A monumental mobile by Alexander Calder from the “Constellation” series achieved a top result of $20.4 million at the 20th-century evening auction at Christie’s in New York.
How did the record sale at Christie’s unfold?
A large wooden mobile by Alexander Calder, titled Painted Wood (1943), debuted at Christie’s auction with an estimate between $15 and $20 million.
The work, presented at the 20th-century evening sale in New York, reached $20.4 million including fees, after a hammer price of $17.2 million.
This is the second-highest auction result ever recorded for a Calder work, according to the Artnet Price Database. The absolute record remains the $25.9 million result achieved in 2014, also at Christie’s New York, for Poisson volant (Flying Fish), from 1957.
The initial estimate, between $15 and $20 million, was the highest ever attributed to a work by the Philadelphia-born artist. Additionally, the sale confirmed the growing market interest in the mobiles from his mature phase.
Who led the bidding in the room
The competition for Painted Wood featured Christie’s senior specialists Alex Rotter, Max Carter, and Patrick Saich, who were bidding on behalf of clients connected by phone. The bidding dynamics helped maintain high tension in the room.
During the bidding, Saich temporarily lost contact with his bidder. The evening’s auctioneer, Adrien Meyer, joked about the situation, noting: “I’m sorry, but at some point, I will have to sell it. Did they answer? Is it the voicemail?”.
That said, Saich managed to re-establish the connection, and with a bid of $17.2 million, his client won the lot. The final price, including fees, thus reached $20.4 million, consolidating Calder’s position among the post-war market leaders.
What distinguishes Painted Wood (1943) in Calder’s production?
Painted Wood, created around 1943, features 11 wooden elements balanced through a structure of metal wires and rope. Some shapes are painted, others left natural. The interplay between colored parts and bare surfaces creates a visual balance that alternates simplicity and complexity.
Some elements resemble fish drawn by a child, while others are deliberately more abstract. Overall, the work is considered one of the largest and most important in the “Constellation” series, initiated by Calder in the early 1940s and inspired by cosmic motifs.
The series draws inspiration from the 23 eponymous gouaches created by Joan Miró in the early 1940s. However, Calder transforms that visual vocabulary into mobile sculpture, creating a dialogue between wooden volumes, color, and real movement in space.
What are the origins of the Constellation series
Calder’s interest in cosmology dates back to the 1930s when he lived in Paris and began creating sheet metal and wire works that evoked orbits and planetary movements. During those years, the artist was already exploring the idea of sculpture as a dynamic system.
With the onset of the 1940s, the wartime metal shortage prompted him to experiment with wood. In 1942, according to the widespread account, Calder dismantled The Crowd, a 1929 ebony sculpture, sawed it, and carved it into small parts.
He then suspended these fragments in a series of mobiles, developing a new language that led to the birth of the “Constellation” series.
In the following years, the artist carved, painted, and assembled elements of walnut, oak, and purpleheart, defining a formal grammar that would mark his mature phase.
Who named the series and what was the role of MoMA
The name “Constellation” was not chosen by Calder but coined by Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney during the major 1943 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The two curators used that term to describe his new works, and the definition stuck.
The exhibition, titled “Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions,” gathered about 100 works distributed between the MoMA’s indoor and outdoor spaces. At 45, Calder thus became the youngest artist to have a solo show at the museum, a record surpassed in 1970 by Frank Stella, then 34.
The 1943 exhibition solidified his status on the international scene, placing his work in direct dialogue with the European avant-garde and research on form in motion. Additionally, it defined the critical context in which the subsequent series of wooden mobiles would be read.
How did philosophers and scientists react to Calder’s work?
The innovative force of Calder’s mobiles deeply impressed the European intellectual environment. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described these sculptures as “water plants swaying in a stream,” highlighting their character suspended between life and mechanics.
Sartre defined them as both lyrical inventions and almost mathematical technical combinations, emphasizing the tension between poetry and rationality. In contrast to this articulated analysis, Albert Einstein reacted with a terse quip, looking at a mobile from the ground: “I wish I had thought of that.”
These testimonies helped reinforce the perception of Calder as a key figure in a new way of conceiving sculpture. However, the artist remained committed to an empirical and experimental approach, built in the studio rather than in theory.
What is the provenance of Painted Wood and its connection to Latin America?
Painted Wood came to auction from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, who acquired the work more than thirty years ago. The collector is best known for her focus on Latin American art but recognized in this work an important link between European modernism and the American context.
A few years after the MoMA retrospective, Calder met Henrique Mindlin, a Brazilian modernist architect who helped introduce the American skyscraper to Brazil. The two became friends, and Mindlin collaborated on organizing an exhibition of the artist in Rio de Janeiro in 1948.
Subsequently, Calder gifted Painted Wood to Mindlin, consolidating the work’s connection to Brazil and the continent’s modernism. Additionally, this provenance has strengthened international collectors’ interest in the lot presented by Christie’s.
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