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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A07553.
The idea of playfulness in abstract sculpture, born out of the humor that Klee and Miro brought to modern painting, is one of Calder's most significant contributions to modern art. Combining biomorphic shapes and planar elements with simple wire constructions, Calder helped liberate sculpture from its fixed pedestal setting.
Yet, humor often belies its own complexity. If the Venus de Milo is most famous for its power to suggest what once was, unearthed from a place darker than memory, Calder's mobiles succeed by suggesting the infinite possibility of what can be. Calder's art is the creation of an instrument that can only be played by the genius of wind, chance, light, vibration, and gravity. Though it can be easily argued that Calder's work gives rise to the felt sculptures of Robert Morris, for example, where chance and gravity are given the authority to arrange strips of felt, Morris' felt sculptures remain fixed in a space after they have been fixed by chance. Calder's work doesn't simply memorialize an artistic accident; rather, his mobiles are always already made and forever in the making. Calder brought twentieth-century sculpture to a state of transparency and weightlessness. The negative space between his planes, in constant redefinition, is where the true beauty lies here.
In Blue Flower, Perforated Red, the evolution of Calder's mobiles can be seen as the potential for movement has become increasingly complex: Parts can move up and down as well as around to form infinitely varied patterns in space. No two elements are the same. Our eyes dance to the rhythm of the red, blue, black and yellow, from shape to shape, from solid forms to punctured ones. The poet Jacques Prevert described Calder's magic in six words: "He gives pleasure, that's his secret" (J. Lipman, Calder's Universe, New York, Viking Press, 1976, p. 41). In his mobiles, Calder has allowed himself to tell a secret by being quiet; and, consequently, every time we look at a Calder mobile we see it anew for it is never as it was and never as it will be.
The idea of playfulness in abstract sculpture, born out of the humor that Klee and Miro brought to modern painting, is one of Calder's most significant contributions to modern art. Combining biomorphic shapes and planar elements with simple wire constructions, Calder helped liberate sculpture from its fixed pedestal setting.
Yet, humor often belies its own complexity. If the Venus de Milo is most famous for its power to suggest what once was, unearthed from a place darker than memory, Calder's mobiles succeed by suggesting the infinite possibility of what can be. Calder's art is the creation of an instrument that can only be played by the genius of wind, chance, light, vibration, and gravity. Though it can be easily argued that Calder's work gives rise to the felt sculptures of Robert Morris, for example, where chance and gravity are given the authority to arrange strips of felt, Morris' felt sculptures remain fixed in a space after they have been fixed by chance. Calder's work doesn't simply memorialize an artistic accident; rather, his mobiles are always already made and forever in the making. Calder brought twentieth-century sculpture to a state of transparency and weightlessness. The negative space between his planes, in constant redefinition, is where the true beauty lies here.
In Blue Flower, Perforated Red, the evolution of Calder's mobiles can be seen as the potential for movement has become increasingly complex: Parts can move up and down as well as around to form infinitely varied patterns in space. No two elements are the same. Our eyes dance to the rhythm of the red, blue, black and yellow, from shape to shape, from solid forms to punctured ones. The poet Jacques Prevert described Calder's magic in six words: "He gives pleasure, that's his secret" (J. Lipman, Calder's Universe, New York, Viking Press, 1976, p. 41). In his mobiles, Calder has allowed himself to tell a secret by being quiet; and, consequently, every time we look at a Calder mobile we see it anew for it is never as it was and never as it will be.