拍品专文
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A01894.
Executed in 1962, Alexander Calder's striking and angular Multicolore is a remarkable example of the artist's most inspiring monumental sculpture. Calder's Multicolore combines the artist's characteristic use of scale, color, material and form to produce a striking piece of sculpture that dominates it surroundings and delights the eye.
The large, multi-colored planes of metal are brought together in a way that seems to defy the laws of physics. Using his in-depth knowledge of materials and engineering Calder assembles each element with the minimum amount of contact with its neighbor. The skill with which he does this produces a piece that exudes a sense of incredible strength and untold grace.
Calder considered the structural elements of each work a part of the aesthetic and something which enhanced the overall feel of industrial manufacture. Speaking in 1962, the year he constructed Multicolore, he explained how the laws of engineering were as responsible for the aesthetic outcome of many of the works as his artistic ideas were. "If a plate seems flimsy, I put a rib on it, and if the relationship between two planes is not rigid, I put a gusset between them. How you construct things changes with each piece; you invent the bracing as you go, depending on the form of each object" (Alexander. Calder as quoted by M. Prather, Alexander Calder 1898-1976, exh. cat. Washington, D.C., p. 281).
Calder's Multicolore is a rather striking foil to early 60's minimalist sculpture, a genre devoid of color and the type of internal relationships that make Calder's Multicolore so delightful and complex. Tony Smith's legendary Die, a six foot square cube of equal proportions, is the counterpoint to Calder's Multicolore. Produced in the same year, Smith's masterpiece is the execution of a single idea, a form understood equally well through written description as through experience, simplifying the relationship between the work and the viewer. By contrast, Calder's Multicolore breaks apart the space that it inhabits and literally transforms its surroundings. Calder's sculpture is both mountain and prism whose severe shapes stretch and freeze into an array of exaggerated color and form. It is a noisy sculpture that will not be denied the attention it demands and as one circles the work it does not disappoint, nor is any vantage point the least bit predictable.
Calder's work was heavily influenced by a visit he made to Mondrian's studio in October 1930. Already an admirer of his paintings, Calder was intrigued by the spartan and abstract environment in which Mondrian worked. He was also impressed by Mondrian's reduction of visual imagery to a vocabulary of flat planes of primary colors. "This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word 'modern' before, I did not consciously know or feel the term 'abstract.' So now at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract" (A.Calder, An Autobiography in Pictures, New York, 1966, p.113).
Executed in 1962, Alexander Calder's striking and angular Multicolore is a remarkable example of the artist's most inspiring monumental sculpture. Calder's Multicolore combines the artist's characteristic use of scale, color, material and form to produce a striking piece of sculpture that dominates it surroundings and delights the eye.
The large, multi-colored planes of metal are brought together in a way that seems to defy the laws of physics. Using his in-depth knowledge of materials and engineering Calder assembles each element with the minimum amount of contact with its neighbor. The skill with which he does this produces a piece that exudes a sense of incredible strength and untold grace.
Calder considered the structural elements of each work a part of the aesthetic and something which enhanced the overall feel of industrial manufacture. Speaking in 1962, the year he constructed Multicolore, he explained how the laws of engineering were as responsible for the aesthetic outcome of many of the works as his artistic ideas were. "If a plate seems flimsy, I put a rib on it, and if the relationship between two planes is not rigid, I put a gusset between them. How you construct things changes with each piece; you invent the bracing as you go, depending on the form of each object" (Alexander. Calder as quoted by M. Prather, Alexander Calder 1898-1976, exh. cat. Washington, D.C., p. 281).
Calder's Multicolore is a rather striking foil to early 60's minimalist sculpture, a genre devoid of color and the type of internal relationships that make Calder's Multicolore so delightful and complex. Tony Smith's legendary Die, a six foot square cube of equal proportions, is the counterpoint to Calder's Multicolore. Produced in the same year, Smith's masterpiece is the execution of a single idea, a form understood equally well through written description as through experience, simplifying the relationship between the work and the viewer. By contrast, Calder's Multicolore breaks apart the space that it inhabits and literally transforms its surroundings. Calder's sculpture is both mountain and prism whose severe shapes stretch and freeze into an array of exaggerated color and form. It is a noisy sculpture that will not be denied the attention it demands and as one circles the work it does not disappoint, nor is any vantage point the least bit predictable.
Calder's work was heavily influenced by a visit he made to Mondrian's studio in October 1930. Already an admirer of his paintings, Calder was intrigued by the spartan and abstract environment in which Mondrian worked. He was also impressed by Mondrian's reduction of visual imagery to a vocabulary of flat planes of primary colors. "This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word 'modern' before, I did not consciously know or feel the term 'abstract.' So now at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract" (A.Calder, An Autobiography in Pictures, New York, 1966, p.113).