‘The art of Calder is the sublimation of a tree in the wind’ – Marcel Duchamp

Created in 1973, Untitled is a lyrical, intimately-scaled standing mobile by Alexander Calder. Its base is formed of a single piece of red-painted metal, tapering up to an elegant point on which the central beam is poised. At one end of the beam is a trio of yellow elements, suspended by lengths of wire: at the other is a larger, sail-like leaf of metal, painted blue. Calder’s use of bold, contrasting primary colours heightens the dynamic contrast between these floating forms, which are at once asymmetrical and perfectly balanced. With his mobiles, Calder changed the trajectory of sculpture from its traditional focus on static mass towards the marvels of real movement in time and space. The present example—deftly fashioned and painted by hand—stems from the enormously productive late period of the artist’s career, during which he created both vast outdoor sculptures and works on a more delicate scale. The ingenious construction changes as its components move and interact with one another, perpetually shifting into new relationships.
By the 1970s, Calder had taken his place as one of the twentieth century’s most important living artists. He had travelled the world, living among the Surrealists in 1920s Paris, and later working in locations ranging from Ahmedabad to Beirut to Caracas. Marcel Duchamp had coined the term ‘mobiles’ upon seeing Calder’s creations, and Jean-Paul Sartre had written eloquently of their beauty. He had designed monumental artworks for major international landmarks, including the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Amid this success, however, Calder never lost touch with his singular, intuitive vision. Following a revelatory visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, where the artist’s environmental installation impressed him, he had turned to abstraction and devoted his life to exploring the possibilities of colour and form in motion, stripping art down to its most basic principles and allowing nature to intervene. Works such as the present are beholden to the slightest gust of air or most imperceptible change of light, shifting and mutating in real time with the forces that move our world. As Sartre wrote, ‘Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes’ (J-P. Sartre, ‘Les Mobiles des Calder’, in Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exh. cat. Galerie Louis Carré, Paris 1946, p. 11).

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This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A06514.