Andrew Huber
Head of Department
Lot 44
ALEXANDER CALDER(1898-1976)Untitled
1956
1956
Amended
16 November 2022, 17:00 EST
New YorkUS$700,000 - US$1,000,000
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Randy Reynolds
Specialist, Head of Sale
ALEXANDER CALDER (1898-1976)
Untitled
1956
signed and dated 56
oil on canvas
42 by 24 in.
106.7 by 60.9 cm.
1956
signed and dated 56
oil on canvas
42 by 24 in.
106.7 by 60.9 cm.
Footnotes
Provenance
Perls Galleries, New York
Private Collection, New York
Sale: Christie's, New York, Contemporary Art, 22 February 1996, Lot 14
Nahmad Collection, Geneva
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art Day Auction, 13 May 2015, Lot 151
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
Roslyn Harbor, Nassau County Museum of Art, Calder and Miró, 1998, p. 52, illustrated in color
New York, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Alexander Calder: The Painter, 2011-2012, p. 55, illustrated in color
"...but of course they are also very ancient materials. In any event, there is very definitely in Calder's work a fascination with metamorphosis that goes back to the ancients, an interest in animating the inanimate." - Jed Perl in conversation with Morgan Meis, October 31, 2017
Exceedingly rare, and yet emphatically Calder, Untitled is an exquisite illustration of Alexander Calder's exploration of shape and color, rendered in oil paints on canvas. Renowned worldwide for his mobiles and monumental stabiles, Alexander Calder's output of ink and gouache was similarly prodigious, and yet, his oil on canvas works of such a painterly quality remain scarce.
Born to a family of well-established sculptors, Calder received his first studio at the young age of eight. An education under George Luks and John Sloan at the Art Students League in the mid-1920s rooted the young artist in painting and figurative abstraction, yet it was his visit, in 1930, to Piet Mondrian's studio that marked the artist's shift from figurative to abstraction. He joined the Abstract Creation Group the following year, forever charting his course of marrying geometric forms and primary colors across a variety of media.
A series of trips Calder took in the mid-1950s can be seen as informing his compositional choices in Untitled, observations translated through the artist's recognizable visual vocabulary. En route to see his dear friend, Henri Seyrig in the Levant, the artist visited Egypt, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The following year, Calder traveled through India and the Middle East alongside Gira Sarabhais, the multi-hypenate textile magnate. The painting depicts two pyramids, off in the horizon, and the two figures gazing out over them. The Pyramids of Giza, long a source of inspiration for artists and travelers alike, clearly influenced the artist, shaping his perception of monumental structure. Following his travels, the pyramid, inanimate and monolithic, both a shape and a structure, formal and otherworldly, would remain a mainstay across a multitude of the artist's practice, countless lithographs, gouaches, drawings, tapestries, stabiles and mobiles, executed across two decades, would showcase the importance of such a form within the artist's oeuvre.
The foregrounded figures, anthropomorphic and alien, animated by bold primary colors, gaze similarly in wonder upon the pyramids. The rendering of these figures suggests perhaps an influence of artwork Calder may have seen while traveling with Ms Sarabhai. Hallmarks of Indian miniature paintings, including eyes long and narrow, forehead running smoothly into an elongated nose in profile, are similarly suggested in the "two men." Presented with immediacy against the picture plane in full red and yellow, solid and sculptural in quality, the figures can be read as a bookend to the international excursions of 1954 and 1955, with the influences of Egypt and India equally present within Untitled.
Having taken first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952, thereafter the artist was at the height of his standing in the art world, a standing he would not relinquish. Today, Calder's work may be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which has the largest Calder collection.
Saleroom notices
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A10313.
