Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

PROPERTY BELONGING TO THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO, SOLD TO BENEFIT THE MUSEUM'S ACQUISITION FUND

1898-1976
BRASS IN THE SKY

56 x 101 x 108 in. 142.2 x 256.5 x 274.3 cm.

signed and dated 47

brass hanging mobile

This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number AI5198.

PROVENANCE

Marshall Field's, Chicago (acquired directly from the artist)
Gift to the present owner from the above in 1991

EXHIBITED

Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Education Center, 1999-2004

NOTE

Alexander Calder is renowned for the beauty and craftsmanship of his sculptures, and works on the grand scale of Brass in Sky are a testament to his technical skill, imaginative genius and talent for organic composition. Liberated from the wartime restrictions on the supply of metal, Calder's innovations of the late 1940s and early 1950s in the creation of large-scale sculptures mirrored the post-war boom in prosperity and expansion. Calder was the foremost choice when collectors, architects, museums or public commissions selected an artist, whether for a private sculpture garden or a public space. Brass in the Sky exemplifies Calder's great gift for the perfect marriage between site, material and composition, in its placement as the centerpiece of Marshall Field's restaurant, the Cloud Room, at Chicago Municipal Airport, now known as Chicago Midway Airport.

For his part, Calder reveled in the challenges of harmonizing sculptural design with technical concerns and site-specific parameters. He was above all an inventor of sculptural forms and genres, inspiring the new sculptural terms: "mobile" and "stabile" coined by Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp when they viewed his early work. Calder would adapt these forms to an uncanny variety of materials and scale, ultimately achieving a unity of grand proportions, fluid movement and luminous aesthetics exhibited to full effect in Brass in the Sky.

Jean-Paul Sartre described the amazing potency of Calder's work in his preface to a 1946 exhibition of the artist's work. "Sculpture suggests movement, painting suggests depth or light. A 'mobile' does not 'suggest' anything; it captures genuine living movements and shapes them. 'Mobiles' have no meaning, make you think of nothing but themselves. They are, that is all; they are absolutes." (Exh. Cat. Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder, 1946). Lacking overt subject matter or narrative content, Calder's mobiles interact with the viewer and with its environment in a completely novel and innovative manner, and much of the attraction of the mobiles lies in their inherent physical properties. Yet, despite Sartre's existentialist view of Calder's work as devoid of any relative context, Calder himself would acknowledge influences from the natural world. Leaves, branches, flowers, and animals are all inspirations for some of Calder's abstract yet organic forms, and appear in many of the titles of his sculptures. One of the most enduring themes throughout Calder's oeuvre is the concept of movement in space -- globes, the cosmos, solar systems - most notably with the Constellations. The concept of objects at play within an intricate pattern was appealing to Calder, having particular resonance for the commission and placement of Brass in the Sky with its surrounding environment of flight and air travel.

Calder's choice of brass as the metallic material for his floating elements was particularly fitting due to its reflective surface, eschewing the usual painted sheet metal which rendered his individual elements as discrete volumes of color in space. While the movement of the painted elements was dependent on the air around them and interacted with their three-dimensional space as part of their composition, these brass elements engaged further with their surrounding space by reflecting the lights of the restaurant, the sunlight from the sky, and the movement and headlights of the passing airplanes. Brass also introduced the element of sound into Calder's sculpture, adding the possibilities of musical connotations to his visual minuets of motion. In Brass in the Sky and other hanging mobiles such as Double Gong (1953), Calder introduced smaller elements to strike brass "gongs", bringing tonal harmony to the visual harmony of his mobiles.