Little Yellow Panel, ca. 1936, Alexander Calder, 1898-1976, sheet metal, wood, rod, wire, string, and paint, 40 3/4 × 12 × 14 in., Promised gift of Jon and Mary Shirley, © 2023 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Nicholas Shirley, Brightwood Photos
AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT
NARRATOR:
Little Yellow Panel is part of a series of works from the mid-1930s that explored the concept of ‘paintings in motion’.
The work blurs the lines between painting and sculpture: viewed from the front, its various elements appear to be positioned against a defined yellow background. But these elements can be moved around – so the composition changes.
Artist Kennedy Yanko.
KENNEDY YANKO:
What I like about it is it's perfect. It's a perfect piece. Where the colors show up: they’re placed perfectly with just the right amount of randomness. It's ironic. It's calling upon all these different things. It captures, you know, an entrance into a more minimal thought of color and form. And it also holds his curiosity. And this really feels kind of like a pivotal moment of clarity.
NARRATOR:
This was an intense period of innovation for Calder. In 1930, he had visited the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian. Calder was excited by the way the older artist had arranged his studio: Mondrian had pinned rectangles of colored cardboard to the walls, as he experimented with different compositions. For Calder, the whole space became an installation.
Following this visit, he made his first wholly abstract compositions.
It was also at this time that he invented the kinetic sculptures we know as mobiles. It was his friend the French artist Marcel Duchamp who suggested the term. Alexander S.C. Rower.
ALEXANDER S.C. ROWER:
He suggested it because in French the word mobile: it refers not only to motion, but it also means your motivation or your motive – Calder’s motivation, Calder’s motions, Calder’s motives. It was like that. It was a pun.