Alexander Calder valuation

Calder painted gouaches in large numbers in his later decades, bold compositions of spirals, suns, targets and flat colour, usually signed and dated. The Calder Foundation registers them as it does the sculpture, and a gouache should have an application number, which appears in catalogue descriptions as the letter A followed by digits.

His first exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in July 1950, came with an issue of the gallery's magazine Derrière le miroir carrying two original lithographs, and later issues carried more. Unsigned sheets from the magazine, signed and numbered lithographs, and the posters made for his exhibitions are three different things, and posters in particular are often framed and offered as prints. The signature, the number and the paper are what tell them apart.

Calder's grandfather made the colossal William Penn on Philadelphia City Hall, and his father was also a sculptor. He studied mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology from 1915. His first solo show of wire sculpture was at the Galerie Billiet in Paris in 1929, with a preface by Jules Pascin, and it was Jean Arp who named the stabiles in 1932. Mercury Fountain stood in the Spanish pavilion at the Paris exhibition of 1937, and when aluminium ran short in the war he carved open wooden forms he called constellations.

From 1936 he worked from small maquettes, which he counted as sculptures in their own right, enlarged by grid to full size, and after 1962 most monumental pieces were fabricated at Etablissements Biémont in Tours. El Sol Rojo, 25.8 metres high, was made for the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, and La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids was the first civic sculpture in the United States funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. He made more than 2,000 pieces of jewellery, joined with loops and rivets instead of solder. Calder Gardens opened in Philadelphia in September 2025.