Alexander Calder – Couleurs au Choix

Description

Alexander Calder, Couleurs au Choix is an original colored lithograph. This print is signed in the lower right and numbered in the lower left.

Alexander Calder is best known for creating mobiles – sculptures composed of abstract shapes moving through space. Born in 1898, in the Philadelphia area, Calder came from a family of artists. In the early 1920s he worked as an illustrator, covering events such as the circus.

Couleurs Au Choix exhibits his rekindled childhood fascination with animals, a subject that is central to his art. In 1926 he went to Paris for the first time and stayed there until the fall of 1927. An active participant in the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the two World Wars, Calder had a wide circle of friends and colleagues in the arts. He met many of them through performances of his entourage of small sculptures, Circus, in the late twenties and through his membership from 1931 in the Abstraction-Création group, a loose alliance of artists promoting diverse multi-national trends in abstract art.

Besides sculptures, his oeuvre also comprises graphic art and gouaches. Additionally, he makes jewelry, stage designs and book illustrations.

American artist Alexander Calder changed the course of modern art by developing an innovative method of sculpting, bending, and twisting wire to create three-dimensional “drawings in space.” Resonating with the Futurists and Constructivists, as well as the language of early nonobjective painting, Calder’s mobiles consist of abstract shapes made of industrial materials – often poetic and gracefully formed and at times boldly colored – that hang in an uncanny, perfect balance.

His complex assemblage Cirque Calder (1926–31), which allowed for the artist’s manipulation of its various characters presented before an audience, predated Performance Art by some 40 years. Later in his career, Calder devoted himself to making outdoor monumental sculptures in bolted sheet steel that continue to grace public plazas in cities throughout the world.

Alexander Calder, Couleurs au Choix