Alexander Calder, one of the most important and renowned artists of the twentieth-century, is the creator of a new form of modern sculpture - the mobile. Calder introduced movement into art by adding a fourth dimension into the height, width, and depth of traditional sculpture and called it a "mobile". Mobiles are suspended from the ceiling, as seen in the white "Untitled" (1963), or balanced on the point of a standing sculpture, as in the large scale "La douche (The Shower)," 1975, or the small-sized "Little Pierced Disc" (c. 1947). Their movement is graceful and spontaneous, and creates an ever-changing sculptural configuration.
Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia in 1898, and produced an inventive and influential body of work for over fifty years, until his death in New York in 1976. Calder was trained in mechanical engineering, and he combined this knowledge with his unique artistic talents to develop an abstract art form consisting of planes of cut sheet metal painted in bold primary colors and black and white.
Calder also created sculptures without moving elements, called "stabilies" and "Black Beast" (1940) is one of his earliest large-scale works. In addition, he frequently combined a stabile with a mobile, as seen in "White Disc Seven Dots on Red and Black" (1960).
It is very fitting that the art of Alexander Calder is now exhibited in the Lobby Gallery of the Lever House building. Throughout his career, Calder collaborated with the masters of modern architecture and created sculptural artworks for buildings by Marcel Breuer, Gordon Bunshaft, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and Eero Saarinen, among others. Bunshaft, the architect of Lever House (for the architectural firm Skidmore, Owing & Merrill), had originally envisioned sculpture as an integral component of Lever House, and the glass encased lobby is an ideal setting for the presentation of modern art. Upon it's opening in 1952, Lever House was hailed as a masterpiece of modern art, and is now officially acknowledged by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Richard D. Marshall, Curator
Works in the Exhibition:
BLACK BEAST (MAQUETTE), 1939
Painted sheet metal, 21 x 28 x 17 inches
Courtesy Calder Foundation, New York
BLACK BEAST, 1940
Painted sheet metal, 103 x 163 x 78 1/2 inches
Courtesy Calder Foundation, New York
LITTLE PIERCED DISC, 1947
Painted sheet metal wire and wire, 11 x 14 x 3 1/2 inches
Courtesy Calder Foundation, New York
UNTITLED, C. 1958
Painted aluminum, wire, and rod, 10 x 72 x 31 inches
Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York
WHITE DISC SEVEN DOTS ON RED AND BLACK, 1960
Painted sheet metal, wire, and rod, 21 3/8 x 21 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches
Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York
UNTITLED, 1963
Painted sheet metal, wire, and rod, 52 x 98x 98 inches
Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York
LA DOUCHE (THE SHOWER), 1975
Painted sheet metal, wire, and rod, 96 x 48 x 48 inches
Courtesy Calder Foundation, New York
www.calder.org