Floor 5: Alexander Calder: QR Code 527

Wall Text

1953
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000

Double Gong consists of seventeen interconnected elements, including two brass plates, or “gongs,” that are struck by red mallets at random intervals. Calder had long disputed the idea that visual art should be silent and unmoving, as seen by his boisterous performance pieces of _Cirque Calder _(1926-31), his miniature handmade circus. Here, the sound is relatively peaceful. Commissioned for the seaside home of a notable Venezuelan art critic, Double Gong was designed to move gracefully and make music in the ocean breeze.

Wall Text

1951
Painted steel wire and rod, glass, plastic, wood, and string
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995

The shimmering reflections and vibrant shadows cast by the glass in this mobile demonstrate Calder’s ability to achieve unexpected results from humble materials. This is one of a dozen hanging fish mobiles the artist made during and after World War II using colored glass and other found items. Although Calder generally made abstract work after 1930, he occasionally created works like this that more directly refer to a figure. Fish were a favorite subject, going back to his wire sculptures of 1929 (for instance see Aquarium, opposite).

Wall Text

1957
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1982

Double Mushroom doesn’t actually move, yet it suggests movement with its bold, curving forms. Calder called such works “stabiles,” meaning stationary counterparts to his mobiles. In the late 1930s, he began creating large-scale stabiles using plates of sheet metal bolted together, often painted a uniform, matte black to absorb light and amply their form for the viewer. In his later decades, the stabiles grew even larger, as cities commissioned them as public artworks. _Double Mushroom _is comparatively modest in size, but at over eight feet tall, it still has a commanding presence.

Wall Text

1976
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2002

The shapes in this small mobile—made only months before Calder’s death at age seventy-eight—recall one of the original touchpoints for his art. In 1922, while sailing off the coast of Guatemala, Calder’s experience of simultaneously seeing the rising sun to the east and the setting moon to the west left him with “a lasting sensation of the solar system.” Here, atypically, the artist represents actual celestial bodies, including an anthropomorphic sun. In general, Calder found inspiration for his abstract mobiles not in nature’s observable forms but in its magnitudes and unseen energies.

Wall Text

1969
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993

Wall Text

1951
Metal, wood, thread, and paint with oil on canvas mounted on wood
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1994

This object is one of a group of four works that Calder called “towers.” Each work consists of an open wire structure, in most cases projecting from the wall, that supports a variety of elements. Closely related to his earlier wall-mounted “constellations” nearby, the towers showcase the artist’s ability to build physical structures from lines of wire. This tower almost acts as a retrospective of Calder’s life’s work, from the small abstract painting referred to in the title, to examples of wood carving, to a delicate hanging mobile that moves easily on air currents.

Wall Text

1949
Metal, paint, and string

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008

Wall Text

ca. 1940
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999

Wall Text

1943
Wood, wire, and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999

Bright organic forms on long wires seem to burst off the red block on the wall and into space. This work is part of a series of painted wood and wire “constellations”—so named by curator James Johnson Sweeney and artist Marcel Duchamp—that Calder began making during World War II, when sheet metal was scarce. The sculpture suggests energetic movement and dynamic pathways that extend beyond its physical boundaries.

Wall Text

1943
Metal, wood, paint, and mechanical elements
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995

Notice how the mechanical components that drive the pendulums’ movements are visible behind the wooden planks. This is a rare example of a motorized mobile from the 1940s; Calder mostly avoided controlled motion in favor of unpredictable movements generated by wind. He was first inspired to embrace abstraction while visiting modernist painter Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930. Struck by the colorful cardboard rectangles adorning a wall, Calder suggested making them oscillate. Mondrian objected, but Calder soon began working out in sculptural form.

Quattro Pendulati is activated Friday through Tuesday at 11:30 a.m.

Wall Text

1929
Wire and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995

In works like this portrait of Hans Cürlis—a German filmmaker who documented Calder during the artist’s 1929 visit to Berlin—the artist shaped coils of metal wire into exaggerated likenesses of his subjects. The “three-dimensional line drawings,” as he called them, have the fluid and spontaneous quality of pencil sketches but operate in space, where they become dynamic and shape-shift depending on the viewer’s angle. With their delicate, spring-like forms, Calder’s massless wire sculptures seem like they might move. _Aquarium _is one of two fishbowl-themed works from 1929 in which the artist first introduced actual movement to his works—in this case, activated by a lever.

Wall Text

1929
Wire
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998

Wall Text

1929
Graphite on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998

Wall Text

1953
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998

Wall Text

1948
Aluminum, steel, and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2007

In this standing mobile, delicate pairs of white forms extend into space on a diminishing scale, giving the sense of progression over time. Suspended by thin wire supports that flutter with air movements, these organic shapes evoke natural forces. As Calder described, “You see nature and then you try to emulate it. . . . My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses, and movement.”

Wall Text

1945
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2001

Wall Text

1962
Metal and paint
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989