Alexander Calder: ‘Red Serpent’ and Works on Paper

For me, the essential, fundamental colours are black and white. On one side, I put red, and on the other, blue. Close to blue, a little yellow and orange. Not very much. Other colours don’t interest me.[1] – Alexander Calder.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was an American sculptor known for his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents, that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static “stabiles”, and his monumental public sculptures.[2]

Family and friends

Calder was born into a family of artists. Alexander Milne Calder (his grandfather), born in Scotland in 1846, was a famous sculptor of his time who settled in Philadelphia in 1898. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was also a sculptor, and his mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, who studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne, was a painter.

Calder’s parents discouraged him from becoming an artist, so he enrolled at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915, to study mechanical engineering. He put his new qualifications to practice for a few years, but soon enrolled at the Art Students League in New York. Following in his mother’s footsteps, he moved to Paris in 1926 to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In Paris, he created his first unique body of work, Circus (1926-1931). This work, constructed of wires and other found materials, attracted the attention of the Parisian avant-garde, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp.

It was perhaps a meeting with Piet Mondrian in 1930 in Paris that facilitated Calder’s most noteworthy artistic breakthrough. He recalled:

“Mondrian lived at 26, rue du Départ. … His studio was very exciting. Light came in from the left and the right, and the solid walls between the windows were lined with daring experiments … performed with coloured cardboard rectangles held together with tacks. I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make all these rectangles oscillate together. And he replied very seriously, No, it’s not necessary, my painting is already going very fast. … One visit gave me the shock that started it all for me.”[3]

Calder’s art was already mature, and his foundation solid. Still, he wavered. Focused on sculpture since 1926, he abruptly changed course. For two full weeks after his meeting with Mondrian, he painted abstract compositions and was even asked to participate in the Abstraction-Création exhibition. Although Calder returned to sculpture after these two weeks, this meeting inarguably impacted his colour palette:

“Another borrowing from Mondrian is Calder’s predilection for the primary colours red, blue and yellow, which, along with white and black, are used almost exclusively, both in his mobiles and stabiles and in the many gouaches, posters, carpets, etc., that he went on to produce.

Colouring a sculpture is hardly surprising today, but it was a surprising innovation at a time when ‘sculpture’ meant bronze, marble or wood. This new orientation ‘freed up’ a great deal of creative potential and Calder began to produce an astonishing variety of abstract works, some in wire, others incorporating pieces of wood painted with wire and, finally, mobiles.”[4]

A Year in Aix-en-Provence

“It was not until 1953, during a year-long stay in Aix-en-Provence, France, that Calder began working two-dimensionally in gouache.”[5] His production of gouaches is massive. The artist worked in this medium for decades, concurrent with his production of sculpture. In his book on Calder, Michael Gibson analyses the paintings as follows:

“The gouaches, too, are painted, with a few exceptions, in the restricted range of colours that Calder had chosen for himself after his meeting with Mondrian. These works, like the rest of his output, display the same acute sense of simplification of form. … They show a certain affinity with popular forms of language, thought, parade or dance, full of wit and verve. … The gouaches, like the drawings and mobiles, are sometimes geometric exercises, sometimes schematizations with a touch of humour. … There are suns and moons in keeping with popular conventions (Soleil noir, lune blanche, 1968), casual circus scenes and comically geometric faces (Aix, 1953), as well as puddles of colour that Calder would let drip by tilting the sheet. … Others, finally, are variations on circles, spirals, prized shapes, erratic blocks and rainbows.”[6]

Red Serpent, 1965

Red Serpent, 1965, acquired from the Laing Gallery in Toronto during Calder’s exhibition “12 Calder Gouaches” in October 1965, is a prime example of his works on paper. Working on a large sheet of wove paper, he used a minimalist colour palette: black ink pools on white paper divided by a red serpentine form above yellow and orange suns. This impressive work conveys a strong and joyful presence created by one of the most inventive artists of his time. Jean Lipman, a friend of Calder and Editor of Art in America magazine from 1940 to 1970, said of these gouaches: “The best of them, joyfully conceived, solidly structured and brilliantly coloured, make up a body of work that is among the most remarkable of our time.”[7]

[1] Bruzeau, Maurice, Alexander Calder, A blacksmith in Town, in Gimenez, Carmen, Alexander S.C. Rower (n.d.), Calder: Gravity and Grace, Ed. Phaidon Press, Spain, 2004, p.53
[2] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/alexander-calder-848
[3] Gibson, Michael, Calder, Ed. Hazan, Paris, 1988, p.48
[4] ibid.
[5] https://huxleyparlour.com/exhibitions/alexander-calder-works-on-paper/
[6] ibid.
[7] Michael Gibson, Calder, Ed. Hazan, Paris, 1988, p.48

We are pleased to offer Red Serpent in our Major Canadian and International Fine Art auction, online November 7 – 20, 2025.

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ABOUT THE AUCTION

Our major fall Fine Art auction includes important works by Group of Seven artists Lawren Harris, A.J. Casson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and A.Y. Jackson, a rare Jock Macdonald abstract, early Kazuo Nakamura paintings, Louis-Philippe Hébert’s major sculpture Algonquins, as well as striking works by Sorel Etrog and Walter Yarwood. International highlights include two exceptionally rare sketches by Sir Edward John Poynter for the Maison Dieu’s stained-glass windows in Dover, Alexander Calder’s Red Serpent, along with works by David Diao, Jules Olitski, and Gene Davis.

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