Claw

Created during the artist’s landmark 1955 residency with the Sarabhai family in Ahmedabad, India, Claw is an impressive large-scale mobile by Alexander Calder. The work spans more than two metres across, and consists of twelve black-painted metal elements suspended from an organic, branching structure of wire beams. They include discs, soft-edged triangles and irregular trapezoid shapes; one has a pincer-like silhouette that likely inspired Calder’s title. Two are perforated with holes, introducing passages of negative space that aid in the work’s cantilevered poise. Where some elements are soldered directly to the wire beams, others hang perpendicular to these—with faces parallel to the ground—from small loops of wire. This inventive construction creates hypnotic complexities of shape and depth as the black forms move through space, shifting perpetually into new patterns and relationships. The work is a remarkable showcase of Calder’s ingenuity, and epitomises his rich sensitivity to colour, shape and movement: it sees the artist at the nomadic, virtuosic pinnacle of his career, at a moment when he was engaged in inspiring cross-cultural projects and his mobiles’ sophistication reached thrilling new heights.

Calder’s trip to India was a high point in a decade of ambitious projects and rising international acclaim. He had won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the XXVI Venice Biennale in 1952, where he represented the United States. He spent much of 1953 in France, living and working in Aix-en-Provence and Saché with his family; in December that year, a solo show of his work mounted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened as part of the II Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil. January 1954 saw Calder visit his friend Henri Seyrig in Beirut, where he made a mobile commissioned by Middle East Airlines. Not long afterwards, he received a letter from Gira Sarabhai, a member of one of India’s most prominent families. ‘She offered Louisa and me a trip to India,’ Calder recalled, ‘if I’d consent to make some objects for her when there. I immediately replied yes’ (A. Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures, New York 1966, pp. 231-32). Calder and his wife arrived in India on 12 January 1955. They spent three happy weeks on the Sarabhai family compound, where Calder made eleven sculptures as well as some pieces of gold jewellery, before departing to explore more of India and Nepal.

Gira Sarabhai, herself an architect, was from a prosperous family known for playing a pivotal role in India’s industrial development, as well as for their contributions to the country’s independence movement. They were also dedicated patrons of the arts. Along with her brother Gautam, Gira founded Ahmedabad’s Calico Textile Museum—arguably the best of its kind in the world—as well as its celebrated National Institute of Design, which shaped the city’s cultural landscape during the 1950s. By the time Calder accepted his invitation, Gira and Gautam had already welcomed leading avant-garde figures from Europe and America to their home, among them Isamu Noguchi, Le Corbusier and John Cage. Others would follow soon after Calder, including Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Charles and Ray Eames.

Calder’s hosts had prepared a studio building for him on the grounds. Drawn as he was to colour and movement, however, he was unable to resist the allure of the Sarabhais’ lush gardens, and completed much of his work on a bench outdoors. ‘Cows were tethered there, and a couple of water buffaloes’, he recalled (A. Calder, quoted in Calder’s Universe, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1977, p. 335). Calder typically titled his abstract objects after the fact of creation, and the titles of some of the sculptures he made there, such as Franji Pani and Sumac 17, nod to the environs’ tropical foliage. Claw might similarly be seen to evoke the living growth and motion of stems, leaves and shadows. Certainly, the garden would have provided the perfect breezy stimulus for Calder’s kinetic works, which were hung from surrounding trees when complete. The mobile is entirely abstract, however, and its relationship to nature conceptual rather than representational. Claw is activated anew with every viewer’s experience, and its movements operate in real space and time. Composing disparate elements into a floating ballet of black shape, Calder captures a holistic sensation of the unseen rhythms, balances and forces that operate among the myriad moving parts of the world at large.

‘Sculptors of all places and climates have used what came ready to hand’, Calder once said. ‘They did not search for exotic or precious materials. It was their knowledge and invention which gave value to the result of their labours’ (A. Calder, quoted in Alexander Calder, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1951, p. 70). He brought only a pair of pliers with him to India: upon their arrival, he and Louisa spent a day sightseeing and shopping for wire and sheet metal in Bombay before boarding the twelve-hour train to Ahmedabad. A profoundly resourceful artist, Calder achieved an extraordinary range of effects with limited means, and expanded the possibilities of what he could achieve in a new environment. Claw is a brilliant relic of this exciting time in his career. The following years would see ever-larger public commissions for the artist, including his vast mobile for Idlewild Airport (today John F. Kennedy International) in New York, and a monumental stabile for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. After he and Louisa left India they wrote to Gira Sarabhai immediately, thanking her for the stay: they remained lifelong friends with the family, exchanging letters until Calder’s death in 1976.