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PostWar & Contemporary
3433
ALEXANDER CALDER(Lawnton/Pennsylvania 1898 - 1976 New
York)
Couple with black dog. 1967.
Watercolour on paper.
Signed and dated lower right: Calder 67.
74.7 x 110 cm.
The work is registered at the Calder Foun-
dation, New York, under the application
number: A06855.
Provenance:
- Pearls Gallery, New York.
- Private collection Geneva, 1974.
- Auction Finarte Milan, 27.04.1982,
lot 349.
- Private collection Switzerland.
Alexander Calder was born in 1898 in
Lawnton, Pennsylvania to a family of
artists. Both his grandfather and his father
were successful sculptors and his mother
a portrait painter. Very early on, Calder
began to make sculptures and objects out
of wire. During his youth, the family often
moved house, fromArizona to California,
Philadelphia and New York. In 1915 Calder
finished high school in San Francisco and
decided to study engineering at the Ste-
vens Institute of Technology in Hoboken,
New Jersey. On completing his studies,
he held various jobs as an engineer and
travelled throughout America before finally
deciding to become an artist, and to study
in New York at the Art Students League.
In 1926 Calder moved to Paris and enrolled
at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière.
Here he met, amongst others, Fernand
Léger, Hans Arp and Marcel Duchamp.
When sailing to New York in 1929, he met
Louisa James, grand-niece of Henry and
William James, and married her in 1931.
They settled in Roxbury, Connecticut,
and started a family. As early as 1943,
the Museum of Modern Art in New York
held a retrospective of Calder’s work – a
great honour for such a young artist. In
1955 Calder travelled with Louise to India,
where he produced nine sculptures as
well as jewellery. In 1963 he moved into
a studio in Indre-et-Loire in France and
in 1966 he published his “Autobiography
with Pictures”. Calder died unexpectedly in
1976, shortly after the opening of a large
retrospective at the Whitney Museum,
New York.
Calder was fascinated by the circus from
very early on, and in 1926 he made his
first mechanical toys. His “Cirque Calder”
consists of miniatures made of wire, fabric,
corks, string and other found objects was
just on view at Tate Modern. This sizeable
work was exhibited in America and Europe
and met with the approval of the Paris
avant-garde in particular. In this period
he also produced his wire pictures, which
were exhibited in Paris in 1929. A visit to
Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930 influenced
him greatly and from then on turned his
attention finally to abstraction. Shortly
afterwards he experimented with the first
kinetic works, which were driven by motors
and cranks. These pieces were seen as
the first works of art liberated from the
traditional notion of the work of art as
static object.
In 1931 Marcel Duchamp named Calder’s
works “mobiles”, and in 1932 he began to
suspend his works, which would move in
the wind or when touched. In 1934 there
followed outdoor works which would be
“driven” only by the wind. At the same
time, he also experimented with static,
abstract sculpture, which Hans Arp called
“stabiles”. After the Second World War,
Calder increasingly used sheet iron, which
he cut into pieces and painted in the now-
famous colours of black, red, white and
blue. In 1946 his works, almost exclusi-
vely hanging and standing mobiles, were
shown at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris.
These had a great impact, together with
the catalogue text written by Jean Paul
Sartre. Although he is famous today for
his sculptures, Calder painted throughout
his artistic career and also made prints.
His painting style became progressively
more abstract over the years, the forms
increasingly geometric and often with the
appearance of movement.
In the 1960s, although Calder worked
predominantly with abstract forms, figural
depictions would appear now and again in
his drawings, as impressively demonstra-
ted in the present example. Despite the
use of motifs from earlier works, the colour
palette with its blue, red, black and yellow,
as well as its flatness, clearly indicate that
this is a watercolour from the 1960s. This
sketch-like, humorous drawing is evo-
cative of the early circus drawings of the
Cirque Calder.
CHF 30 000 / 40 000
(€ 27 780 / 37 040)