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Petit Disque Jaune

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Image of a stabile with yellow, red, and black discs balanced on wires

© Estate of Alexander Calder / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


Petit Disque Jaune

1967
painted steel
92 in. x 116 in. x 32 in. (233.68 cm x 294.64 cm x 81.28 cm)
Museum Purchase: Gift of the Friends, 1983.82

Alexander Calder
American
1898–1976

Alexander Calder's mobiles and stabiles are among the most widely recognized sculptures in the world. As the son and grandson of noted sculptors Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945) and Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), young "Sandy" Calder was exposed to art early in life. His first career choice, however, was mechanical engineering, which he pursued for several years following his graduation in 1919 from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Dissatisfied with the jobs he held, Calder turned to painting after enrolling in an evening drawing course taught by an artist friend of his father's. In 1923 he entered the Art Students League of New York, where he learned commercial art techniques. By 1926 Calder was in Paris, studying drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and making his first sculptures, a group of wire and wood figures of acrobats and animals that became the nucleus of his Circus.

Notable for its wit, Calder's Circus gained an appreciative following among the French avant-garde. At home, however, his work was generally overlooked, and during the late 1920s and early 1930s Calder spent much of his time in Paris. There he experimented with abstract art, and in 1932 he created his first mobiles and stabiles. As with his Circus, these were appreciated more in Europe than in America. However, with the general acceptance of abstract art following World War II, Calder's sculpture grew in popularity. During the 1950s Calder won a number of major commissions, including the Whirling Ear for the Brussels World's Fair of 1958 and .125, a gigantic mobile for the Idlewild (now Kennedy) International Airport in New York. Monumental sculpture occupied much of the artist's later career, and in 1962 he built a second studio in Saché, France. Toward the end of his life, Calder returned to painting and commenced a series of small sculptures that he called "Animobiles." The artist died in New York City in 1976.

The Currier's Petit Disque Jaune (Small Yellow Disc) embodies many of the principal features of Calder's mobile sculpture. Giving the impression of a whimsical set of scales, a canted metal rod appears to balance on a floor-mounted fulcrum. Suspended from each end of the rod are two primary forms made of cut and painted metal plates. The larger of the two is a yellow ovoid, a portion of which has been cut out so as to allow the "fulcrum" to pass through; the other form is a red disc of approximately the same size and shape of the cutout. In contrast to the yellow form, which hangs directly from one end of the rod, the red form is attached somewhat more tenuously, by means of smaller wirelike rods and hooks. The same array of wires also supports a group of four small black forms that extend into space.

Calder was among the first to make completely abstract sculpture. A major influence on his work was the Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró (1893-1983), whose whimsical paintings inform the appearance and spirit of many of Calder's mobile and stabile compositions. Typically, Miró's paintings combine spare linear passages with brightly colored, amoeba-like forms. Although vaguely suggestive of microscopic environments, they avoid the appearance of depth and volume. Fundamentally two-dimensional, their flatness is echoed in the flat forms and linear structure of Calder's sculpture.

Unlike Miró's paintings, however, Calder's sculpture can be viewed from many angles and, moreover, is movable. Depending on the viewer's physical relationship to the work, its forms change shape, size, and sometimes seem to disappear altogether as they are seen edge-on or are eclipsed by larger forms. Each form shifts and changes proportionately to those around it, and the entire composition takes on a balletic quality as the viewer moves around the work. The overall effect is one of soothing lyricism, a characteristic that has made Calder's sculpture particularly suitable to busy public spaces such as airport terminals, city squares, and university campuses.

Petit Disque Jaune was probably fabricated in Calder's Saché studio in 1967. Shortly after completion, it entered the collection of Galerie Maeght in Paris, and from there it passed through gallery and private collections in London, Geneva, and New York. The sculpture was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art in 1983.

VSD

REFERENCES

A Salute to Alexander Calder. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970.

Alexander Calder. Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1967.

Marla Prather, with contributions by Alexander S.C. Rower and Arnauld Pierre. Alexander Calder: 1898-1976. Ex. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; 1998.


Exhibition
1969 Gimpel Fils Gallery, London, England, "Alexander Calder", Feb. 15 - Mar. 15.

1982 Waddington Galleries, London, England, "Sculpture", Sept. 29 - Oct. 23.

2008 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "In the Artist's Words."

2017 Currier Museum of Art. "Seeing Red in the Collection" June 23, 2017 - Jan. 2018

Provenance
Artist
Galerie Maeght
Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection
James Goodman Gallery, New York, NY
Purchased by Currier Gallery of Art, 1983

Additional Images
Additional Image
Additional Image Detail 1
Detail 1
Additional Image Detail 2
Detail 2


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