"A mobile in motion leaves an invisible wake behind it, or rather, each element leaves an individual wake behind its individual self."
—Alexander Calder
Epitomizing the artist’s explorations on the movement of objects in space, Fourteen Black Leaves is an especially poetic example of Alexander Calder’s iconic hanging mobiles. Executed in 1961, the kinetic energy engendered in the present work transforms metal and wire into stemmed forms dancing in the wind. As the mobile moves in different light and air conditions, the elements shift through infinite possibilities before the viewer’s eyes, displaying an extraordinary sense of dynamism. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “These movements that intend only to please, to enchant our eyes, have nonetheless a profound and, as it were, metaphysical meaning....he abandons [the mobiles] in the wild: in a garden, by an open window he lets them vibrate in the wind like Aeolian harps. They feed on the air, breathe it and take their life from the indistinct life of the atmosphere.”i
Emulating Nature
"[Their] marvellous swan-like nobility make Calder’s mobiles strange creatures, mid-way between matter and life….His mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the tangible symbol of Nature."
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Over the course of the next few decades, Calder’s sculptures continued to evolve towards invoking nature's unseen forces as he integrated increasingly organic forms to his mobiles. Recalling the biomorphic shapes of his Surrealist friends Joan Miró and Jean Arp, the crisp, sheet-metal elements in the present work flutter with streams of air, mimicking the effect of wind blowing through a tree. Here, Calder restricts his palette to solely black, distilling nature to its most basic form. Highlighting the rhythm of the natural world and freeing sculpture to interact with its environment, Fourteen Black Leaves epitomizes the artist’s vision, as he expressed in an interview from 1962, “You see nature and then you try to emulate it. The basis of everything for me is the universe….My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.”ii
Crafting Poetry
"Then there is the idea of an object floating—not supported—the use of a very long thread as a long arm in cantilever as a means of support seems to best approximate this freedom of the earth."
—Alexander Calder
A marker of Calder’s innovative craftsmanship channeled through his intuitive engineering skills, the lyrical simplicity of his works belie the complexity of their creation. Jed Perl observed, “How the shapes are connected affects their movements and their relationships....And the movement of any individual element in a mobile has everything to do with how its particular mass encounters some amount of energy.”iii In a recently released 1943 manuscript unpublished in Calder’s lifetime, the artist examined the core factors in the laws of physics—matter and energy—that preoccupied his art: “Wire, rods, sheet metal have strength, even in very attenuated forms, and respond quickly to whatever sort of work one may subject them to. Contrasts in mass or weight are feasible, too, according to the gauge, or to the kind of metal used, so that physical laws, as well as aesthetic concepts, can be held to. There is of course a close alliance between physics and aesthetics.”iv Calder, in his unique sensibility, “alone found a way to project this fascination with the movement of forms through time and space back into the real world as an artistic actuality,” as Perl articulated.v “This, is the miracle of [Calder’s] mobile.”vi
A Composer of Motion
"Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an intensely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion."
—Alexander Calder
Created at the height of Calder’s career, the present work exemplifies the artist’s mature endeavors at kinetic abstractions, which Marcel Duchamp had coined as “mobiles” by the early 1930s. During his formative years in Paris, Calder visited Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930—an experience that would forever change the course of Calder’s oeuvre as he relinquished figuration for pure abstraction.vii “I was very much moved by Mondrian’s studio,” the artist once reflected. “I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on the wall...I told him I would like to make them oscillate.”viii Beginning his investigations by utilizing cranks and electric motors to incorporate movement with his abstract forms, Calder refined his process by discarding mechanization and introducing the element of chance, allowing nature to be the source of motion, the artist its composer. In Calder’s words, “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”ix
i Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, Galerie Louis Carré, Paris, p. 14. ii Alexander Calder, quoted in Katharine Kuh, “Alexander Calder,” in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Different Artists, New York, 1962, p. 39.
iii Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science,” in Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013, pp. 45-46. iv Alexander Calder, “A Propos of Measuring a Mobile,” in Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021, p. 40.
v Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science,” in Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013, p. 49.
vi Ibid.
vii Alexander Calder, “Mobiles,” in Myfanwy Evans, ed., The Painter’s Object, London, 1937, p. 63.
viii Alexander Calder, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3, Spring 1951, p. 8.
ix Alexander Calder, “Statement,” in Modern Painting and Sculpture: Alexander Calder, George L.K. Morris, Calvert Coggeshall, Alma de Gersdorff Morgan, exh. cat., Berkshiirie Museum, Pittsfield, 1933, n.p.
來源
巴黎 Maeght 畫廊 倫敦 Brook St. 畫廊(1964年購自上述來源) 紐約 Harold Diamond 收藏 華盛頓 Joseph H. Hirshhorn 收藏(1965年購自上述來源) 華盛頓特區赫希霍恩博物館和雕塑園 紐約,蘇富比,1988年11月11日,拍品編號138A 紐約 Perls 畫廊(購自上述拍賣) 紐約私人收藏(購自上述來源) 洛杉磯私人收藏(2012年購自上述來源) 蘇富比,倫敦,2017年10月5日,拍品編號29 現藏者購自上述拍賣
Alexander Calder worked as an abstract sculptor and has been commonly referred to as the creator of the mobile. He employed industrious materials of wire and metal and transformed them into delicate geometric shapes that respond to the wind or float in air. Born into a family of sculptors, Calder created art from childhood and moved to Paris in 1926, where he became a pioneer of the international avant-garde. In addition to his mobiles, Calder produced an array of public constructions worldwide as well as drawings and paintings that feature the same brand of abstraction. Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania.