Combining the fluttering grace of the artist’s mobiles with the dramatic grandeur of his stabiles, ‘Crag’ (1974) is a seminal late work that exemplifies the culmination of Calder’s decades-long exploration and synthesis of painterly and sculptural idioms. Standing nearly two metres high, with a two-and-half metre span, ‘Crag’ (1974) is anchored by a fantastical base that is adorned with gently oscillating floating discs. Made from the artist’s signature black-painted sheet metal, steep sloping curves and perforations suggest the geological dimensions –– peaks, valleys and rocky terrains –– and yet the work is entirely nonobjective. It is an exquisite monument to movement, a harmonious union of exuberant spontaneity and steadfast gravitas.

In 1923, at the age of twenty-five, Calder enrolled in a painting course at the Art Students League in New York. While his tutors painted principally in oils, Calder favoured gouache, which he felt was better suited to the spontaneity he sought in his pictures. Indeed, from the 1940s onwards, Calder rarely painted in oils. Yet, Calder’s oil paintings demonstrate a mastery of the medium: the slower process inspired a more deliberate oeuvre, which marries the vibrant colour and inventive composition of his gouaches with the spirit of his visionary sculptures. Painted in 1963, ‘Shapes with Butterfly’ was created in Calder’s studio in Saché, a small village near Tours in the Loire Valley. In 1954 Calder had bought a house there and he immediately set about establishing a small painting studio in a nearby cottage, which he fitted out with whitewashed walls and sealed windows. In this hermetic space Calder worked energetically, painting works that abstracted elements of nature and the landscape around Saché that he found so stimulating.
With its invigorating composition and bold colouration, ‘Shapes with Butterfly’ is amongst the artist’s most accomplished paintings. Employing his signature palette of red, yellow and black, the work pays tribute to Calder’s close relationship with Joan Miró. The artists became friends during Calder’s sojourn in Paris in the late 1920s, and their connection was solidified at Calder’s Connecticut residence where they continued to exchange ideas, reinforcing the resemblance between their styles. It was Miró who influenced Calder away from traditional modes of representation and towards a language of Surrealist abstraction. Another of Calder’s formative influences was Piet Mondrian. In 1930, a visit to Mondrian’s studio turned out to be a transformative experience for Calder. ‘Though I had heard the word ‘modern’ before’, he recalled, ‘I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract’. So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract’. [2] Invoking a visual language that treads the boundary between abstraction and figuration, ‘Shapes with Butterfly’ channels the influence of Mondrian and Miro, while remaining true to Calder’s own personal iconography and intoxicating joie de vivre.

[1] Alexander Calder, quoted in Ruth Wolfe (ed.), Jean Lipman, ‘Calder’s Universe’, Philadelphia PA: Running Press, 1976, p. 82. 2) Ibid., p. 112.