the immovability of his land-based "Stabiles" with the free hanging forms of his mobiles. In doing so he created here a cute Surrealist monster akin to the small creatures that populated the paintings of Miró at this time.