Displaying items by tag: Calder Foundation

One of Alexander Calder’s largest and most complex mobiles is to be shown outside Brazil for the first time this week after being restored by his grandson, Alexander Rower. Black Widow (around 1948) will be hung in its own space as the finale of the exhibition Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture (11 November-3 April 2016) at Tate Modern in London—the largest show of Calder’s work ever held in the UK.

Rower, the head of the Calder Foundation in New York, is on a mission to restore as many sculptures as possible.

The first exhibition of works by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is due to open in Russia next month at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. "Alexander Calder: Retrospective" (June 8 - August 30) includes 52 works drawn from the New York-based Calder Foundation, along with several key pieces on loan from private collections based in Russia.

“Remarkably, there have been very few exhibitions with Calder’s work in Russia,” says Alexander Rower, Calder’s grandson and president of the Calder Foundation.

Alexander Calder's abstract works revolutionized modern sculpture and made him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20^th century. In collaboration with the Calder Foundation, this exhibition brings together 40 of the artist's mobiles (kinetic metal works) and stabiles (dynamic monumental sculptures) to explore how Alexander Calder introduced the visual vocabulary of the French Surrealists into the American vernacular.

An unsigned doodle of a craggy, mustachioed face that turned up at auction a few weeks ago has been identified as the product of a famous circle of friends.

The Calder Foundation in Manhattan paid about $4,800 for the drawing at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in Thomaston, Me.; the catalog had described it as a portrait of the French artist Fernand Léger by his friend Alexander Calder. But the foundation was wary at first, since the market has become treacherous.

A necklace by the American sculptor Alexander Calder, which was purchased at a flea market for $15 in 2005, will be sold at Christie’s this fall. The brass necklace from 1938 is expected to bring between $200,000 and $300,000.

Philadelphia resident Norma Ifill spotted the rare necklace while she was browsing a local flea market. She was drawn to the piece’s tribal aesthetic but it wasn’t until she visited a Calder jewelry exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum that she realized she had a true treasure in her possession. Ifill spoke with the exhibition’s curator and later took the necklace to the Calder Foundation in New York, where her find was deemed a genuine Calder. She also learned that the piece was once on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

The necklace will be offered on September 26, 2013 at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art auction.

Remember Picasso’s electrician in the south of France, who claimed that the artist gave him 271 artworks? He was indicted last summer after the Picasso estate accused him of stealing the items. Now a similar case is being reported in the region around Tours, where a retired man says that Alexander Calder gave him nine small mobiles when he lived and worked there in the 1970s. The Calder Foundation has accused him not of stealing the works, but of counterfeiting them. The mobiles — which, if authentic, could be worth €2 million ($2.75 million) — were seized by French authorities and the foundation has filed suit against the man for forgery.

According to La Nouvelle République, which broke the story, the man, whose name has not been released, claims to have helped Calder with the technical aspects of some of his sculptures between 1969 and 1975, when the artist lived in the town of Saché. At this time, in addition to making small mobiles, Calder produced some of his monumental steel works at the Biémont factory in Tours (including “Bent Propeller,” commissioned for 7 World Trade Center and destroyed in the attacks of September 11). Calder, who died in 1976 at the age of 78, was very friendly with the townspeople, according to La Nouvelle République, and often gave “gouaches or small mobiles to certain residents who did him favors.”