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拍品專文
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A01791.
With its dramatic silhouette of soaring vertical peaks and animated constellations of suspended objects, Alexander Calder’s Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight combines two of the artist’s most iconic forms—his graceful mobiles and monumental sculptures. Calder made his name in the 1930s by inventing a completely new artistic form—the mobile, yet by the late 1950s he had moved on to producing a series of large monumental sculptures that graced public places around the world. It is here, in works such as Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight that these two forms combine to produce an entirely new iteration of Calder’s unique artistic language.
Standing over five feet tall, Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight majestically exhibits Calder’s total mastery of form. In this work, opposites attract as a large black, monolithic form is counterbalanced by a thin wire armature from which is suspended a series of delicate cascading metal forms. In addition, Calder’s pits vibrant colors against dark shadows, and solidity plays against softness. Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight is centered around a large dominant core comprised of thick sheets of painted metal. The artist fabricates this element by fashioning a series of peaks and troughs cut into the sheet metal, causing the eyes to raise skyward and mimicking the dramatic mountainous range of the work’s title. In order to offset the monumentally of this central core, Calder inserts a series organic shaped holes into these metallic planes, giving the whole work a sense of lightness—a device which he also used adroitly in some of his larger-scale mobiles. Balanced perfectly in one of the ‘valleys’ of the central core is a long, thin metal wire to which Calder attached, at one end, the red and yellow counterweights of the work’s title and at the other extremity, a series of perfectly cascading white circles, floating like snowflakes in the breeze. This enticing combination of strength and dexterity is a consummate example of Calder’s art, showcasing the technical and aesthetic skill that enabled his to become one of the most innovative and revolutionary artists of his generation.
One of only seven Crags created for an exhibited at the Perls Gallery in New York in 1974, this work links back to Calder’s early interest in Surrealism. Their dramatic outlines and amorphous forms recall the works of artists such as André Mason, Hans Arp, Max Ernst and particularly Yves Tanguy, with whom Calder had been friends ever since both artists were represented by the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Indeed there was much cross-contamination of ideas between the two artists and the undulating, almost form-less forms of Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight resonate with the imaginary landscapes of Tanguy’s paintings, such as The Palace of Rocks and Windows, 1942 (Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). Indeed as Susan Davidson notes, many of Calder’s sculptures are indebted to a form of cross-pollination between abstraction and Surrealism. “Biomorphism, as practiced by Tanguy and Calder, is at the heart of both movements,” she writes. “Tanguy’s rock forms are not merely dreamscapes; they evoke the passage of time and echoes of a mythical, druidic past, qualities that resonate with the gentle movements generated by air passing through Calder’s similarly shaped, 'abstract' mobiles” (S. Davidson, “Shared Visions: The Friendship of Yves Tanguy and Alexander Calder” in Tanguy Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction, exh. cat., L Arts, New York, 2010, p. 23).
Executed in 1974, Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight comes towards the end of Calder’s extraordinarily prolific career. He began to investigate the introduction of movement into his art in the early 1930s when, after a visit to Mondrian’s studio in Paris, he famously declared “Why must art be static? You look at abstraction, sculpture or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step is sculpture in motion” (A. Calder, quoted by M. Prather, Alexander Calder 1898-1976, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 57). Here, the spheres that featured so heavily in some of these earliest sculptures sit in perfect harmony with the monolithic planes and nuclei that came to populate his later work. Thus it is with works such as this that we begin to see the scale of Calder’s unique approach to artistic expression, and the role that the centrality of the universe played in it. As the artist himself said, “Since the beginning of my work in abstract art, and even though it was not obvious at the 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).
With its dramatic silhouette of soaring vertical peaks and animated constellations of suspended objects, Alexander Calder’s Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight combines two of the artist’s most iconic forms—his graceful mobiles and monumental sculptures. Calder made his name in the 1930s by inventing a completely new artistic form—the mobile, yet by the late 1950s he had moved on to producing a series of large monumental sculptures that graced public places around the world. It is here, in works such as Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight that these two forms combine to produce an entirely new iteration of Calder’s unique artistic language.
Standing over five feet tall, Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight majestically exhibits Calder’s total mastery of form. In this work, opposites attract as a large black, monolithic form is counterbalanced by a thin wire armature from which is suspended a series of delicate cascading metal forms. In addition, Calder’s pits vibrant colors against dark shadows, and solidity plays against softness. Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight is centered around a large dominant core comprised of thick sheets of painted metal. The artist fabricates this element by fashioning a series of peaks and troughs cut into the sheet metal, causing the eyes to raise skyward and mimicking the dramatic mountainous range of the work’s title. In order to offset the monumentally of this central core, Calder inserts a series organic shaped holes into these metallic planes, giving the whole work a sense of lightness—a device which he also used adroitly in some of his larger-scale mobiles. Balanced perfectly in one of the ‘valleys’ of the central core is a long, thin metal wire to which Calder attached, at one end, the red and yellow counterweights of the work’s title and at the other extremity, a series of perfectly cascading white circles, floating like snowflakes in the breeze. This enticing combination of strength and dexterity is a consummate example of Calder’s art, showcasing the technical and aesthetic skill that enabled his to become one of the most innovative and revolutionary artists of his generation.
One of only seven Crags created for an exhibited at the Perls Gallery in New York in 1974, this work links back to Calder’s early interest in Surrealism. Their dramatic outlines and amorphous forms recall the works of artists such as André Mason, Hans Arp, Max Ernst and particularly Yves Tanguy, with whom Calder had been friends ever since both artists were represented by the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Indeed there was much cross-contamination of ideas between the two artists and the undulating, almost form-less forms of Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight resonate with the imaginary landscapes of Tanguy’s paintings, such as The Palace of Rocks and Windows, 1942 (Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). Indeed as Susan Davidson notes, many of Calder’s sculptures are indebted to a form of cross-pollination between abstraction and Surrealism. “Biomorphism, as practiced by Tanguy and Calder, is at the heart of both movements,” she writes. “Tanguy’s rock forms are not merely dreamscapes; they evoke the passage of time and echoes of a mythical, druidic past, qualities that resonate with the gentle movements generated by air passing through Calder’s similarly shaped, 'abstract' mobiles” (S. Davidson, “Shared Visions: The Friendship of Yves Tanguy and Alexander Calder” in Tanguy Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction, exh. cat., L Arts, New York, 2010, p. 23).
Executed in 1974, Crag with Yellow-Red Counterweight comes towards the end of Calder’s extraordinarily prolific career. He began to investigate the introduction of movement into his art in the early 1930s when, after a visit to Mondrian’s studio in Paris, he famously declared “Why must art be static? You look at abstraction, sculpture or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step is sculpture in motion” (A. Calder, quoted by M. Prather, Alexander Calder 1898-1976, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 57). Here, the spheres that featured so heavily in some of these earliest sculptures sit in perfect harmony with the monolithic planes and nuclei that came to populate his later work. Thus it is with works such as this that we begin to see the scale of Calder’s unique approach to artistic expression, and the role that the centrality of the universe played in it. As the artist himself said, “Since the beginning of my work in abstract art, and even though it was not obvious at the 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).