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拍品专文
‘The basis of everything for me is the universe. The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle’
ALEXANDER CALDER
‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch – a coil of rope – I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’
ALEXANDER CALDER
‘That Calder was deeply impressed by this sight, can be seen in subsequent oil paintings and gouaches, featuring that fiery red orb, the rising sun. In the wake of this experience, Calder resolved to become a painter’
JACOB BAAL-TESHUVA
Painted circa 1945, Untitled is a glowing example of Alexander Calder’s visionary oil paintings. Against a backdrop of brightly coloured linear bands, the artist imposes three abstract ciphers: a black triangle and its inversion, a silver spiral and a fiery red orb. Operating in counterpoint with his sculptural practice, and sharing much of its biomorphic language, Calder’s select body of oils serves as a reminder of his early artistic roots. It was painting to which he first turned in the early 1920s, having made the decision to abandon his vocation as an engineer. The present work, in particular, may be seen to evoke the epiphany that sparked his lifelong devotion to art. In June 1922, Calder left New York to work as a firefighter on the H. F. Alexander: a freighter bound for San Francisco and South America. He awoke one morning on the ship’s deck to a sight that would remain with him for the rest of his career. ‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch – a coil of rope – I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (A. Calder, quoted in A. Calder and J. Davidson, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York 1966, pp. 54-55). As a new dawn broke over the ocean, Calder resolved to become a painter. His fascination with the orbital motions of the universe – a passion shared by his friend and contemporary Joan Miró – would give rise to an extraordinary visual language, expressed both in his paintings and his celebrated mobiles and stabiles. By 1945, buoyed by the landmark success of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York two years previously, he had achieved widespread acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The present work, with its abstracted vision of a flaming sunrise, pays tribute to the moment that his journey began. In 1923, upon his return to New York, Calder had promptly enrolled in the Art Students League. There, for the next three years, he studied under American painters such as Boardman Robinson, George Luks and John Sloan. He had previously attended a series of life drawing evening classes run by Clinton Balmer, but found he had little interest in painting traditional nudes. As he travelled through Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, Calder was increasingly drawn towards abstraction. In tandem with his admiration for Piet Mondrian – whose studio famously inspired his kinetic sculptures – Calder became a member of the Abstraction-Création group: a collective that included Jean Arp and Jean Hélion. Perhaps most significant in this regard, however, was his relationship with Miró. ‘We became very good friends and attended many things together’, said Calder. ‘I came to love his painting, his colour’ (A. Calder, quoted in E. Hutton and O. Wick (eds.), Calder Miró, London 2004, p. 27). Whilst both Calder and Miró championed non-figurative modes of expression, their mutual fascination with the dynamics of the solar system gave rise to a vocabulary of cosmic forms, evocative of stars and constellations, the planets, the moon and the sun. ‘The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle’, said Calder. ‘I represent them by discs and then I vary them’ (A. Calder, quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York 1962, reproduced at https://www. calder.org/system/downloads/texts/1962-Artists-Voice-P0349.pdf [accessed 24 May 2017]). In the minimal geometries of the present work, Calder evokes the celestial wonder of that morning at sea: the calm ocean, the waning silvery moonlight, the blazing dawn and the blood-red glow on the horizon.
ALEXANDER CALDER
‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch – a coil of rope – I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’
ALEXANDER CALDER
‘That Calder was deeply impressed by this sight, can be seen in subsequent oil paintings and gouaches, featuring that fiery red orb, the rising sun. In the wake of this experience, Calder resolved to become a painter’
JACOB BAAL-TESHUVA
Painted circa 1945, Untitled is a glowing example of Alexander Calder’s visionary oil paintings. Against a backdrop of brightly coloured linear bands, the artist imposes three abstract ciphers: a black triangle and its inversion, a silver spiral and a fiery red orb. Operating in counterpoint with his sculptural practice, and sharing much of its biomorphic language, Calder’s select body of oils serves as a reminder of his early artistic roots. It was painting to which he first turned in the early 1920s, having made the decision to abandon his vocation as an engineer. The present work, in particular, may be seen to evoke the epiphany that sparked his lifelong devotion to art. In June 1922, Calder left New York to work as a firefighter on the H. F. Alexander: a freighter bound for San Francisco and South America. He awoke one morning on the ship’s deck to a sight that would remain with him for the rest of his career. ‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch – a coil of rope – I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (A. Calder, quoted in A. Calder and J. Davidson, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York 1966, pp. 54-55). As a new dawn broke over the ocean, Calder resolved to become a painter. His fascination with the orbital motions of the universe – a passion shared by his friend and contemporary Joan Miró – would give rise to an extraordinary visual language, expressed both in his paintings and his celebrated mobiles and stabiles. By 1945, buoyed by the landmark success of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York two years previously, he had achieved widespread acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The present work, with its abstracted vision of a flaming sunrise, pays tribute to the moment that his journey began. In 1923, upon his return to New York, Calder had promptly enrolled in the Art Students League. There, for the next three years, he studied under American painters such as Boardman Robinson, George Luks and John Sloan. He had previously attended a series of life drawing evening classes run by Clinton Balmer, but found he had little interest in painting traditional nudes. As he travelled through Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, Calder was increasingly drawn towards abstraction. In tandem with his admiration for Piet Mondrian – whose studio famously inspired his kinetic sculptures – Calder became a member of the Abstraction-Création group: a collective that included Jean Arp and Jean Hélion. Perhaps most significant in this regard, however, was his relationship with Miró. ‘We became very good friends and attended many things together’, said Calder. ‘I came to love his painting, his colour’ (A. Calder, quoted in E. Hutton and O. Wick (eds.), Calder Miró, London 2004, p. 27). Whilst both Calder and Miró championed non-figurative modes of expression, their mutual fascination with the dynamics of the solar system gave rise to a vocabulary of cosmic forms, evocative of stars and constellations, the planets, the moon and the sun. ‘The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle’, said Calder. ‘I represent them by discs and then I vary them’ (A. Calder, quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York 1962, reproduced at https://www. calder.org/system/downloads/texts/1962-Artists-Voice-P0349.pdf [accessed 24 May 2017]). In the minimal geometries of the present work, Calder evokes the celestial wonder of that morning at sea: the calm ocean, the waning silvery moonlight, the blazing dawn and the blood-red glow on the horizon.