Alexander Calder

The playful character of Alexander Calder’s sculptures has its origins in the childhood toys he created from pieces of wire and scrap metal. Initially trained as an engineer, he went on to apply keen understanding of how things work to the constructions he devised as a sculptor. Earlier 20th-century artists, including Marcel Duchamp, were the pioneers of mechanical sculpture, and it was in fact Duchamp who christened Calder’s inventions “mobiles.” The concept refers to a sculpture that is always in flux, its components designed to move freely and to constantly shift relationships of lines, forms, and colors. In the delicately balanced format of a mobile, flat metal shapes are hinged to rods which in turn hang from cords or—in the case of this work—from fixed supports. Calder also used upright metal forms to create “stabiles,” stationary sculptures that seemed perched on slender feet. In this untitled work of 1957, formerly owned by the architect Marcel Breuer, he combines active and static approaches by suspending a floating constellation of disks from a tripod resembling an imaginary animal.