Achieving a harmonious formal elegance within a refined formal vocabulary, Untitled is a virtuosic late example of the innovative exploration of form, motion, and color that lies at the heart of Alexander Calder’s iconic sculpture oeuvre. Suspended from an intricate wire framework in a mesmeric equilibrium between weight and counterweight, the present work imbues its environs with the sublime. Untitled holds distinguished provenance, formerly belonging to the collects ion of James Johnson Sweeney, the influential proponent of Calder’s work.

Revolutionizing the nature of sculpture from static forms to harmonies of color, balance and movement, Calder devised one of the most groundbreaking artistic innovations of the past century. The artist’s distinct sculptural, aesthetic and conceptual ingenuity was apparent from an early age, even before enrolling in the Art Students League in New York in 1923 to study painting. The artist’s formative years were spent in Paris, and it was there, prompted by a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, that he made the move into abstraction. Entranced not by the Dutch artist’s paintings but by a series of colored rectangles Mondrian had tacked to the wall “in a pattern after his nature”, Calder speculated aloud that he “would like to make them oscillate–[Mondrian] objected." As Calder famously recalled of this experience, “Though I had heard the word ‘modern' before, I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract.’ So now, at thirty‑two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract” (Alexander Calder, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113.

Untitled, dating to the final years of Calder’s long and illustrious career, was executed in a period crowned by numerous artistic achievements including the high-profile public commissions Flamingo at Federal Plaza, Chicago and Universe in the lobby of Sears Tower (now Willis Tower), Chicago (see figs. 1 and 2). The Whitney Museum organized Calder’s Universe, a major traveling retrospective of his work, just a month prior to Calder’s death in November 1976.

The physical components of Untitled comprise the absolute essentials of Calder’s aesthetic. The fifteen ovoid and circular elements of the present work cascade in size from the topmost red element to the tip of the white tail, featuring all three primary colors plus black and white—Calder’s most famed palette. Extending nearly six feet in length and wingspan, this work’s monumental scale is belied by the effortless way it appears to float balletically through the air. Connected by dazzling red wire, two crowning discs of black and red hover parallel to the floor and counterpoise the perpendicular forms that spring upward at myriad angles.Untitled is further distinguished by the remarkable dual faces of one central element—one red, one with sweeping brush strokes in a rich shade of blue—which offer a dynamic viewing experience for all who survey the work. With each minor pivot and oscillation orchestrating an entirely new configuration, the present work continuously and seamlessly redefines its surrounding space. Untitled, as with the greatest of Calder’s mobiles, presents a model of balance and equilibrium that is at once alluringly simple and ingeniously complex: as the artist famously declared, “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” (quoted in“Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It in Motion,” New York World-Telegram, 11 June 1932). Engendering a sense of outward expansion, Untitled gives tangible form to the invisible forces that drive and affect us.

Untitled was among the numerous masterworks belonging to renowned curator, museum director and critic James Johnson Sweeney, remaining in his collects ion from its acquisition in the year of its execution until Sweeney’s death in 1986. Sweeney held an indelible impact on the early trajectory of Calder’s career, writing the introductions for the artist’s early solo exhibitions at Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York and the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago in 1934-35. As curator and later Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 1935-46, Sweeney organized, with Marcel Duchamp, the pivotal 1943-44 survey Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions. Later the Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston, as well as a consultant to the National Gallery of Australia, Sweeney spearheaded acquisitions of these institutions’ most important works by Calder, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, among many others, while also organizing groundbreaking exhibitions of renowned artists including Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró and Henry Moore.

The present mobile lyrically expresses the poetry, mastery of composition and technical excellence that allowed Calder to revolutionize the ability of sculpture to connect with its environment and its viewer. Through a remarkable manipulation of metal and wire, Calder advances the possibilities of motion and form. Untitled fully invokes James Johnson Sweeney’s earliest declaration on Calder’s genius: “It was only a step further for Calder to bring back actual movement in place of the suggestions of it. And the immediacy of this stimulus carried with it a primitive strength of rhythmic evocation that is perhaps Calder’s most striking contribution. But a still more personal and perhaps more important one lies in his recognition of another feature of natural movements—their unpredictable character and the aesthetic possibilities of the unexpected” (quoted in “Alexander Calder: Movement as a Plastic Element,” Plus, no. 2, February 1939, pp. 25-26).