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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A05660.
When he executed Aspen in 1948, Alexander Calder was already one of the best-known sculptors of his time, as loved abroad as he was in the United States. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had mounted a major retrospective of his work five years earlier. Art historian James Johnson Sweeney pronounced, in 1944, that Calder possessed "The widest international reputation of any American plastic artist of his generation" (M. Prather, et al, Alexander Calder 1898-1976, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1998, p. 15). Calder created his first kinetic sculptures - which Marcel Duchamp had famously dubbed "mobiles" - in 1931. Thus, by 1948, he had been exploring the possibilities of representation in moving form for nearly twenty years.
Nuclei and spheres dominated the compositions of Calder's early mobiles, which possessed an almost classical austerity. By the 1940s, however, Calder composed his sculptures primarily of organic and biomorphic forms inspired by the natural world's plants and animals, and even weather phenomena. The Surrealist works Calder would have been exposed to in New York and Paris undoubtedly influenced such imagery; however, he was also significantly inspired by the nature surrounding his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, a farmhouse that he and his wife Louise had purchased in 1933.
In Aspen, we see just such a metaphorical and imaginative interpretation of the natural world, as the sculpture's abstracted elements evoke a myriad of vegetal forms. Delicate lines recall blades of grass or the stems of flowers, shooting up cheerfully through a flat, black ground. Calder anchored the bottoms of these lines with pod-like weights, while the tops "blossom" with delicate white discs. As with all of Calder's standing mobiles, he makes the sculpture's base integral to its composition, its delicate form extending down from the composition's center like the root of a plant or a tree trunk descending into the earth. Calder employed a palette of black, white and red, typical of his 1940s work, as he favored using dramatically disparate colors to enhance a work's structural and formal clarity, and enhance the kinetic relationships between its compositional elements (M. Prather, p. 230).
This work's title suggests that Calder took his inspiration for Aspen from the Aspen tree, a species indigenous to New England, his home at the time. White discs and red drop-like forms sprout from either end of the sculpture's wire "branches" abstractly echoing the tree's rounded leaves and drooping catkin flowers, which blossom in the spring. The Aspen, sometimes referred to as the "quaking Aspen," is known for the way its leaves flutter in even the smallest wind due to the flattened shape of its leaf stalks. Calder's branch-like elements delicately sway, perhaps inspired by the artist's observing Aspen branches trembling in the breeze. As Duchamp once said, "Calder's art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind" (M. Duchamp, quoted in M. Seuphor, The Sculpture of this Century, New York, 1959, p. 85).
Calder often revisited the white discs seen in Aspen in his works from this period. The artist explained, "I do a lot of things that look like snowflakes. The round white disc is pretty much a standard thing in life - snowflakes, money, bubbles, cooking devices" (A. Calder, quoted in M. Calder Hayes, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir, Middlebury, VT, Paul S. Eriksson, 1977, p. 269). For example, he composed his hanging mobiles Snow Flurry and Roxbury Flurry, both also from 1948, solely of white metal discs and wire. These mobiles were originally inspired by a blizzard the artist witnessed at his home in Connecticut. Calder's explicitly associated these white disc forms with snow, so this sculpture's white discs may also refer to the snowy mountainside of Aspen Mountain in Colorado. Calder crossed the country twice in 1948 during a road trip with his wife and daughters to California; it is possible that the vistas of the Rocky Mountains he experienced during these travels inspired this work.
Calder depicted flora and fauna in an explicitly figurative way in certain works from this period. More commonly, however, nature inspired Calder in a more abstract way. He would distill forms in the natural world to their essential qualities or evoke nature's temporal aspects, such as the movement of tree branches swaying in the wind. Art historian Jed Perl notes that, for Calder, "nature was a source material, a reference material - a cornucopia from which to select what he needed at a particular time." He further explains: "The natural world comes into Calder's work not literally, but metaphorically, as a stream of associations and analogies. The mobile itself is one key to his imaginative life - an imagination that is not stable but fluid, dynamic, a celebration of dissonances and disparities and convergences, a becoming rather than a being" (J. Perl, "Calder's Imagination," in Calder: Sculptor of Air, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2009, p. 18 and 26).
When he executed Aspen in 1948, Alexander Calder was already one of the best-known sculptors of his time, as loved abroad as he was in the United States. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had mounted a major retrospective of his work five years earlier. Art historian James Johnson Sweeney pronounced, in 1944, that Calder possessed "The widest international reputation of any American plastic artist of his generation" (M. Prather, et al, Alexander Calder 1898-1976, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1998, p. 15). Calder created his first kinetic sculptures - which Marcel Duchamp had famously dubbed "mobiles" - in 1931. Thus, by 1948, he had been exploring the possibilities of representation in moving form for nearly twenty years.
Nuclei and spheres dominated the compositions of Calder's early mobiles, which possessed an almost classical austerity. By the 1940s, however, Calder composed his sculptures primarily of organic and biomorphic forms inspired by the natural world's plants and animals, and even weather phenomena. The Surrealist works Calder would have been exposed to in New York and Paris undoubtedly influenced such imagery; however, he was also significantly inspired by the nature surrounding his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, a farmhouse that he and his wife Louise had purchased in 1933.
In Aspen, we see just such a metaphorical and imaginative interpretation of the natural world, as the sculpture's abstracted elements evoke a myriad of vegetal forms. Delicate lines recall blades of grass or the stems of flowers, shooting up cheerfully through a flat, black ground. Calder anchored the bottoms of these lines with pod-like weights, while the tops "blossom" with delicate white discs. As with all of Calder's standing mobiles, he makes the sculpture's base integral to its composition, its delicate form extending down from the composition's center like the root of a plant or a tree trunk descending into the earth. Calder employed a palette of black, white and red, typical of his 1940s work, as he favored using dramatically disparate colors to enhance a work's structural and formal clarity, and enhance the kinetic relationships between its compositional elements (M. Prather, p. 230).
This work's title suggests that Calder took his inspiration for Aspen from the Aspen tree, a species indigenous to New England, his home at the time. White discs and red drop-like forms sprout from either end of the sculpture's wire "branches" abstractly echoing the tree's rounded leaves and drooping catkin flowers, which blossom in the spring. The Aspen, sometimes referred to as the "quaking Aspen," is known for the way its leaves flutter in even the smallest wind due to the flattened shape of its leaf stalks. Calder's branch-like elements delicately sway, perhaps inspired by the artist's observing Aspen branches trembling in the breeze. As Duchamp once said, "Calder's art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind" (M. Duchamp, quoted in M. Seuphor, The Sculpture of this Century, New York, 1959, p. 85).
Calder often revisited the white discs seen in Aspen in his works from this period. The artist explained, "I do a lot of things that look like snowflakes. The round white disc is pretty much a standard thing in life - snowflakes, money, bubbles, cooking devices" (A. Calder, quoted in M. Calder Hayes, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir, Middlebury, VT, Paul S. Eriksson, 1977, p. 269). For example, he composed his hanging mobiles Snow Flurry and Roxbury Flurry, both also from 1948, solely of white metal discs and wire. These mobiles were originally inspired by a blizzard the artist witnessed at his home in Connecticut. Calder's explicitly associated these white disc forms with snow, so this sculpture's white discs may also refer to the snowy mountainside of Aspen Mountain in Colorado. Calder crossed the country twice in 1948 during a road trip with his wife and daughters to California; it is possible that the vistas of the Rocky Mountains he experienced during these travels inspired this work.
Calder depicted flora and fauna in an explicitly figurative way in certain works from this period. More commonly, however, nature inspired Calder in a more abstract way. He would distill forms in the natural world to their essential qualities or evoke nature's temporal aspects, such as the movement of tree branches swaying in the wind. Art historian Jed Perl notes that, for Calder, "nature was a source material, a reference material - a cornucopia from which to select what he needed at a particular time." He further explains: "The natural world comes into Calder's work not literally, but metaphorically, as a stream of associations and analogies. The mobile itself is one key to his imaginative life - an imagination that is not stable but fluid, dynamic, a celebration of dissonances and disparities and convergences, a becoming rather than a being" (J. Perl, "Calder's Imagination," in Calder: Sculptor of Air, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2009, p. 18 and 26).