ALEXANDER CALDER'S SPONTANEOUS ABSTRACT ART
One of the under the hammer at the November 5 auction of paintings and antique furniture was a splendid gouache by Alexander Calder (1898- 1976) that raised 94,000 euros and was the top lot of the auction. The painting, formerly owned by Bettino Craxi, was probably purchased at the Michelucci Gallery of Florence, as suggested by the label on the back and the hand-written wording The wheel which is the title of the work.
The gouache not only epitomizes some of the main contents of Alexander Calder’s artistic experimentation, namely his attraction for the elementary symbols of the universe, his use of primary colours and movement which are also the three fundamental elements of his abstract art, but also appeared on the market just a few days before the inauguration of the Calder: performing sculpture exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. A coincidence that triggered a flurry of reservations by collectors and gallery owners all over the world to attend the auction and carry off the lot.
Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania in 1898 into a long line of sculptors (his grandfather and father were academic sculptors, his mother was a professional artist). After a youth spent moving back and forth from one end of the United States to the other, he graduated in mechanical engineering in New Jersey (1919), attended an art school in New York and set off to visit Europe in 1926. In 1930, in France, he came into contact for the first time with Mondrian’s abstract art, a real “illumination” for Calder, that was to lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, his mobiles, i.e. kinetic structures in which elements of simple shape are maintained in a delicate balance and in which movement of one of the elements by some external agent generates an expansion and a “new” volume in the plastic work which represents the revolutionary aspect of Calder’s art.
Almost in contrast with the mathematical precision of his carefully-balanced sculptures, the gouache visibly reflects the spontaneity and vitality of the artist. Calder started to paint gouaches in 1932 (in: Calder Mobiles stabiles, gouaches, bijoux, catalogue of the exhibition, Antibes 1993, p. 43), continuing to do so regularly from 1953 during his stay at Aix-enProvence. After bathing the paper in water, he used water and gum to prepare his colours, mainly red, blue and yellow and as bright as oil colours which, together with black and white, reflect Calder’s attention to with the primitive and primeval. The themes depict occasions of private life that Calder transformed into shapes taken from nature that is to say into symbols (also shared by Joan Mirò), using a vivid palette to express spontaneous impressions on paper with almost ritual gestures.
The wheel in particular is, in fact, a spiral with painted segments characterised by minor intentional irregularities in colour such as for example a black spot at the centre of the drawing that disturbs the shapes of the elements of the composition. With regard to the iconography of Calder’s drawings, in 1966 during a visit to an art exhibition on the Russian Steppes in Rome, he remarked, referring to a Scythian fibula: “This was man’s first decorative gesture, a spiral” (in: Calder curated by Giovanni Caradente, Milan 1983, p. 14). A work of this type is dated much later than the most sought-after period of the artist, that of his mobiles e stabiles (as Arp defined his standing mobiles) of the 1930s to the 1960s which already soared to extremely high prices. In the early 1990s, gouaches such as that presented, i.e. painted between the end of the 1960s and early 1970s and of the same dimensions (approx. 74x105 cm) could be purchased for less than 10,000 euros. From 2002, they were sold for just over 10,000 euros and, until 2011, seldom topped 50,000 euros. The value attributed to these works was to stabilise above this figure only from 2012 onwards, rising to twice this figure in the autumn of 2015 when the exhibition at the Tate opened (November 11, 2015 – April 3, 2016). Therefore, on November 5, the Bolaffi auction house was one of the first, at that precise moment, to have the good fortune and privilege of presenting a gouache by Calder at one if its sales.
By Maria Ludovica Vertova
The gouache not only epitomizes some of the main contents of Alexander Calder’s artistic experimentation, namely his attraction for the elementary symbols of the universe, his use of primary colours and movement which are also the three fundamental elements of his abstract art, but also appeared on the market just a few days before the inauguration of the Calder: performing sculpture exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. A coincidence that triggered a flurry of reservations by collectors and gallery owners all over the world to attend the auction and carry off the lot.
Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania in 1898 into a long line of sculptors (his grandfather and father were academic sculptors, his mother was a professional artist). After a youth spent moving back and forth from one end of the United States to the other, he graduated in mechanical engineering in New Jersey (1919), attended an art school in New York and set off to visit Europe in 1926. In 1930, in France, he came into contact for the first time with Mondrian’s abstract art, a real “illumination” for Calder, that was to lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, his mobiles, i.e. kinetic structures in which elements of simple shape are maintained in a delicate balance and in which movement of one of the elements by some external agent generates an expansion and a “new” volume in the plastic work which represents the revolutionary aspect of Calder’s art.
Almost in contrast with the mathematical precision of his carefully-balanced sculptures, the gouache visibly reflects the spontaneity and vitality of the artist. Calder started to paint gouaches in 1932 (in: Calder Mobiles stabiles, gouaches, bijoux, catalogue of the exhibition, Antibes 1993, p. 43), continuing to do so regularly from 1953 during his stay at Aix-enProvence. After bathing the paper in water, he used water and gum to prepare his colours, mainly red, blue and yellow and as bright as oil colours which, together with black and white, reflect Calder’s attention to with the primitive and primeval. The themes depict occasions of private life that Calder transformed into shapes taken from nature that is to say into symbols (also shared by Joan Mirò), using a vivid palette to express spontaneous impressions on paper with almost ritual gestures.
The wheel in particular is, in fact, a spiral with painted segments characterised by minor intentional irregularities in colour such as for example a black spot at the centre of the drawing that disturbs the shapes of the elements of the composition. With regard to the iconography of Calder’s drawings, in 1966 during a visit to an art exhibition on the Russian Steppes in Rome, he remarked, referring to a Scythian fibula: “This was man’s first decorative gesture, a spiral” (in: Calder curated by Giovanni Caradente, Milan 1983, p. 14). A work of this type is dated much later than the most sought-after period of the artist, that of his mobiles e stabiles (as Arp defined his standing mobiles) of the 1930s to the 1960s which already soared to extremely high prices. In the early 1990s, gouaches such as that presented, i.e. painted between the end of the 1960s and early 1970s and of the same dimensions (approx. 74x105 cm) could be purchased for less than 10,000 euros. From 2002, they were sold for just over 10,000 euros and, until 2011, seldom topped 50,000 euros. The value attributed to these works was to stabilise above this figure only from 2012 onwards, rising to twice this figure in the autumn of 2015 when the exhibition at the Tate opened (November 11, 2015 – April 3, 2016). Therefore, on November 5, the Bolaffi auction house was one of the first, at that precise moment, to have the good fortune and privilege of presenting a gouache by Calder at one if its sales.
By Maria Ludovica Vertova