Lot 542 D

„Cagey about his formal alliances, Calder showed with diverse groups without ever declaring himself a „member“. Along with Miró and Arp, he could, in general terms, be classified a biomorphic-type abstractionist or Surrealist. That is, shapes and lines that are at once detached from representation yet inevitably relate to phenomena in the world make for the perfect conjunction of abstraction and Surrealism. Crucial to this synthesis is a tenet from abstraction that goes something like this: advanced works of art do not re-present anything at all but simply live in the world, as natural objects do. The completely independent and concrete existence of such things produce an in-the-moment sense of art, heretofore absent in other forms of work. (Mark Rosenthal, Alexander Calder, At the intersection of modernist trends, in: Krystina Gmurzynska und Mathias Rastorfer (ed.), Alexander Calder, “The Modernist”, exhib.cat. Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, Cologne 2005, p.12)