"I’ve always been delighted by the way things are hooked together. It’s just like a diagram of force. I love the mechanics of the thing—and the vast space—and the spotlight."
—Alexander CalderPetite croix  is a standing mobile that is emblematic of Alexander Calder’s mature period. Discs of sheet metal painted in bright, solid colors connect and intersect one another in a matrix of hooked wire arms, topped off with a cross of three white discs that move unpredictably in the ambient air. Created in 1968, Petite croix is one of the largest standing mobiles from Calder’s personal practice, and it is about three times larger than similar works that have come to market. The sculpture was last shown in 1969, after which legendary New York collector and gallerist Allan Stone owned the work for over four decades.
 
This standing mobile forms one of Calder’s signature sculptural shapes, which grounds his floating, cantilevered, colored discs into place with a sturdy, foot-like base. This sense of grounding, and connection between a sculpture and its physical surroundings became more important to Calder later in his career, from the mid-1950s onward, as he was commissioned to build large-scale sculptures in public and private outdoor settings around the world. The monumental commissions enlarged the scale of his artistic practice as a whole, and Petite croix, which extends eight feet across, is no exception. “It is true I’ve more or less retired from the smaller mobiles,” Calder said in 1960. “The engineering on the big objects is important; they’re mostly designed for a particular spot, and they have to fit properly and either support themselves properly or hang from the ceiling properly.”ⁱ

 

Petite croix reflects the growing popularity for monumental sculpture in the late 1960s among art critics, urban planners, and public audiences. In a sense, Petite croix embodies the cultural zeitgeist of American sculpture in 1968; that year’s Whitney Biennial, which featured Calder, among other artists, focused on new developments monumental and outdoor sculpture. Calder was highly sought after globally to create sculptures for public spaces and corporate parks alike. These commissions allowed him to push the limits of scale in his work, as with El Sol Rojo (The Red Sun), designed for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, which stands eighty feet tall.
"There’s been an agrandissement in my work."
—Alexander CalderCalder described this time in his career as one of agrandissement: an enlargement from one form to another. That does not mean that his monumental works are direct copies of smaller, extant sculptures—Calder made models, or maquettes, for that portion of his artistic process. Rather, for Calder, the act of agrandissement is an enlargement or expansion of themes, of core artistic values, including balance, counter-balance, movement, and intuition. In this sense, works like Petite croix are the seeds of Calder’s mature legacy, and the inspiration for his grand public sculptures, many of which still activate cultural spaces today. Petite croix is thus a rare opportunity for private engagement with Calder’s most public period.
 
The meteoric expansion of Calder’s career in the late 1960s, from Petite croix to his monumental works, took place against the backdrop of a nation captivated by the Space Race. Robert Osborn imagines Calder’s career as a “circus rig of his own, flinging him end over end into space—his natural possessed element.”ⁱⁱ

 

The shape of the pierced circle on the pedestal of Petite croix, also seen in Trois noirs sur un rouge, 1968, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, expresses voids and volumes. Multidimensional space was a long-term source of artistic inspiration for Calder; in a 1951 statement, he said “The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof... the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densitites, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.”[iii] He recalled fond memories of the planetarium, drawing a parallel between the energy of the planets and the movement of the metal discs in his sculptures.

"More or less as the earth is a sphere, but also has some miles of gas about it, volcanoes upon it, and the moon making circles around it…a disc of metal is rather a dull object without this sense of something emanating from it."
—Alexander CalderCalder considered the kinetic element of his sculptures, meaning, their ability to move, an essential part of his work. “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, one can compose motions,” he said.^iv Standing mobiles like Petite croix presented an opportunity to “compose motions” across multiple dimensions—some elements bob up and down, while others sway side to side, engaging the unseen forces of nature. This three-dimensionality, this multiplicity of kinetic possibilities and interactions, provide those “miles of gas,” in Calder’s terms. The potential for, and action of, movement gives Calder’s flat discs of metal their meaning; they expand from discs into celestial bodies.

 

 Detail of the present work
 

Calder kept up his passion for space and motion through the end of his life. His 1967 print, Crossroads, was reproduced as a poster for the opening of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, in July 1976. Calder was a master designer of color, form, and motion, at all scales, from Crossroads to Petite croix.

 

ⁱ Alexander Calder, quoted in Marla Prather, Alexander Calder: 1898-1976, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1998, p. 279.
ⁱⁱ Robert Obsorn, “Calder’s International Monuments,” Art in America, Mar-Apr 1969, p. 49.
ⁱⁱⁱ Alexander Calder, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, no. 18, vol. 3, 1951, p. 8.
^iv Alexander Calder, quoted in Prather, p. 329.