Alexander Calder

Perls Galleries, New York
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
Ruth and Leonard Horwich, Chicago (acquired from the above in 1966)
Harold Diamond, New York
Private Collection, New York
Christie's, New York, May 10, 2006, Lot 168
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Chicago, Richard Gray Gallery, Alexander Calder, April - May 1966, no. 14
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Alexander Calder: a Retrospective Exhibition: Work from 1925 - 1974, October - December 1974

This sculpture is in very good condition. The white discs of the hanging element have some very slight wear at the edges and around the wire joins, and a consistent creamy-white patina as is to be expected for a work of this age. Under very strong light, the black stabile element has very faint ghost-like traces related to impression in the pigment from previous soft-pack wrapping.
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Beautifully set in an ever-changing and unending metallic choreography, Alexander Calder's supremely elegant White Discs on the Pyramid of 1965 encapsulates in impressive scale the simplicity of form and joyfulness of movement that is so characteristic of his best sculpture. Continually subject to imperceptible adjustments in the invisible forces and pressures that surround them, the eight pristine white discs of this archetypal stabile are forever destined to flicker through the air in unrepeatable configurations on their cascading horizontal axes. Revolving around the tall angular obelisk, the pure, serene whiteness of their circular sails strikes ultimate polar opposition to its opaque blackness. Calder here institutes non-colors to maximize the changing effects of light, movement and form, and rarely does a sculpture in his oeuvre so powerfully assert its fixed state of motion with such grace and clarity.

With remarkable facility and ingenuity Calder forged a revolutionary genre of sculpture that made subjects of form and movement themselves. By traversing the boundaries of artistic precedent Calder's groundbreaking work required a new descriptive lexicon, and as early as 1932 Marcel Duchamp christened Calder's early mechanized wire works as 'mobiles', while some time later Jean Arp coined the term 'stabiles'. Having reveled in the challenges of harmonizing sculptural design within technical parameters and won the Grand Prize in sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952 for his innovative and ingenious use of sheet metal, Calder became consumed by the possibilities of three-dimensional movement through the mobile format.

Initially following the two dimensional exemplar of paintings by Piet Mondrian, Calder determinedly limited the palette of his output to primary colors, and the stark purity of white and black. In White Discs on the Pyramid the delicate satellites descend downwards in diminishing scale, and yet the intensity of these contained white roundels is amplified beyond their mere size by the contrast against the black pyramid. The largest disc gently oscillates in counterbalance to its smaller relatives, its subtle movement setting the underlying beat for their subsequent pirouettes. Indeed, the formal arrangement of the various elements here is profoundly reminiscent of notes of music, while the constantly evolving spatial relationships, apparently arbitrary and chaotic but actually interlinked and relational, finds close parity with precepts of symphonic composition.

When he visited a 1946 exhibition of Calder's work in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre described the amazing potency of the artist's work: "Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. A 'mobile' does not 'suggest' anything; it captures genuine living movements and shapes them. 'Mobiles' have no meaning, make you think of nothing but themselves. They are, that is all; they are absolutes." (Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder, 1946). However, despite Sartre's Existentialist view of Calder's work as devoid of any relative context, Calder himself acknowledged influences from the natural world. Leaves, branches, flowers, and animals serve as inspiration for Calder's abstract yet organic forms, and appear in many of the titles of his sculptures. With the present work the arrangement of multiple circles in perpetual orbit on a semi-fixed axis is surely reminiscent of the great cosmic systems, while the configuration of descending and diminishing armatures is suggestive of such natural phenomena as the Fibonacci sequences of the branching of trees.   

Nevertheless, as Calder stated six years after the present work, "the most important thing is that the mobile be able to catch the air. It has to be able to move." ('Hommage à Calder,' in XXe siecle, Paris 1972, p. 98). Ultimately the present work is free of overt subject matter and narrative content to interact with the viewer and its own environment in a completely innovative manner. Asked to define his artistic approach, Calder again evoked the importance of his visit to Mondrian's studio: "Each thing I make has, according to its degree of success, a plastic quality, which includes many things - the mass or masses; the sinuosity; the contrast of black to white; the contrast of somberness to color; whatever element of movement there is in the object, even its manner of suspension." (Margaret Bruening, 'Calder mobiles and stabiles,' in American Magazine of Art, no. 32, June 1939, p. 361). White Discs on the Pyramid is a wonderful example of these "many things" and represents the very best features in balance, design and movement of Calder's inspirational language of sculpture.