Alexander Calder

George Morton Grinnell, New York (gift of the artist circa 1928)
Acquired by descent to the present owner

Greenwich, Bruce Museum, Alexander Calder: Printmaker, October 2009 - January 2010

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. There is evidence of light wear to the brass and evidence of mild oxidation. The wheels and bell move smoothly and freely.
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Alexander Calder's Locomotive, circa 1928, is a fantastically whimsical objet d'art, one that is concurrently distinctive of the artist's contemporary Paris aesthetic as well as heralds Calder's mature oeuvre. Modeled exclusively from wire, Locomotive, exemplifies the artist's mastery of the historically overlooked medium with its elegance of line and technical virtuosity coupled with Calder's illustriously playful wit.

Having arrived in Paris in 1926, the young Calder quickly ingratiated himself within the inner circle of the Paris avant-garde. Apropos for the artist who had been fascinated with movement from an early age, his reputation in this new city rapidly ascended as word spread about the magical performances of the boisterous ring-master and his miniature circus sculptures, the Cirque Calder. Fashioned from ephemeral materials such as wire, cork and cloth, Calder enchantingly imbued these circus figurines with an amazing sense of life, pathos and humor. Calder, who had made mobile toys for his own amusement, found initial fame and eventual inspiration for his celebrated mobiles.

At the suggestion of fellow artist, Clay Spohn, Calder began to experiment with sculpture made exclusively of wire. With a dexterous hand and set of pliers, Calder drew his subjects in space. "This was a new development," wrote his friend and curator James Johnson Sweeney. "The tiny articulated circus performers had taken a new scale and a new character. These figures were no longer merely toys wittily contrived from chance materials. They were now three-dimensional forms drawn in space by wire lines--much as if the background paper of a drawing had been cut away leaving only the lines. The same incisive grasp of essentials, the same nervous sensibility to form, and the same rhythmic organization of elements, which are virtues of a drawing, were virtues of this new medium." (James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, New York, 1951, pp. 19-20). Using wire to outline and manipulate space, the artist produced whimsical figures and objects that were not only visually coherent, but also engaging and expressive in the round. The present wire work not only reflects the artist's mastery of this medium, but also functions as an exceptional object in the artist's body work – in subject it is demonstrative of the artist's early fascination with trains, toys and the Circus and in its mobile construction prefigurative of the quest for balance and motion to which he would devote his career.