Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder – Red Serpent and His Works on Paper

“For me, the two 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.” Alexander Calder [1]

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] 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 after a long stay in London. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was also a sculptor, and his mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, who studied in Paris at the Julian Academy and at the Sorbonne, was a painter.

His parents discouraged him from becoming an artist, so Calder 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 art: Circus, from 1926 to 1931. This work, made of wires and other found materials, attracted the attention of the Parisian Avant-Garde like Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp.

It was perhaps a meeting with Mondrian in 1930 in Paris that was the biggest artistic breakthrough for Calder: “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. Even the gramophone, which had been piss-coloured, had been repainted red.
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.
This visit gave me a profound shock. A greater shock even than the one I had felt eight years earlier when, off the coast of Guatemala, I had seen the beginning of a blazing sunrise on one side, and the moon that looked like a silver coin on the other.
That one visit gave me the shock that started it all for me.” [3]

Calder’s art was already mature, and his foundation solid. Still, Calder wavered. His art, focused on sculptures since 1926, abruptly changed its course. For two full weeks right after this meeting, he practiced painting. Calder made abstract compositions and was even asked to participate in the Abstraction-Création exhibition. Although Calder got back to his sculptures after these two weeks, this meeting with Mondrian indubitably 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 on 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]

It was not until 1953, during a yearlong stay in Aix-en-Provence, France, that Calder began working on a two-dimensional practice: gouache. [5] His production of gouaches is massive. The artist worked for decades on this medium, side by side with his production of sculptures. In his book on Calder, Michael Gibson analyses them 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, acquired by this Private collection from the Laing Gallery in Toronto during Calder’s exhibition, 12 Calder Gouaches, in October 1965, is a prime example of Calder’s gouaches. Working on a large sheet of wove paper, Calder uses a minimalist colour palette: black ink pools on white paper divided by a red serpentine form above a few yellow and orange suns. This impressive work conveys a strong and joyful presence made by one of the most distinctive artists of his time. The art conservator Jean Lipman said of these gouaches that “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] Maurice Bruzeau, Alexander Calder, A Blacksmith in Town, Carmen Gimenez, Alexander S.C. Rower, Calder: Gravity and Grace, Ed. Phaidon Press., Spain, 2004, p.53.
[2] Tate Gallery, Alexander Calder 1898–1976, Tate. January 1, 1970, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/alexander-calder-848.
[3] Michael Gibson, Calder, (Paris: Universe Books, 1988), 48.
[4] ibid.
[5] Huxley-Parlour Gallery, Alexander Calder: Works on Paper. Exhibition. London: Huxley-Parlour Gallery. Accessed November 7, 2025. https://huxleyparlour.com/exhibitions/alexander-calder-works-on-paper//.
[6] ibid.
[7] Michael Gibson, Calder, (Paris: Universe Books, 1988), 48.