Four Pyramids and Sun

Painted in 1973, Four Pyramids and Sun is a vivid example of Alexander Calder’s gouache paintings. Calder is most widely known for the kinetic sculptures that he pioneered in Paris during the early 1930s. Comprised of flat, sheet-metal elements suspended from wires, his delicately poised mobiles set form in ever-changing motion. From 1953 onwards, Calder also made gouache paintings to explore his ideas in two dimensions, using bold, graphic lines and primary colours to depict Euclidean and figurative shapes. In the present work a brilliant red sun illuminates the four pyramids of the title, with three spheres or circles and a more ambiguous silhouette in the foreground. The pyramids’ left-hand faces are vibrant in orange, black-and-white stripes, yellow and blue, while their right-hand faces are solid black, as if cast into shadow.

The red sun represents a foundational image for Calder. In 1922, while employed in the boiler room of the steamship H. F. Alexander on a voyage from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, he had witnessed a spectacle of visionary splendour. The understanding he reached in that moment can be seen to inform the energised, near-animistic view of the universe’s dynamism later embodied by his moving artworks. ‘It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala,’ he remembered, ‘when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system’ (A. Calder, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, ed. Jean Davidson, New York 1966, pp. 53-55).

This ‘sensation of the solar system’ was precisely what Calder aimed to capture in his art: a feeling of the rhythms, movements and orbits of nature’s forces. His first mobiles were born specifically of the desire to enliven abstract form, a direction he took after his experience of Piet Mondrian’s studio environment in 1930. His gouaches, whose pared-back palettes recall those of Mondrian’s paintings, achieve their own surprising vitality. For all its elements’ seeming simplicity, Four Pyramids and Sun conveys a palpable sense of objects illuminated in space and time, subject to a universe of disparate energies and motions.