“Valéry said the sea is always beginning over again. One of Calder’s objects is like the sea and equally spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new."
Triumphantly exhibited in Alexander Calder’s seminal 1947 exhibition at Buchholz Gallery, New York, Armada from 1946 is an early and important example of the artist’s corpus of mobiles, representing Calder’s celebrated return to working freely with sheet.mes tal after the conclusion of World War II. Famously pictured with the artist in an iconic photograph by Herbert Matter, the present work is a feat of construction and complexity of form, as a fleet of matte black elements surging along a meridian of vermilion rods: the weight, gravity, and intensity of Armada’s abstract elements channel the strength and naval fortitude of its very namesake. Armada also bears exceptional provenance, having formerly belonged in the permanent collects ion of the Minneapolis Institute of Art before residing in the distinguished collects ion of French filmmaker Claude Berri. Held for the last two decades in the personal collects ion of Daniella Luxembourg, Armada ranks among the most arresting of Calder’s creations, summoning his proficiency and intuitive vision. “Valéry said the sea is always beginning over again” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in the introductory essay for the 1946 Galerie Louis Carré catalogue. “One of Calder’s objects is like the sea and equally spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new. A passing glance is not enough; you must live with it, be bewitched by it. Then the imagination revels in these pure, interchanging forms, at once free and rule-governed.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Mobiles de Calder,” in: Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, 1946; translation courtesy Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre, Calcutta, 2008) Test.mes nt to the extraordinary significance of this 1947 Buchholz Gallery exhibition in Calder’s oeuvre, other works from this watershed show are represented in international institutional collects ions, including Bougainvillier and Gamma at the Seattle Art Museum and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
“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.”
Calder was the product of a familial artistic legacy, and undeniably both reimagined and shaped the breakthroughs of his Modern predecessors and peers. In 1923, after deciding to become a painter, Calder dedicated himself solely to his practice, taking courses at the Arts Students League and traveling frequently between the United States and France over the next decade. During his transatlantic sojourns, Calder quickly ensconced himself in the pioneering Modernist milieu: in particular, his visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930, where he was greatly impressed by the environment, galvanized the artist to devote much of the remainder of his career to abstraction. These creative circles he consequently shaped in Paris would lead him toward his epiphanic, revolutionary breakthrough of imbuing sculpture with movement. When the United States entered World War II, however, supply shortages of sheet.mes tal led him to experiment with alternative media, such as wood and glass, which allowed him to refine and revisit his approach to shape, color, and weight in a way that would profoundly influence not only his later large-scale compositions but also the mobiles created in the immediate aftermath of the war. Armada, executed the year after World War II ended, thus marks Calder’s triumphant postwar return to his signature materials, allowing the unembellished simplicity and innate properties of the sheet.mes tal to come to the fore.
Armed with abundant sheet.mes tal following the Allied victory of World War II, Calder resumed his production of mobiles and stabiles. “1945,” James Johnson Sweeney—who organized Calder’s major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1943—observed, “saw him once more working sheet.mes tal, wire and wood as he had for so many previous years, but now with a new grace and a fresh treatment of pierced planes made to swim lazily horizontal. At the same t.mes , Calder’s stabiles took on a greater complexity of interpenetrating geoMetricas l forms. Now the pierced elements helped to a new lyrical effect.” (James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, New York 1951, pp. 61-62) Over the next four decades, Calder pushed sculpture into the realm of the dynamic, the autonomous, the ambulatory. Under his direction, sculpture came to life, and Armada serves as an anchor of Calder’s broader conceptual and aesthetic program, in which the interplay of volume, t.mes and space is not only observable but heightened. The gravitas of his oeuvre is particularly palpable in hanging mobiles, which command the surrounding atmosphere, changing the viewer’s physical and phenomenological engagement with the work with each passing moment. Activated by the slightest changes in the air, Armada springs to life, pivoting and oscillating in seamless, lurching motion. In propulsive yet unpredictable surges and retreats, the present work’s stunningly simple economy of means produces infinite permutations of kinetic paths and interpretations. “For what are the elements in a mobile,” Jed Perl mused, “if not sails flapping in the wind, fruit falling from a tree, one piece of metal clanging against another?” (Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science” in: Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, 2013, p. 42)
Works from the 1947 Buchholz Gallery Exhibition Alexander Calder in Institutional collects ions
Armada’s rhythmic movements see Calder’s revelatory engagement with t.mes and matter crystallize before the viewer. Through metal, rod, paint and wire, Calder was able to challenge the status quo of contemporary sculpture and subvert the presupposed role and social function of the discipline. Through the spellbinding singularity of his vision and the extraordinary feats of his engineering, Armada bewitches its beholder, a powerful and uncompromising display of Calder’s virtuosic contributions to twentieth-century artmaking.
