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拍品專文
While he is celebrated for his use of bold colours, some of Alexander Calder’s most engaging works are his monochrome mobiles. With its dramatic black forms that appear to hover effortlessly in mid-air, Untitled (1947) is an outstanding example of this important facet of the artist’s career. The beauty of the work lies in its simplicity. From the formal purity of the dark shapes to the sublime gracefulness of their movement, it demonstrates both Calder’s technical mastery and his unrivalled eye for aesthetic detail. It is also a remarkable example of his use of pierced sheet metal in mobile format, capturing the new material freedom that blossomed in his work after the end of the Second World War. Seen in an iconic studio photograph taken in 1963, the present work remained in Calder’s collection for almost two decades.
The mobile is structured along a central spine, with wires that extend freely in all directions. While two pierced discs punctuate the bottom of the mobile, the arms reach upwards and outwards, making use of their three-dimensional area. The mobile’s open shape and lively, expansive beauty activate the surrounding space. Calder did not see volume as a purely solid mass: here, volume is determined by the total space within the mobile’s range. The biomorphic shapes of the black discs bring to mind the work of Joan Miró and Paul Klee—although Calder developed along a singular trajectory. From below, the forms hover on the air, while a side view reveals how he has suspended another element such that it appears to leap in an upward direction. Calder endows the mobile and the surrounding space with metaphorical and literal freedom.
Calder considered viewpoints in multiple dimensions. In some ways, his formal concerns for his work being observed ‘in the round’ align with those of traditional sculptors. Yet the experience of viewing the present mobile departs from convention, with its form appearing strikingly different from various angles. It looks elegantly vertiginous if seen from the side. From below, the concentration of black discs is visually arresting, and the shapes appear to float beside one another on one horizontal plane. The work was executed at the pinnacle of Calder’s work in all-black sculpture, which he made from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. He considered colour secondary to his mobiles’ movement. With the monochrome simplicity of the present work, Calder highlights its strong silhouettes, complicated construction, and patterns of motion around a central axis.
By the 1940s, Calder—born in Pennsylvania to an artistic family in 1898—was an artist of international renown, exhibiting widely on both sides of the Atlantic. He had become a fully-fledged member of the Paris avant-garde during the previous decade, befriending artists including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Le Corbusier, Theo van Doesburg and Joan Miró. It was a 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio, however, that had proved his most formative encounter, signalling a shift to abstraction. The environment featured coloured cardboard rectangles tacked to the wall for compositional experimentation, creating a circumambient space of abstract shape in black, white and primary colours. ‘I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate’, Calder recalled. ‘… This one visit gave me a shock that started things’ (A. Calder in Jean Davidson, ed., Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113). His first mobiles, made of materials including wire, sheet metal and wood, soon followed.
When the wartime rationing of sheet metal ended in 1945, Calder was able to return to the medium with a renewed interest, now piercing his metal discs. The present mobile’s cut-out pieces create a lyrical effect with their suggestion of weightlessness. By heightening its sense of transparency and surface animation, Calder manipulated the visual and physical weight of the entire structure. Placing the largest elements at the base of the mobile, he ingeniously fashioned shapes so that they appear to be cut out from these lower, larger discs in a careful consideration of balanced weight. The discs seem to be floating upwards away from their voids. ‘For though the lightness of a pierced or serrated solid or surface is extremely interesting’, Calder said, ‘the still greater lack of weight of deployed nuclei is much more so’ (A. Calder, ‘A Propos of Measuring a Mobile’, manuscript, 1943, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).
The mobile is structured along a central spine, with wires that extend freely in all directions. While two pierced discs punctuate the bottom of the mobile, the arms reach upwards and outwards, making use of their three-dimensional area. The mobile’s open shape and lively, expansive beauty activate the surrounding space. Calder did not see volume as a purely solid mass: here, volume is determined by the total space within the mobile’s range. The biomorphic shapes of the black discs bring to mind the work of Joan Miró and Paul Klee—although Calder developed along a singular trajectory. From below, the forms hover on the air, while a side view reveals how he has suspended another element such that it appears to leap in an upward direction. Calder endows the mobile and the surrounding space with metaphorical and literal freedom.
Calder considered viewpoints in multiple dimensions. In some ways, his formal concerns for his work being observed ‘in the round’ align with those of traditional sculptors. Yet the experience of viewing the present mobile departs from convention, with its form appearing strikingly different from various angles. It looks elegantly vertiginous if seen from the side. From below, the concentration of black discs is visually arresting, and the shapes appear to float beside one another on one horizontal plane. The work was executed at the pinnacle of Calder’s work in all-black sculpture, which he made from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. He considered colour secondary to his mobiles’ movement. With the monochrome simplicity of the present work, Calder highlights its strong silhouettes, complicated construction, and patterns of motion around a central axis.
By the 1940s, Calder—born in Pennsylvania to an artistic family in 1898—was an artist of international renown, exhibiting widely on both sides of the Atlantic. He had become a fully-fledged member of the Paris avant-garde during the previous decade, befriending artists including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Le Corbusier, Theo van Doesburg and Joan Miró. It was a 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio, however, that had proved his most formative encounter, signalling a shift to abstraction. The environment featured coloured cardboard rectangles tacked to the wall for compositional experimentation, creating a circumambient space of abstract shape in black, white and primary colours. ‘I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate’, Calder recalled. ‘… This one visit gave me a shock that started things’ (A. Calder in Jean Davidson, ed., Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113). His first mobiles, made of materials including wire, sheet metal and wood, soon followed.
When the wartime rationing of sheet metal ended in 1945, Calder was able to return to the medium with a renewed interest, now piercing his metal discs. The present mobile’s cut-out pieces create a lyrical effect with their suggestion of weightlessness. By heightening its sense of transparency and surface animation, Calder manipulated the visual and physical weight of the entire structure. Placing the largest elements at the base of the mobile, he ingeniously fashioned shapes so that they appear to be cut out from these lower, larger discs in a careful consideration of balanced weight. The discs seem to be floating upwards away from their voids. ‘For though the lightness of a pierced or serrated solid or surface is extremely interesting’, Calder said, ‘the still greater lack of weight of deployed nuclei is much more so’ (A. Calder, ‘A Propos of Measuring a Mobile’, manuscript, 1943, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).