
Not on display
- Artist
- Alexander Calder 1898–1976
- Medium
- Aluminium and steel wire
- Dimensions
- Object: 1111 × 1283 × 1283 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 1962
- Reference
- T00541
Summary
Alexander Calder’s Antennae with Red and Blue Dots c.1953 is a hanging sculpture that extends just over a metre in each direction and is designed to be displayed suspended from its upper steel wire. Four large and four smaller downward-hanging aluminium plates resembling fins comprise the main body of the sculpture, while rising upwards are four antenna-like wires surmounted with a yellow, blue, red, and white aluminium disk respectively, as well as three that support small black fins. Although Calder’s mobile sculptures are not inert and their motion does not follow a set pattern of movement, there are specific rules for connecting the elements. The Calder Foundation provided the following instructions for Antennae with Red and Blue Dots: ‘the smallest black elements should hang as far from the largest black elements as possible, not directly beneath them’. (Arminée Chahbazian, Calder Foundation, letter to Tate curator Michela Parkin, 12 June 1995, Tate Acquisition File, Alexander Calder.)
After training as a mechanical engineer, Calder began to make animated animals and people in wood and wire in 1926, creating works such as the circus that he named Cirque Calder 1926–31 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Living in Paris in 1931, he joined the group Abstraction-Création and started making sculptures which could be moved by hand or by small electric motors. He then started to make the forms for which he is best known, namely his mobiles – suspended networks of wires and painted forms that could be set in motion by air currents. Mobile c.1932 (Tate L01686) is an earlier construction that contains several of the same fin-like forms and primary colours that are seen in Antennae with Red and Blue Dots.
When hung, Antennae with Red and Blue Dots experiences constant shifts in position and might not always resemble static photographs of it fully extended. This was part of Calder’s intention for his sculptures, and in 1932 he wrote:
Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a fleeting ‘moment’, but a physical bond between the varying elements in life.
(Quoted in Borchardt-Hume 2015, p.219.)
Curator Penelope Curtis noted the performative elements of Calder’s sculpture in relation to the title of his retrospective Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture at Tate Modern, London, in 2015:
‘Performing Sculpture’ clearly has a double sense and perhaps both meanings can be applied to the work of Alexander Calder. On the one hand it is a category of sculpture that performs; on the other it is a state of being, an act of transformation, a moment in which the sculpture become sculptural.
(Penelope Curtis, ‘Performance or Post-Performance’, in Borchardt-Hume 2015, p.14.)
Calder’s works invite dynamic interaction between artwork and viewer, performing sculpture through an investigation of space and motion.
Further reading
‘Calder’s Work’, online catalogue raisonné, Calder Foundation, New York, undated, http://www.calder.org/, accessed 17 June 2016.
Joan M. Martin, Alexander Calder, Cambridge 1991.
Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2015, reproduced p.206.
Hana Leaper
June 2016
Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
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Display caption
DOES COLOUR HELP YOU SEE SHAPES OR MOVEMENT?
Alexander Calder was fascinated with making art that changed shape as it moved slowly in the air. He attached together delicately balanced groups of objects that he suspended from the ceiling. One of his friends, the French artist Marcel Duchamp invented the term ‘mobile’ to describe these works. So
Calder invented the mobile. To keep things simple he used mostly black, white and the primary colours of red, blue and yellow. Here, the colours of the small discs help us trace their movement against the black shapes below.
‘Just as one can compose colours, or forms, so one can compose motions.’
Start Gallery caption, 2016
Gallery label, July 2017
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Catalogue entry
Alexander Calder 1898-1976
T00541 Antennae with Red and Blue Dots
1960
Not inscribed
Hanging mobile, sheet alumium and steel wire, dimensions variable, ht. 43 3/4 (111) maximum horizontal extension 50 1/2 (128.2)
Purchased from the artist (Knapping Fund and Grant-in-Aid) 1962
Exh:
Bewogen Beweging, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March-April 1961 (among 43-63, twenty-one unlisted mobiles by Calder); Rorelse i Konsten, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May-September 1961 (46) as 'Antennerna (aluminium)'; Bevœgelses-Udstillingen, Lousiana Museum, Humlebaek, September-October 1961 (37) as 'Antennerne (aluminium)'; Alexander Calder, Tate Gallery, July-August 1962 (not in catalogue)
Repr:
Michael Compton, Optical and Kinetic Art
(London 1967), pl.24; Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art since 1945
(London 1969), pl.149
The artist said in 1963 that, as far as he could remember, this was made in 1960 and was one of his works shown in the exhibition of kinetic art at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1961. Installation photographs of the Stedelijk Museum exhibition show it hanging in one of the rooms, and it has been confirmed from the exhibition records that the mobiles lent by Calder to Amsterdam, and unlisted in the catalogue, included one called 'Les Antennes'. This was presumably the same as catalogue nos.46 and 37 in the subsequent showings at Stockholm and Humlebaek.
Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.93, reproduced p.93
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