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拍品專文
Alexander Calder’s Gypsophila is a majestic, double spray hanging mobile, which embodies the exquisite and effortless elegance of the artist's greatest work. As one of the twentieth century’s most beloved artists, Calder’s appeal is universal, but of all his work, the hanging mobiles of the 1940s are among the most covetable and celebrated of his career. Gypsophila, executed in 1949, is one of only two hanging mobiles of the same name that Calder created between 1949-1951; five others are standing mobiles, including Large Gypsophila on Black Spike (1951) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Calder titled his abstract works after their creation based on formal associations, and Gypsophila, a series of cascading discs exquisitely balanced on thin wire supports, recalls the tiny white blossoms of the flower also known as Baby’s Breath. Here, the weightless splendor of the upwardly thrusting elements reflects the intuitive methods to pull off their balance. Perfectly equipoised, Gypsophila appears to float effortlessly on a gentle breeze. “To most people who look at a mobile, it’s no more than a series of flat objects that move,” Calder so aptly explained. “To a few, though, it may be poetry” (quoted in S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957, p. 142).
Each of Calder’s hanging mobiles offer up an invitation into a transcendent space, a place where the patient viewer is rewarded by the infinite subtleties of the artist’s work, as it floats and dances before their eyes. In Gypsophila, a lithe and balletic creation, a series of flat white discs are cantilevered and balanced in such a way as to connote a feeling of utter weightlessness. Their magical suspension activates the surrounding space, while also hinting at the hidden, invisible forces at work at the subatomic level. This is Calder’s sublime gift; for although Gypsophila may evoke the delicate floral sprays of its namesake, it is a nonobjective sculpture that creates an entirely new universe of its own, in which the delicate spheres spontaneously move according to their own, unique gravitational pull.
By the time he constructed Gypsophila in 1949, Calder was celebrated as an avant-garde pioneer with a simple yet profound aesthetic. His signature round discs are among the most important shapes in his formal vocabulary. In the present work, Calder has put together twenty-one white discs of varying sizes, arranged in two separate, lyrical sprays that are connected by a thin, wire strand. Together, they extend vertically and horizontally into a four-and-a-half-foot range. “The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle,” Calder once said. “I represent them by discs and then I vary them” (quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962, p. 39).
To create these sorts of compositions, Calder often began with an abstract shape at its tip and then worked backwards from there. “I start by cutting out a lot of shapes,” as he once described his method. “Next, I file them and smooth them off. Some I keep because they’re pleasing or dynamic. Some are bits I just happen to find. Then I arrange them, like papier collé, on a table, and ‘paint’ them—that is, arrange them, with wires between the pieces if it’s to be a mobile, for the overall pattern” (quoted in S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957, p. 140). As a purely abstract composition, Gypsophila is breathtaking to behold, and its form evokes a delicate feeling as it moves effortlessly in the wind.
It should be noted that Calder’s mobiles, while they exist in parallel with nature, never slavishly copy from it. When asked which had influenced him more, nature or technology, Calder replied: “Nature. … You see nature and then you try to emulate it” (quoted by K. Kuh, op. cit., p. 39). Within this natural world, Calder was able to harness a sort of universal abstract language of energy, which he then transformed into elegant and poetical sculpture. The exquisite power of a refined, abstract vocabulary is one that he shared with many of his contemporaries, who were ultimately the pioneers of twentieth-century art. These included Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. In fact, it was in Mondrian’s studio where Calder, impressed by the overall environment, subsequently came upon the idea for his unique form of abstract art. Looking back, he recalled: “It was more or less directly as a result of my visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, and the sight of all his rectangles of color deployed on the wall, that my first work in the abstract was based on the concept of stellar relationships … For though the lightness of a pierced or serrated solid or surface is extremely interesting the still greater lack of weight of deployed nuclei is much more so” (A Propos of Measuring a Mobile, October 7, 1943, online via www.calder.org/bibliography [accessed: March 12, 2025]).
By 1949, Calder had become one of the most internationally renowned American artists. He was poised on the cusp of a decade that would prove to be transformational in his work. In 1943, Calder was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, which was curated by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp. A few years later, in 1946, he was given a major solo exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris. The seminal catalogue essay, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, praised the poetical qualities of Calder’s oscillating and gliding mobiles. He described them as “a little hot-jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning. If you missed it, it is lost forever” (J.-P. Sartre, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, Paris, 1946, online).
Each of Calder’s hanging mobiles offer up an invitation into a transcendent space, a place where the patient viewer is rewarded by the infinite subtleties of the artist’s work, as it floats and dances before their eyes. In Gypsophila, a lithe and balletic creation, a series of flat white discs are cantilevered and balanced in such a way as to connote a feeling of utter weightlessness. Their magical suspension activates the surrounding space, while also hinting at the hidden, invisible forces at work at the subatomic level. This is Calder’s sublime gift; for although Gypsophila may evoke the delicate floral sprays of its namesake, it is a nonobjective sculpture that creates an entirely new universe of its own, in which the delicate spheres spontaneously move according to their own, unique gravitational pull.
By the time he constructed Gypsophila in 1949, Calder was celebrated as an avant-garde pioneer with a simple yet profound aesthetic. His signature round discs are among the most important shapes in his formal vocabulary. In the present work, Calder has put together twenty-one white discs of varying sizes, arranged in two separate, lyrical sprays that are connected by a thin, wire strand. Together, they extend vertically and horizontally into a four-and-a-half-foot range. “The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle,” Calder once said. “I represent them by discs and then I vary them” (quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962, p. 39).
To create these sorts of compositions, Calder often began with an abstract shape at its tip and then worked backwards from there. “I start by cutting out a lot of shapes,” as he once described his method. “Next, I file them and smooth them off. Some I keep because they’re pleasing or dynamic. Some are bits I just happen to find. Then I arrange them, like papier collé, on a table, and ‘paint’ them—that is, arrange them, with wires between the pieces if it’s to be a mobile, for the overall pattern” (quoted in S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957, p. 140). As a purely abstract composition, Gypsophila is breathtaking to behold, and its form evokes a delicate feeling as it moves effortlessly in the wind.
It should be noted that Calder’s mobiles, while they exist in parallel with nature, never slavishly copy from it. When asked which had influenced him more, nature or technology, Calder replied: “Nature. … You see nature and then you try to emulate it” (quoted by K. Kuh, op. cit., p. 39). Within this natural world, Calder was able to harness a sort of universal abstract language of energy, which he then transformed into elegant and poetical sculpture. The exquisite power of a refined, abstract vocabulary is one that he shared with many of his contemporaries, who were ultimately the pioneers of twentieth-century art. These included Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. In fact, it was in Mondrian’s studio where Calder, impressed by the overall environment, subsequently came upon the idea for his unique form of abstract art. Looking back, he recalled: “It was more or less directly as a result of my visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, and the sight of all his rectangles of color deployed on the wall, that my first work in the abstract was based on the concept of stellar relationships … For though the lightness of a pierced or serrated solid or surface is extremely interesting the still greater lack of weight of deployed nuclei is much more so” (A Propos of Measuring a Mobile, October 7, 1943, online via www.calder.org/bibliography [accessed: March 12, 2025]).
By 1949, Calder had become one of the most internationally renowned American artists. He was poised on the cusp of a decade that would prove to be transformational in his work. In 1943, Calder was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, which was curated by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp. A few years later, in 1946, he was given a major solo exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris. The seminal catalogue essay, written by Jean-Paul Sartre, praised the poetical qualities of Calder’s oscillating and gliding mobiles. He described them as “a little hot-jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning. If you missed it, it is lost forever” (J.-P. Sartre, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, Paris, 1946, online).