“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."
A lyrical assemblage of monochromatic planar shapes, Four Big Dots is an exquisite example of Calder’s mature practice, an elegant achievement of exacting equilibrium which demonstrates the artist’s singular ability to infuse sculpture with organic movement. Calder’s approach to abstraction is intimately connected with the natural world in how he harnessed its unseen forces, and in Four Big Dots, references to nature’s energies abound. The stepped abstract planes cascade gently from delicate wires, counterbalanced by perpendicular plates suspended softly in the air, as if hovering on the surface of the sea. Existing in a perpetual state of motion, Four Big Dots maintains a graceful composure while gently shifting with the gentlest of breezes. By introducing organic, free-flowing movement through both space and t.mes to a formerly static medium, Calder’s sculptures, as exemplified by the elegant sways of Four Big Dots, form a symbiotic relationship between their environments and viewers.
“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 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired Four Big Dots from Perls Galleries in New York in the year that the work was executed. Opened in 1937 by brothers Klaus and Frank Perls, Perls Galleries played an integral role in championing the European avant-garde in America. In 1956, the Perls Galleries hosted the first of nineteen lifet.mes exhibitions dedicated to Calder, ushering in a period during which Klaus and Dolly Perls became the artist’s most important representatives and advocates. Held in the prestigious collects ion of the SFMOMA for over six decades, Four Big Dots has impeccable provenance. Calder’s stylistic shift from the figurative wire sculptures that made his name in 1920s avant-garde circles in Paris to a pared down abstract vernacular occurred after a storied visit to the Rue de Départ studio of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Calder was not affected by the Modern master’s radical approach to abstraction but rather by the all-encompassing environment of Mondrian’s studio, which gave the effect of a total work of art experienced through multivalent perspectives. This pivotal visit prompted a shift to abstraction that soon developed into a series of motorized kinetic sculptures, resolving concurrent avant-garde experiments of the Constructivists, Futurists, Dadaists and Bauhaus artists. Calder developed the mobile and stabile, the two sculptural forms that would define his mature practice and primary contributions to modern sculpture.
Calder’s revolutionary departure into kinetic sculpture ushered in a new, distinctly modern approach that demanded a new relationship between the viewer, environment and the work of art. At the dawn of the new century, an obsession with movement, speed, mechanization and the new pace of modern living swept through techno-positive avant-garde circles. While Cubists, Futurists, and Orphists introduced movement into their canvases with fractured views to express ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity, modern sculptors such as Archipenko, Brancusi, Gonzalez and Gabo ventured to rethink three-dimensional art. As Norman Foster observed, Calder is not the first or the only modern artist to work in metal, nor the first and only artist to explore kinetic sculpture, yet it is Calder “who is associated with breaking the tradition of static sculpture and showing that it could be liberated to move in space and continually change its composition.” (Exh. Cat. London, Pace, Calder After the War, 2013, p. 9) Marcel Duchamp designated Calder’s new form the “mobile” for the word’s dual meaning of both movement and motive. Duchamp’s double entendre is telling, emphasizing the fact that Calder’s mobiles appear to move with a vitality that designates them less an object than a self-determined organism.
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In his mature career, Calder continued to refine his practice using an extraordinarily limited economy of means to create poetic expressions of form and color. Executed using exclusively black paint with minimal, sprawling arms attached to simple flattened plates, Four Big Dots cultivates the negative space between its appendixes. The work’s impressive expressive power testifies to the subtle beauty of the restrained approach that characterizes Calder’s most renowned works. By mastering the ability to orchestrate color and form within set parameters, the next logical step for Calder’s artistic progression in the early 1950s was to push his work to a new and exciting scale. By the t.mes that Calder created Four Big Dots in 1963, his practice was increasingly oriented towards the creation of monumental mobiles and stabiles. Having moved to the Saché Indre River in 1953, Calder created a vast new studio overlooking the Indre Valley in 1963 which enabled the artist to create sculptures of magnificent new sizes. Fabricated with the help of the nearby Biémont Foundry, the monumental works are a remarkable feat of engineering. Following a 1964 Guggenheim retrospective, Calder gained new levels of fame in the United States, initiating a series of large-scale commissions, many of which were funded by newly established public arts initiatives. Spanning an ambitious 12 ½ feet, Four Big Dots reflects Calder’s movement towards the monumental and demonstrates the power of Calder’s large-scale sculptures to invigorate their environments through constant and unpredictable change, a vital force that places Calder’s works in harmony with the rhythm of the world around them.
Exploring the Legacy of Calder and Stella: When Art Refused to Stand Still | In Conversation with Replica Shoes 's
