Alexander Calder

Buchholz Gallery, New York
Billy Wilder, Beverly Hills
Christie's, Los Angeles, June 7, 2000, lot 23
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

This work is in excellent condition overall. It has recently benefited from treatment with Calder Restoration.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Hanging delicately from a single point, Alexander Calder's Arrows with Blue Tail extends with the graceful balance of a sinewy tree branch. The red wires that stem, one from the other, like successive lines in a diagrammed sentence, flow into triangular bursts of primary yellow, red, and blue. These shapes, which resemble leaves, sails, or fins, lend the object its somewhat anthropomorphic sense, and offer weighted counterpoints to the form's delicate wire support.

With an innovative approach to his materials, and a virtuosic grasp of gravity and balance, Calder created his first mobile around 1930. It was fellow artist Marcel Duchamp who gave Calder's kinetic wire sculptures their name, combining the French words for "motion" and "motive" into the new category, "mobile." Prior to making these dancing abstractions, Calder had experimented with figurative wire sculptures, kinetic objects, and toys. His Cirque Calder was an object of his own invention: a miniature circus that the artist designed and performed for his close circle of friends in Paris in the late 1920s (a social cohort that included many of the Europe's most influential avant-garde artists of the era). Upon visiting the studio of Piet Mondrian in 1930, Calder became enamored with the artist's colorful, abstract shapes, and began guiding his own works towards the abstract as well, making his first mobile shortly thereafter.

While it is Calder's mobiles that have become iconic symbols of 20^th Century art and gone on to influence generations of artists since his time, Calder was far from a one-hit wonder. In addition to his immensely popular kinetic works, Calder created public commissions, beginning with the Mercury Fountain made in 1937, and extending up to works like Flamingo, made for the General Services Administration in Chicago in 1973. He also executed numerous oil paintings, graphic works on paper, and carved wooden sculptures. Ever experimenting, stretching, and evolving, Calder even designed sets for theatrical productions, a stunning ceiling for a theater in Caracas, Venezuela, and an Art Car painted in his signature primary colors.

Calder was both inspired and inspiring, in equal measure, and it is not hard to find echoes and traces of his ground-breaking form reverberate throughout art since his time. While Calder's graphic style and use of color can be easily associated with his contemporaries like Paul Klee and of course Mondrian, it is Calder's sense of balance, motion, and animation that has been perhaps most significant. Looking at Mark di Suvero's Mother Peace (1969-1970), Calder's sense of dynamic motion is visible, rendered by di Suvero at a monumental scale. Creating large-scaled outdoor works using industrial materials since the 1960s, di Suvero's energetic engagement with contrasts between levity and weight, stillness and motion, refer back to Calder's own well-balanced constructions. As di Suvero himself has said, "[Calder] was able to take steel and make it balance. This is a man who knew about invisible centers of gravity…Calder chose a dancing motion that had to do with a special kind of pleasure that human eyes need, which is the pleasure of leaves in the wind, of branches, a kind of a gentle relationship to the human hand."

Lee Bontecou, who began creating fascinating sculptures out of welded steel, canvas, and wire in the 1960s, also shares Calder's affinity for kinetic motion and anthropomorphic figuration. While her earliest and most widely recognized works—large wall-based sculptures that emerge out towards the viewers like some sort of ominous, amazing machine—Bontecou also created mobiles beginning in the late 1960s. Her untitled fish sculptures made from vacuum-formed plastic take a more direct approach to the sort of embodied movement that Calder abstracted. Her more recent kinetic mobiles have returned to the abstracted, machinistic forms of her early works and draw heavily on Calder's spatial language and logic, creating whirling galaxies through wire, steel, canvas, and porcelain.

In 1944, Calder became the youngest artist to have ever received a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This grand gesture on the part of the Museum signifies the importance that Calder had, even at this early moment in his career; his significance to contemporary art and culture has not waned since that time. Though the first one was constructed more than 75 years ago, Calder's mobiles remain visually fresh, experientially engaging, and formally impressive. Arrows with Blue Tail is an excellent example of Calder's lightness of hand and his deft use of shapes, color, and wire to create endless motion and energy.