Untitled

Currently the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Alexander Calder revolutionized the nature of sculpture to encompass both color and movement. Executed in 1972, Untitled displays one of Calder’s most striking arrangements of lively forms and together—when suspended in space—they jostle for attention as each of the organic forms shifts in an ever-changing arrangement of vibrant, floating shapes. Spanning nearly six feet across at its widest point, this large-scale mobile commands any space it occupies; composed of white, red, black, and yellow colored disks the individual elements are arranged into sweeping, elegant forms. Topped off by a trio of red circles at the apex of the sculpture, as the eye descends down through the composition, they are joined by a single black and a single yellow horizontal disk, before culminating an elegant sweep of seven white circular elements. Each of these components is carefully considered, both for its aesthetic role in the composition, but also from an methodical standpoint to ensure that the entire composition hangs balanced and effortless, as an organic whole.
As an outstanding example of Calder’s celebrated mobiles, Untitled is a superb example of the all- encompassing universality of Calder’s art. His unique ability was to produce works of exquisite balance that retain their harmony when moved by the merest breath of wind. The individual elements of the present lot are all anchored by a series of exceptional mechanisms that allow them to move independently of each other yet retaining a unity that ensures that none of the elements dominate or bump into each other.
The interplay of form and color on display here recalls the palette of Piet Mondrian, whose studio Calder had visited early in his career in 1930. Thinking about his experience there, the artist remarked "I was very much moved by Mondrian’s studio, large, beautiful and irregular in shape as it was… I thought at the time how fine it would be if everything there moved…" (A. Calder, quoted by H. Greenfeld, The Essential Alexander Calder, New York, 2003, p. 57). Calder’s visit came at a formative moment: he moved to Paris in the 1920s after studying at the Art Students League in New York, and was introduced to many visionaries of the European avant-garde. He mingled with the likes of Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp (who later coined the term ‘mobiles’ to describe his moving sculptures). Calder’s work resonated with many of the tenets of Surrealism and Constructivism, and yet it remained entirely new and radical.
The gestures of Calder’s mobiles served as a prelude to Abstract Expressionism. “I feel that there’s a greater scope for the imagination in work that can’t be pinpointed to any specific emotion,” he explained in a 1957 interview (A. Calder, quoted in S. Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 1957). Looking at the concentration of Untitled as they flow through the air, one cannot help but be reminded of those looping movements of tracery performed by Jackson Pollock. But where Pollock claimed that he was Nature, Calder has taken a step away and instead produced works that run parallel to it. The forms in the present work float by in a slow, graceful dance that echoes the movements of the heavens, bringing them to life within the context of the ceiling above us, underneath the wider canopy of the cosmos. This is a relationship that Calder himself emphasized: “Since the beginning of my work in abstract art, and even though it was not obvious at that time, I felt that there was no better model for me to work from than the Universe... Spheres of different sizes, densities, colors and volumes, floating in space, surrounded by vivid clouds and tides, currents of air, viscosities and fragrances—in their utmost variety and disparity” (A. Calder, quoted in C. Giménez & A.S.C. Rower (ed.), Calder: Gravity and Grace, London, 2004, p. 52).