Sold for: $52,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Maeght, Paris
Albert White Galleries, Toronto
Estate of Dan Iannuzzi, Toronto
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
Alexander Calder, Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932

Alexander Calder is internationally renowned for his sculptures, particularly his kinetic mobiles.

As well as mobiles, Calder made standing sculptures on a large scale, which artist Jean Arp called “stabiles.” Calder also did brush drawings, illustrations and paintings. This fluid gouache depicts Calder’s imaging of a monumental hybrid sculpture – a stabile with mobile attachments, which appears to dwarf the buildings ringing the town square it stands in. The sculpture’s radiant primary colours exude an upbeat energy, in contrast to the black and white outlines of the surrounding city. We can speculate that his title implies that a city is happier with art such as this!

In Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, Calder poetically described his approach to his work:

How can art be realized?

Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe.

Out of different masses, light, heavy, middling- indicated by variations of size or colour- directional line - vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc…-these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many.

Spaces, volumes, suggested by the smallest means in contrast to their mass, or even including them, juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds.

Nothing at all of this is fixed

Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationship with the other elements in its universe.

It must not be just a fleeting ‘moment’ but a physical bond between the varying events in life.

Not extractions?

But abstractions?

Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.

This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application #A12989.

The first major Canadian retrospective of Calder's work, Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor, is currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until February 24, 2019.

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