Alexander Calder
Trained as an engineer, and then hung sculpture from the ceiling so the air could move it.
Alexander Calder was born in Pennsylvania in 1898 into a family of sculptors and took a degree in mechanical engineering before art school. In Paris in the late 1920s he made Cirque Calder, a miniature circus of wire and cloth that he performed himself, and a 1930 visit to Mondrian's studio pushed him into abstraction. What followed were the mobiles — Duchamp named them — hanging arrangements of painted sheet metal and wire balanced so precisely that a draught is enough to move them, and the stabiles, their standing counterparts, which grew to monumental scale in his last two decades. He died in New York in 1976.
The Calder Foundation registers works and issues application numbers, and in practice no significant Calder trades without going through it; a work not registered is a work with a problem. Sheet metal and wire are easily bent and repainted, and repainting is the most common condition issue — original paint surface is material to value. Mobiles must hang and balance correctly, and a replaced wire or a shortened arm changes the object. Beyond sculpture there are gouaches on paper in quantity, plus jewellery, tapestries and lithographs.
If you own a work by Alexander Calder
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.