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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A19940.
A signature example of Alexander Calder’s hanging mobiles, Untitled exists on a more intimate scale than some of the larger commissions the artist began around the same time. Formed from painted aluminum and sheet metal, each element floats airlessly as if frozen in time. However, with a simple breath, or breeze from an open window, the entire apparatus begins its unhurried dance anew about its myriad axes. Calder’s ability to craft transcendent assemblies out of unassuming materials makes clear his prodigious talent. The personal scale of Untitled places it in the realm of the individual, something not always achievable in the artist’s more extravagant constructions.
Like some spritely bird, its large yellow beak offset by a smattering of red feathers, Untitled balances delicately in the air on a single filament. These kinetic sculptures beg to be named and recognized, but reside in a space all their own. Speaking about Calder’s mobiles, Jean-Paul Sartre noted that the artist “captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.” (J. Sartre, “Les Mobiles des Calder,” in Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exh. cat., Galerie Louis Carre, Paris, 1946, pp. 6-19, English translation by Chris Turner). We as observers can only cast associations on their constantly changing forms in space.
Similar to its larger brethren, like Black, White and Ten Red, Untitled exists as a collection of two-dimensional shapes in a three-dimensional world. Each strand of wire and colored form exists in an interstitial space between drawing and sculpture, a distinction that can change at a moment’s notice depending on the wind.
A signature example of Alexander Calder’s hanging mobiles, Untitled exists on a more intimate scale than some of the larger commissions the artist began around the same time. Formed from painted aluminum and sheet metal, each element floats airlessly as if frozen in time. However, with a simple breath, or breeze from an open window, the entire apparatus begins its unhurried dance anew about its myriad axes. Calder’s ability to craft transcendent assemblies out of unassuming materials makes clear his prodigious talent. The personal scale of Untitled places it in the realm of the individual, something not always achievable in the artist’s more extravagant constructions.
Like some spritely bird, its large yellow beak offset by a smattering of red feathers, Untitled balances delicately in the air on a single filament. These kinetic sculptures beg to be named and recognized, but reside in a space all their own. Speaking about Calder’s mobiles, Jean-Paul Sartre noted that the artist “captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.” (J. Sartre, “Les Mobiles des Calder,” in Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exh. cat., Galerie Louis Carre, Paris, 1946, pp. 6-19, English translation by Chris Turner). We as observers can only cast associations on their constantly changing forms in space.
Similar to its larger brethren, like Black, White and Ten Red, Untitled exists as a collection of two-dimensional shapes in a three-dimensional world. Each strand of wire and colored form exists in an interstitial space between drawing and sculpture, a distinction that can change at a moment’s notice depending on the wind.