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拍品專文
Distinguished by its vibrant palette and seductive form, Alexander Calder’s Sumac VI is one of the artist’s most accomplished sculptures from the early 1950s. By combining movement and color in such dramatic fashion, Calder breathed new life into an artistic tradition that had remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years. Named after the fact of creation for the Sumac trees whose leaves turn a brilliant shade of red in the autumn, Calder’s nonobjective mobile captures the radical and innovative nature of these ground-breaking works. Of the approximately twenty examples in the Sumac series, several examples are in public institutions, including Sumac II in the collection of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Just a Sumac to You, Dear in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Red Sumac in the collection of Duke University. Illustrated in Jed Perls authoritative 2020 biography on the artist, Sumac VI stands as an exemplary example of some of the most successful and sought works of Calder’s long and storied career.
Sumac VI is comprised of twenty-four red metal components which are choreographed into an adagio of seemingly floating elements. Formed into a variety of organic shapes, each piece is supported by a metal wire armature and maintains is own agency, ‘suspended’ in midair, while avoiding direct physical contact with its neighbors. However, it is a sign of Calder’s skill as both as an artist and as an innovator that this composition of individual elements (no two are exactly the same) act in concert in pursuit of a harmonious whole; activated by the merest breath of wind, they spring into life in a ballet of graceful movement.
The Sumac title, while not an asset for interpretation, emphasizes how the moving parts of this mobile exist in parallel to nature. In harnessing movement in this way, Calder has managed to harness some of the underlying rhythms of nature. The physical properties of the work (the shape, the color etc.) echo the wind-tossed leaves of fall, imbuing the work with a vivid, cyclical feel. This was a quality recognized by Marcel Duchamp, a champion of Calder’s work, who said, “The art of Calder is the sublimation of a tree in the wind” (M. Duchamp, in Collection of the Société Anonyme, Yale, New Haven, 1950, p. 52). However, on another level, it is also nature's unseen forces which set the mobiles into motion, say in the form of a gentle breeze, and it is this movement of nature, on both the small scale and the large, that literally breathes life into his works.
Along with its graceful, natural forms, one of the most arresting qualities of Sumac VI is its striking red palette. Calder’s choice of color was inextricably linked to the overall sense of dynamism that the artist had spent his career exploring. His shift to abstraction was inspired by an early visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris where he was struck by the environment. He suggested that the static cardboard rectangles of black, gray, white, and bright colors that the Dutch artist had tacked to his walls for compositional experimentation be made to "oscillate." Mondrian disagreed and apparently would subsequently come to claim that his paintings were faster than Calder's mobiles. This sense of movement is partly due to the intensity of Calder’s chosen pigment, something which the American artist admired in the Fauves. In this respect, the present work has strong parallels with the boldness of Henri Matisse’s early masterpieces such as Les toits de Collioure (View from Collioure) (1905, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). With its various elements moving around, the reverberations of a color-driven epiphany are on view in Calder’s work, as he would later explain “Black and white are first—then red is next—and then I get sort of vague. It’s really just for differentiation, but I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red. I often wish that I'd been a fauve in 1905” (A. Calder, in Katharine Kuh, ed., The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. New York and Evanston, Illinois: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 41.)
Soon after its completion, Sumac VI was included in a production of a French play for which Calder had been asked to design the sets and costumes. Nucléa was written by a young playwright called Henri Pinchette, whom Calder had met through fellow artist Alberto Giacometti. For the play—a two act performance about love and war which starred the glamourous Gérard Philipe and a young Jeanne Moreau—Calder designed a platform above the regular stage so that there were two areas in which the drama could unfold. The set also consisted of a red stabile and black and white panels becoming alternately visible as they turned; Sumac VI was suspended on stage as part of the design. Calder recalled that the play did not meet with much critical success “despite certain merits” (A. Calder, quoted by J. Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976, New York, 2020, p. 251).
Despite the mixed reviews for Nucléa’s drama, if not for Calder’s stage design, 1952 proved to be an important year for the artist. In June, Calder represented the United States at the 26th Venice Biennale, winning the grand prize for sculpture and marking his arrival as an artist of truly international stature. Twenty three works were displayed in what one critic described as a “triumphant” room devoted to the artist’s work, raving that “Calder’s work articulates a language suited to our century, not merely an American dialect, but a vital new speech involving the fresh use of industrial materials” (J. Mellquist, quoted by M. Prather, op. cit., p. 233).
Calder’s work from the 1950s is widely regarded as some of the most accomplished of his career, and the successful combination of color and form—something that lay at the very heart of his career—reaches its peak in a work such as Sumac VI. It bares all the hallmarks of the adventurous spirit with which he made has name, but with a sophistication that marks out his mature period. As his biographer, Jed Perl, points out “With the wind-driven mobiles of the 1950s, he was pushing the exhilarating elegance he had first achieved in the years around 1940 into ever more glamorous variations” (J. Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976, New York, 2020, p. 329).
Sumac VI is comprised of twenty-four red metal components which are choreographed into an adagio of seemingly floating elements. Formed into a variety of organic shapes, each piece is supported by a metal wire armature and maintains is own agency, ‘suspended’ in midair, while avoiding direct physical contact with its neighbors. However, it is a sign of Calder’s skill as both as an artist and as an innovator that this composition of individual elements (no two are exactly the same) act in concert in pursuit of a harmonious whole; activated by the merest breath of wind, they spring into life in a ballet of graceful movement.
The Sumac title, while not an asset for interpretation, emphasizes how the moving parts of this mobile exist in parallel to nature. In harnessing movement in this way, Calder has managed to harness some of the underlying rhythms of nature. The physical properties of the work (the shape, the color etc.) echo the wind-tossed leaves of fall, imbuing the work with a vivid, cyclical feel. This was a quality recognized by Marcel Duchamp, a champion of Calder’s work, who said, “The art of Calder is the sublimation of a tree in the wind” (M. Duchamp, in Collection of the Société Anonyme, Yale, New Haven, 1950, p. 52). However, on another level, it is also nature's unseen forces which set the mobiles into motion, say in the form of a gentle breeze, and it is this movement of nature, on both the small scale and the large, that literally breathes life into his works.
Along with its graceful, natural forms, one of the most arresting qualities of Sumac VI is its striking red palette. Calder’s choice of color was inextricably linked to the overall sense of dynamism that the artist had spent his career exploring. His shift to abstraction was inspired by an early visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris where he was struck by the environment. He suggested that the static cardboard rectangles of black, gray, white, and bright colors that the Dutch artist had tacked to his walls for compositional experimentation be made to "oscillate." Mondrian disagreed and apparently would subsequently come to claim that his paintings were faster than Calder's mobiles. This sense of movement is partly due to the intensity of Calder’s chosen pigment, something which the American artist admired in the Fauves. In this respect, the present work has strong parallels with the boldness of Henri Matisse’s early masterpieces such as Les toits de Collioure (View from Collioure) (1905, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). With its various elements moving around, the reverberations of a color-driven epiphany are on view in Calder’s work, as he would later explain “Black and white are first—then red is next—and then I get sort of vague. It’s really just for differentiation, but I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red. I often wish that I'd been a fauve in 1905” (A. Calder, in Katharine Kuh, ed., The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. New York and Evanston, Illinois: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 41.)
Soon after its completion, Sumac VI was included in a production of a French play for which Calder had been asked to design the sets and costumes. Nucléa was written by a young playwright called Henri Pinchette, whom Calder had met through fellow artist Alberto Giacometti. For the play—a two act performance about love and war which starred the glamourous Gérard Philipe and a young Jeanne Moreau—Calder designed a platform above the regular stage so that there were two areas in which the drama could unfold. The set also consisted of a red stabile and black and white panels becoming alternately visible as they turned; Sumac VI was suspended on stage as part of the design. Calder recalled that the play did not meet with much critical success “despite certain merits” (A. Calder, quoted by J. Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976, New York, 2020, p. 251).
Despite the mixed reviews for Nucléa’s drama, if not for Calder’s stage design, 1952 proved to be an important year for the artist. In June, Calder represented the United States at the 26th Venice Biennale, winning the grand prize for sculpture and marking his arrival as an artist of truly international stature. Twenty three works were displayed in what one critic described as a “triumphant” room devoted to the artist’s work, raving that “Calder’s work articulates a language suited to our century, not merely an American dialect, but a vital new speech involving the fresh use of industrial materials” (J. Mellquist, quoted by M. Prather, op. cit., p. 233).
Calder’s work from the 1950s is widely regarded as some of the most accomplished of his career, and the successful combination of color and form—something that lay at the very heart of his career—reaches its peak in a work such as Sumac VI. It bares all the hallmarks of the adventurous spirit with which he made has name, but with a sophistication that marks out his mature period. As his biographer, Jed Perl, points out “With the wind-driven mobiles of the 1950s, he was pushing the exhilarating elegance he had first achieved in the years around 1940 into ever more glamorous variations” (J. Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976, New York, 2020, p. 329).