Executed in 1947, Moths I is an exquisite example of Alexander Calder’s celebrated corpus of standing mobiles, which he began creating in the early 1930s and continued developing across the subsequent decade. Elegantly capturing a sense of lightness and flight, the present work is both biomorphic and fluid, its laterally progressing elements suggestive of sequential movement through t.mes and space. Exemplifying the harmonious fusion of optics and kinetics inherent to the artist’s magnificent sculptural practice, Moths I is the first iteration from an important series of three works depicting the same ethereal, winged subject. The second mobile in the series, Moths II (1948), was previously in the collects ion of Doris and Don Fisher and now resides in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, while the third work in the series, Moths III (1948) remains in a private collects ion. Photographed in the artist’s Roxbury, Connecticut studio the same year it was executed, Moths I is a pivotal work from an important period of production within Calder’s oeuvre. Significantly, this standing mobile was one of only twenty-eight works included in one of the artist’s early, career-defining exhibitions at Buchholz Gallery, New York in 1947. Signifying Calder’s importance within intellectual circles of the immediate post-war period, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the catalogue text, in which he described the mobile’s intrinsic ability to evoke nature. Seventeen years later, Moths I was included in Calder’s ground-breaking exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1964), a test.mes nt to the standing mobile’s importance within the artist’s wider oeuvre. The kinetic, performative quality of the present work speaks to Calder’s revolutionary approach to abstraction: “Why must art be static?...You look at an abstraction, sculpted 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” (A. Calder cited in: H. Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder, New York, 2003, p. 67).

The prestigious provenance of the present work further speaks to its importance within Calder’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Moths I was acquired from Curt Valentin Gallery by American architect Paul Lester Wiener and his wife, artist Ingeborg ten Haeff in 1951. Wiener and Ten Haeff were prominent collects ors within New York City’s bourgeoning art scene of the 1940s and ‘50s. Wiener’s most prestigious architectural commission was the planning of New York City’s Washington Square Park in 1958, developing several thousand housing units within a six-block radius; Ten Haeff was a successful artist and participated in over twenty exhibitions between 1963 and 1998, in as diverse locations as Bonn, New York and Mexico City. Calder presumably met the couple through celebrated architects Le Corbusier and Josep Lluís Sert. Le Corbusier and Sert were frequent collaborators with Wiener on large-scale city planning projects, and the three took long sojourns to Latin America, preparing architectural plans for projects in Lima and Bogota. Calder, too, collaborated with both Le Corbusier and Sert, and it is possible Wiener and ten Haeff met the artist in Brazil, where he travelled to exhibit his work in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1948. The provenance of the present work is thus evidence of Calder’s long-standing relationship with pre-eminent collects ors of the post-war period, but also his strong ties to the most renowned architects of the Twentieth Century, including Le Corbusier and Sert, but also Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen.

Rendered in rich, creamy white monochrome, the fan-like elements of Moths I are suspended in perfect counterbalance, signifying Calder’s technical mastery and conceptual intuition. Balanced on a delicate serpentine stand of slender metal, two large organic forms occupy one side of the sculpture’s branch-like arm, while a succession of sequentially diminishing white forms on the opposite side mirror these larger elements. The gradual evolution of shapes, from large to small or small to large, depending on the viewer’s position, is vividly reminiscent of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a moth: while the large elements are expansive and wing-like – evoking a moth caught in flight – the smaller elements are contained and delicate, suspended mid-air as though caught in a moment of rebirth. These nine brilliant forms demonstrate Calder’s commitment to the inherent purity and grace of the colour white, while demonstrating the breathtaking innovation of the artist’s mobiles as containing: “a beauty as unprecedented and unique as a natural creation; they will look like no other existing thing. Calder’s works are beautiful in themselves and not.mes rely in comparison to something; their beauty is autonomous” (S. Gasch cited in: C. Giménez, Calder: Gravity and Grace, Madrid, 2003, pp. 66-67). Hovering, seemingly weightless, before the viewer, Calder’s ephemeral abstract forms communicate a sense of limitless kinetic potential, shifting subtly in the natural currents of the air. Their movements are never repeated, and thus their forms meticulously resemble the true rhythms of nature.

While Calder’s mobile sculptures embrace total abstraction, Moths I reveals the artist’s enduring fascination with the unseen forces of nature. His mobiles are decidedly nonobjective, yet their biomorphic quality suggests living and breathing creatures. This subtle suggestion of nature is indeed reminiscent of the work of Calder’s contemporaries, Surrealist artists Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. For these artists, colour and form functioned as a means of expressing the untapped dimensions of consciousness, and as tools for heightening visual experience. Calder pushed their painterly investigations into the third dimension, exploring the boundaries of sculpture in an entirely new and radical way. In the third dimension, Calder could more vigorously explore the binaries intrinsic to traditional sculpture – gravity and lightness, surface and mass, volume and void.

A work that is at once vibrant, elegant, and masterfully executed, Moths I encapsulates Calder’s engaging ability to capture movement across t.mes and space: “Look closely at a Calder mobile and the details are direct and tough – the work of an artisan. But stand back and behold the equilibrium, light and fragile, as the separate parts pirouette around each other like dancers or acrobats in a circus, and you realise that the artisan is also a poet. Free of mechanical assistance, dependent on gravity and natural airflows, his beautiful mobiles share a language of plates, cantilevers, arms, suspension elements and connections – deceptively simple, but wonderfully sophisticated” (N. Foster cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Pace, Calder After the War, 2013, p. 9).