“If it is true that the sculptor is supposed to infuse static matter with movement, then it would be a mistake to associate Calder’s art with the sculptor’s. Calder does not suggest movement, he captures it.”
Harmonious in its formal elegance and virtuosic in its innovative exploration of motion, The Beetle is a superlative example of Alexander Calder’s sculptural choreography, each and every element charged with limitless kinetic possibility. Gently stemming from a tripod of wire are four polygonal plates of sheet.mes tal, precariously balanced. An arc of thin and delicate wire extends from the crescent element, reaching out into space and balancing a network of five circular discs, distinctive in their presence and elegant in their equilibrium. Activated by the slightest breeze, The Beetle’s multicolored mobile springs to life, gently swaying side to side in graceful ebbs and flows. In its intricate composition and delicate formal vocabulary, the present work wholly captures Calder’s iconic aesthetic vision that introduced t.mes and movement into static sculpture, and in so doing revolutionized the trajectory of twentieth-century art.
“Somet.mes s Calder amuses himself by imitating a new form. … But most of the t.mes he imitates nothing, and I know no art less untruthful than his. Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.”
Born in 1898 to a sculptor father and a painter mother, Alexander Calder was encouraged from a young age to pursue his own artistic practice. His revolutionary oeuvre was energized by his family along with his Modernist predecessors and peers, while remaining groundbreaking in his singular visual lexicon. Expanding his practice among the likes of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger and Joan Miró, the last of whom would become a close friend, Calder famously questioned: “Why must art be static? … You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an intensely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without.mes aning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.” (the artist quoted in: “Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It In Motion,” New York World-Telegram, 11 June 1932)
Propelling sculpture into motion is indeed the innovation that came to define Calder’s work over the following four decades. His sculptures unify natural forces with industrial materials, capitalizing on principles of incalculable airflow and human manipulation, enveloping the viewer in the realm of the dynamic and kinetic. The artist himself underscored the significance of motion in his works summarizing his practice in conversation with curator Katharine Kuh, saying that “the mobile has actual movement in itself, while the stabile is back at the old painting idea of implied movement.” (the artist quoted in: Katharine Kuh, “Alexander Calder,” The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York 1962, p. 42) His standing mobiles, such as The Beetle, further this formal interrogation of balance and motion both through their sturdy groundedness and ethereal airborne presence. From a modestly scaled base, the present work extends into the air and commands the surrounding space, presenting the complex intertwinings of mass, gravity, weightlessness, and kineticism as it dances before the viewer’s eyes. Though Calder’s works are nonobjective, the artist often identified them after their creation with title based on formal associations, which duly brings the present sculpture to life with a distinct corporeal liveliness. The Beetle synchronizes movement and stasis in an elegant harmony of kinetic paths: “Somet.mes s Calder amuses himself by imitating a new form. … But most of the t.mes he imitates nothing, and I know no art less untruthful than his. Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Mobiles de Calder,” in: Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, 1946, p. 11; translation courtesy Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre, Calcutta 2008)
Breathtaking in its precise craftsmanship, dynamic presence, and delicate structural equilibrium, the present work crystallizes Calder’s revelatory control of t.mes and movement in one graceful form. Its bold shapes and vibrant shades which pivot and flutter before the viewer weave a mesmerizingly lyrical composition that connects with its environment in an entirely new fashion. A giant of twentieth-century art, Calder revolutionized our understanding of space through the at once intimate and enigmatic dynamism of his sculptures, and The Beetle, which fuses the stabile and mobile, epitomizes Calder’s famous claim that “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.” (Alexander Calder, “Stat.mes nt,” in: Exh. Cat., Pittsfield, Berkshire Museum, Modern Painting and Sculpture: Alexander Calder, George L.K. Morris, Calvert Coggeshall, Alma de Gersdorff Morgan, 1933, n.p.)
