Alexander Calder

Among the “innovations” in art after the First World War Calder’s approach to sculpture was so removed from the accepted formulas that he had to invent a new name for his forms in motion. He called them mobiles. In their treatment of gravity, disturbed by gentle movements, they give the feeling that “they carry pleasures peculiar to themselves, which are quite unlike the pleasures of scratching,” to quote Plato in his Philebus. A light breeze, an electric motor, or both in the form of an electric fan, start in motion weights, counter-weights, levers which design in mid-air their unpredictable arabesques and introduce an element of lasting surprise. The symphony is complete when color and sound join in and call on all our senses to follow the unwritten score. Pure joie de vivre. The art of Calder is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.