ALEXANDER CALDER | White Fields

Estate of the artist
Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011

New York, Perls Galleries, Calder, February - March 1956
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition, Work from 1925-1974, October - December 1974
New York, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Alexander Calder: Memorial Exhibition, November - December 1977, cat. no. 20
Turin, Palazzo a Vela, Calder: Mostra Retrospettiva, July - September 1983, cat. no. 333, p. 182, illustrated 
New York, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Alexander Calder: The Painter, November - December 2011, p. 51, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at +1 212 606 7254 for a professional condition report prepared by Modern Art Conservation. Framed under glass.
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"Well, the archaeologists will tell you there's a little bit of Miró in Calder and a little bit of Calder in Miró."
Alexander Calder Executed in 1955, Alexander Calder’s White Fields belongs to a rare corpus of large-scale oil paintings which capture the artist’s playfulness and mastery over color and space. The present work brings together the most entrancing elements of Calder’s well-known sculptural mobiles, and transfers them, through his singular pictorial language, into two dimensions.

Calder had a lifelong love of art, facilitated by constant tinkering and experimentation. Supplementing his bourgeoning passion with an education in mechanical engineering, Calder would grow to revolutionize concepts of form and movement in art. From 1926 to 1933, Calder lived in Paris, integrating himself into the artistic community there. It was during this time that the artist first formulated his now iconic mobiles and joined the Abstract Creation Group, inspiring a love of the geometric forms and primary colors which figure prominently into the present work.

Painted during a time when Calder was looking to expand his practice in both medium and scale, White Fields is a product of an extraordinarily prolific period in the artist’s career. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Calder crafted some his most famous and technically ambitious commissions, such as the John F. Kennedy Airport mobile and the monumental commission for U.N.E.S.C.O.  The present work reflects that ambition, translating Calder’s explorations in three-dimensional composition on a flat picture plane.

In White Fields, space is suggested, compressed, and playfully ignored; the canvas is a laboratory for Calder’s free expression, hosting myriad conceptual experiments in a single composition. Anchored by an airy gray ground and broken into distinct, irregular sections by attenuated lines, the work implies depth through gradation, and then negates that illusionism through passages which evoke the remarkable flatness of Mondrian. Unlike the carefully gridded surfaces of the De Stijl artists, Calder’s painting seems to be erupting from inside itself, fracturing and coalescing around numerous axes before becoming flush to the canvas, spreading out in a field of tone. Circles and a curved irregular shape overlay this fractured and angular expanse, floating above the picture plane. Despite the variety of forms in the composition, a profound sense of balance pervades the work. No element dominates the view, instead, they all work together to create an entrancing whole.

Calder utilizes a reduced palette of primary colors and grey tones to accentuate his formally complex composition. The careful deployment of color in the work illuminates a connection between the artist and Joan Miró, who Calder had met decades earlier. Describing their artistic interchange, Calder explained, “I got to like his paintings and the colors and the characters he used, and we did an exchange” (the artist in Exh. Cat., New York, Perls Galleries, Calder- Miró, 1961). This “exchange” is apparent in the lyricism and amoeboid shape which feature prominently into the lower right quadrant of the work. Despite the indelible influence of both Miró and Mondrian in White Fields, the painting is undeniably Calder’s. The artist pushes beyond his influences, crafting a scene of constantly shifting negative space and depth of field from flat and static canvas, culminating in a painting with a dreamlike sense of movement.



This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A01253.