Beschreibung:

Alexander Calder The White Face 1969 hanging mobile, painted sheet metal, rod, wire overall 22 x 114 x 53 in. (55.9 x 289.6 x 134.6 cm.) Initialed and dated “CA ‘69” on the surface of the largest black element. This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation under application number A03827.
Provenance Perls Galleries, New York Makler Galleries, Philadelphia Irving R. Segal, Philadelphia Christie’s, New York, Contemporary Art, May 7, 1996, lot 20 Private Collection, Geneva Russeck Gallery, Palm Beach Catalogue Essay “The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.” ALEXANDER CALDER 1951 One of the great gifts that Alexander Calder left the world of art was not only his magical and prolific body of work, but also his testimonials and statements about his process. We can point to the Surrealists and Futurists and Cubists in an attempt to talk about a movement, employing their common tenets as the basis and theory of their work; yet, with Calder, his work is a movement of its own. Such a seamless integration of engineering excellence, aesthetic marvel, and philosophical whimsy has not been seen since Calder ceased to create. As Calder’s carrier entered its later decades in the 1960s and 1970s, he dedicated much of his efforts to installations based on specific spaces, pieces that would highlight and enhance their surroundings; this is indeed the genesis of the present lot, The White Face, 1969, where we see Calder’s experience of many years of creation come alive under the guise of his magnificent mobile. Calder’s early background is a necessary prelude to a description of The White Face, since so much of his initial work seems now to have a teleological end in his later work. As the son and grandson of two of the most esteemed architects and sculptors of early American metal and stone, Calder’s fated career as a visual artist is not surprising. What is unexpected, however, is Calder’s route to that realization. His early inclinations turned away from the creative path and he found himself an engineering student with a penchant for structural mechanics. Working aboard a passenger ship, the H.F. Alexander, Calder’s privileged view of mountain scenery and the unmitigated glow of the heavenly bodies soon led him to sketching and painting. As the years passed, he found a special fondness for Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, where the physical and mechanical underpinnings of the show were as compelling as the spectacle that they made possible. Calder’s solidarity with the growing avante garde movements of the 1920s led him to Paris, where he further indulged his interests in balance and design, even leading to work as a set designer for the ballet under Martha Graham. Absorbing the influence of his toy-making work from the first few years of his stay in France, Calder created what is now recognized as the forebear of his early career’s most recognizable work: the Cirque Calder. Incorporating his later mainstays of mobiles and mounted sculpture, the Cirque Calder was a compact model of the circus, employing elements both aesthetic and functional. Calder’s piece soon gained notoriety amongst the avant-garde artists of 1920s Paris for its method of transportation: a suitcase. But Calder’s influences were not limited to the entertainments of the masses. Arnauld Pierre comments on Calder’s early work and its basic principles of mechanical design and balance: “It might be said that Calder sculpted less with materials than with the potentiality of motion. This potentiality occurs thanks to the principle of stable equilibrium around which are organized the active masses. Stable equilibrium ensures that the articulated parts of the mobile spontaneously return to their initial state when they are being caused by external circumstance to move away from it (by being blown or pushed).”(A. Pierre, Motion-Emotion: the Art of Alexander Calder New York, 1999, p. 8) Calder’s emerging sculptural work was based as much in principle on the motions of the heavens as they were on the organized chaos of the circus. Calder’s work finally began its transition into its most beloved and cherished forms during the 1930s. Both his floor mounted pieces, interactiv