“It’s really just for differentiation, but I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red. I often wish that I’d been a Fauve in 1905."
E xecuted in 1964, The Red Dozen embodies the absolute essentials of Alexander Calder’s inimitable groundbreaking aesthetic, expressed through the captivating and seductive cascade of twelve monochrome red elements hanging poetically in perfect harmony. First sold through the legendary Perls Gallery in New York, The Red Dozen has been held in private hands for over three decades since it was acquired in 1988. Beautifully suspended in an ever-changing choreography, The Red Dozen epitomizes the simplicity of form and joyfulness of movement that mark the artist at his most technically adept and conceptually inventive. An extraordinary example of Calder’s cherished hanging mobiles–the artist's most iconic and enduring body of work–The Red Dozen stands as feats of both Calder’s inquisitive mind and extraordinary intuition. Indeed, Calder’s invention of these hanging and sculptural mobiles are a test.mes nt to his ingenuity as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
What makes Calder’s mobiles, including The Red Dozen, so exceptional is the fact that they are continually subject to imperceptible adjustments in the invisible forces that surround them. In the present work, the twelve organically formed elements are forever destined to sway and dance through the air in seemingly unrepeatable configurations. Cascading and revolving in endless permutations, the powerful red elements physically and chromatically balance into a powerful visual symphony. Dazzling in its brilliant monochromatic red hue, The Red Dozen embodies the precision and dynamic verve that distinguishes the artist’s renowned sculptural oeuvre. With remarkable facility and ingenuity we see how Calder forged a revolutionary genre of sculpture that made subjects of form within space as well as the movement themselves.
“To most people who look at a mobile, it’s no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.”
In 1930, Calder visited Piet Mondrian's studio which immediately sparked and inspired the thirty two year old artist’s idea to create abstract sculpture in motion. Just two years later, this bold intention was finally realized with Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere, Calder's first hanging mobile, held in the collects ion of the Calder Foundation. While this first hanging mobile is seemingly simple in presentation, a small white sphere and a larger red sphere hover at the end of vertical wires, this work itself creates a self-contained constellation, as it is presented alongside what Calder called "impedimenta," or repurposed objects including a wooden crate, a tin can, glass bottles and a gong. As Calder continually endeavored to push the boundaries and construct new iterations of the hanging mobile, all elements became suspended, and Calder found his archetypical style, which is captured in the elegant cascade of The Red Dozen. Previously relying on motors to activate his earliest mobiles, Calder shifted his focus to create mobiles that respond to air currents and human interaction to create an unpatterned choreography of form within space.
In spite of a turn toward total abstraction with his mobiles, The Red Dozen reveals Calder’s preserving fascination with the unseen forces of nature, which in turn activate organic forms. Although nonobjective, Calder’s mobiles somet.mes s suggest the form of living flora and fauna, a quality that reveals an affinity between Calder’s sculptures and the Surrealist paintings of his close friend and fellow artist Joan Miró. Indeed, one can imagine the individual red elements of Calder's The Red Dozen melded into the evocative cosmic array of Surrealist and anthropomorphic shapes in Miró's celebrated Constellations. Breathtaking in its precise craftsmanship, harmonic beauty, and dynamic presence, The Red Dozen stands as a test.mes nt to the technical skill and imaginative genius of Alexander Calder. Cascading in an elegant and ever changing arc, The Red Dozen attests to Calder's brilliance in bringing form, color and line into the three dimensional space inhabited by the viewer.
