On Wednesday, June 6th, 2018, PIASA will present its Editions sale : prints, illustrated books, and multiples. Amongst the lots up for sale will be works by Picasso, Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, as well as a rare ‘Spider’ carpet by Calder, whose cartoon was created for Marie Cuttoli and the Lucie Weill-Seligmann gallery.
Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Araignée - 1972
Alexander Calder began his career almost accidentally; his passion for the circus drew him to the creation of figurines, a tent, characters from string, cork, fabric and wire. The success of his first ‘models’ led him to develop what came to be known as ‘Le Cirque de Calder’. These tamers, acrobats, and especially animals remained an inspiration throughout his career. But, more so even than lions, horses and elephants, spiders fed his inspiration. The arachnidan motif is a recurring theme for Calder, as early as the 1930s in mobiles, and up to the end of his life: the work presented by PIASA is dated 1972, four years ahead of his death.
If Louise Bourgeois explores the theme of spiders in order to emphasize their maternal virtues, their patience and meticulousness (as demonstrated by the monumental Maman - ‘Mother’ - sculpture shown at Bilbao’s Guggenheim), Calder appreciates the movement they evoke. Many of his mobiles are named ‘Spider’: the arachnid is, by nature, an ideal model for the artist’s moving sculptures whose members and spindles are suspended and articulated in the air, as if at the tip of a thread or on a web. Jean Paul Sartre describes them thusly: “They are both sounding boards and traps. Some, like a spider, dangle from threads”... The patterns weaved on the carpet sold by PIASA evoke this equilibrium, this fluidity, the movement of spiders, echoing the shapes found in the artist’s mobiles.
Other distinctive aspect of Calder’s work, the wool used for this carpet is a bright red. Fond of black, white and primary colors, he claims to have imagined the concept of the mobile by attempting to put Mondrian’s paintings in movement.
"Black and white are first—then red is next… It’s really just for differentiation, but I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red. I often wish I’d been a fauve in 1905."
This ‘Spider’ carpet is also reminiscent, through its theme and color, of the ‘Red Spider’ stabile at La Défense, commissioned by the city in 1974 and completed in 1976, the year of the artist’s death.
