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Description: Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Constellation with Red Knife
signed with monogram 'CA' (on the underside)
wood and painted wire
19 x 22 x 14 in. (48.3 x 55.9 x 35.6 cm.)
Executed circa 1943.

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Provenance: Keith and Edna Warner, New York, acquired from the artist
Galerie Maeght, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner, circa 1983

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Notes: On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.
This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A08302.


Constellation of 1943 suberbly exemplifies the "new form of art" that Alexander Calder described inventing in 1942-3 (A. Calder, quoted in Calder's Universe, New York, 1976, p. 222). This remarkable sculpture embodies the advice that Calder gave to fellow artists that same year, when he endorsed "simplicity of equipment and an adventurous spirit of attacking the unfamiliar or unknown" as the most productive path for an artist (A. Calder, quoted in Alexander Calder: 1898-1976, Washington, D.C., 1996, p. 137). Part of Calder's Constellation series, the present work demonstrates Calder's ingenious use of the pared-down materials of polychrome wood and wire to create a work that is richly allusive and intriguing. In Constellation, Calder engaged in a lively dialogue with Surrealist forms, echoing the biomorphic forms of his friends such as Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró, albeit in his own wholly unique sculptural style. One of only about twenty-nine Constellations, Calder created this work at a particularly high point in his career, during the year that a retrospective celebrated him at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Calder turned to working on a smaller scale in wood in large part because the United States had recently entered into World War II. As Calder would later reflect, "In 1943, aluminum was being all used up in airplanes and becoming scarce. I cut up my aluminum boat, which I had made for the Roxbury pond, and I used it for several objects. I also devised a new form of art consisting of small bits of hardwood carved into shapes and sometimes painted, between which a definite relation was established and maintained by fixing them on the ends of steel wires. After some consultation with [James Johnson] Sweeney and [Marcel] Duchamp, who were living in New York, I decided these objects were to be called 'constellations'" (ibid.).

Duchamp, along with Surrealist leader André Breton, had included Calder's work in the famous First Papers of Surrealism exhibition held in New York the year before. Calder was well aware of Surrealism both from his experience living in Paris for much of the 1920s and 1930s, and from his close friendships with many European artists associated with the movement who moved to the U.S. in the wake of the war. The biomorphic forms of Constellation strikingly recall the mysterious bone-like figures of one of Tanguy's dreamscapes, or the undulating silhouettes and of Miró's figures who are often similarly enmeshed in a web of delicate lines. Although often compared to Miró's series of gouaches titled Constellations of 1940-1, to which Calder even pointed as a source for his own works, it appears that Calder would not have been able to see Miró's Constellations until they were exhibited in New York in 1945. Among all of Calder's Constellations, the present work is also notable for its references to Constantin Brancusi, a sculptor that Sweeney named as one of Calder's forerunners in the catalogue for his 1943 retrospective. Here, Calder intentionally integrates quotes from Brancusi sculptures, including an echo of units from his Endless Column and Fish, which Calder treats playfully by presenting them in diminutive proportions.

Always inventive in his sculptural explorations of space, in Constellation Calder used thin pieces of colored wire to connect his forms -- much like a diagram of heavenly bodies -- but also to suggest forms floating in space as in his mobiles. This active engagement of space within his sculpture recalls the experiments with open form by avant-garde artists such as Picasso, González and Giacometti, and David Smith. Yet whereas most other artists frequently employed welded steel, Calder remarkably transforms the humble materials of wire and wood into spatially complex construction.

In the spring of 1943, Pierre Matisse hosted an exhibition at his New York gallery dedicated to the Constellations, which he chose to hold simultaneously with an exhibition of Tanguy's paintings to underline the connection between the artists. The two had met in 1940 and became friends after Tanguy and his wife Kay Sage moved to Connecticut home not far from the Calders earlier that year. Calder's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in September 1943 and included some Constellations, importantly acknowledged his prominent stature in the art world. At the time, Calder was the youngest artist ever to receive the distinction of a retrospective at the museum. The exhibition effectively positioned Calder as leader among American modernists, and celebrated him one of the few State-side artists with a truly international reputation. The retrospective was well-received by both visitors and critics, and was so popular that the museum extended it through January 1944. With his cosmopolitan background and devotion to abstraction, Calder was exceptional at a time when many in the U.S., particularly those who subscribed to the ideals of the American Scene, were skeptical of outside influences.

Sweeney, the curator of Calder's retrospective at the Modern, claimed that "Calder's most original contribution is his unique enlivening of abstract art by humor" (J. J. Sweeney, Alexander Calder, New York, 1943, p. 8). Created in the midst of the war, works such as Constellation offered humor and liveliness that was particularly welcome. Indeed, the critical response to Calder's retrospective vividly demonstrated the life-affirming resonance that his work had for his wartime audience. As a critic writing for the New York Sun intoned "The present emergency is one of the most terrific that nature has ever experienced and it is only those among us most persuaded of nature's invincibility and power to recover from every rejection she gets at the hands of human beings. [Calder's] exhibition in the Modern Museum contains an astonishing number of proofs that nature never can be entirely thwarted and that even when at the last gasp, as I presume nature is at the moment, she can still supply to poets and to genuine artists the manna which the soul craves and upon which alone the soul thrives" (quoted in J. Marter, Alexander Calder, Cambridge, 1991, p. 203).