"Sculpture suggests motion, painting suggests light or space. Calder suggests nothing, he fashions real, living motions which he has captured. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing but themselves: they are, that is all: they are absolutes [...] These motions, which are meant only to please, to enchant the eye, have nevertheless a profound meaning, a metaphysical one."
Alexander Calder’s Base jaune is a culmination of the artist’s career-long investigation into movement, color and play. The pioneering sculptor of the twentieth-century, Calder was born in Pennsylvania to a family of artists: his father and grandfather were each renowned sculptors, and his mother was a portrait painter. Set on forging his own creative path, the artist experimented throughout his career with novel modes of artistic expression, pioneering his mobiles, stabiles, and wire forms in the process. A fabled visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930 galvanized Calder’s pivot to abstraction; there, he saw a wall of various compositions that Mondrian had arranged using colored shapes. He deemed this installation so spatially innovative it would inspire his kinetic explorations for decades to follow. In the present work, harmony and balance are built into the composition by design; a perfect equilibrium is achieved through the use of irregularly shaped plates of metal, balanced just-so on the tip of the yellow base. Despite its carefully calibrated design, Base jaune is not static, instead responding to its external environment through movement and engaging more abstract conceptual notions of t.mes and space. Vibrant, elegant, and masterfully executed, Base jaune encapsulates Calder’s overarching artistic goal “[...] of making the spell last, embedding the unpredictable, contradictory, (and often syncopated) movements of animals and people into his works” (Penelope Curtis, “Performance of Post-performance”, in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, 2015, p. 17).
