Open Space and Transparency

"The Star" (1960) Polychrome sheet metal and steel wire 35 3/4 x 53 3/4 x 17 5/8”
by ALEXANDER CALDER(American, 1898-1976)

Alexander “Sandy” Calder—American printmaker, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer—revolutionized the art of sculpture by expressing movement with his invention of the “mobile,” a word coined in 1931 by Marcel Duchamp to describe Calder’s kinetic, and often whimsical, sculpture. The son and grandson of Philadelphia sculptors, Calder was trained as a mechanical engineer before studying at the Art Students League in New York, where he was a student of the urban realist painter John Sloane in 1923. Later inspired by the geometry and color employed by Spanish surrealist Joan Miró, whom he met in 1927, Calder began sculpting with continuous strands of wire that rendered volume without mass. Critics described these works as “drawings in space,” which later led to his “paintings in space”—constructions of abstract shapes cut from thin sheet metal and painted with primary colors. When attached to metal rods and suspended in midair, Calder’s “mobiles” hover and continuously shift with every air current. The flat, colorful shapes often resemble streamlined birds, fish, leaves, and stars, which adds an additional playful—and celestial—quality to Calder’s work. A major contribution to the development of abstract art, Calder’s floating compositions challenge the notion of sculpture as static compositions of mass and volume by focusing on the ideas of open space and transparency.