Alexander Calder – Quatre lances, 1964
Calder with Quatre lances (1964) at Etablissements Biémont, Tours, France, 1967.
Photograph by Tony Vaccaro. Photo courtesy of Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, New York
© 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
On December 4, 2024, Alexander Calder’s Quatre lances will be inaugurated on Place Princesse Gabriella in Mareterra.
History
In 1964, Calder was commissioned to create a large standing mobile for a reflecting pool at Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Created by Calder in the Loire Valley, the sculpture ended up being too large for its intended spot at Fondation Maeght and wasn’t installed.
In 1966, the work was acquired by the Principality of Monaco in response to the wishes of Princess Grace. Later that year, it was inaugurated on the Centennial Hall’s esplanadein the presence of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace alongside Calder and his wife, Louisa.
Restoration
Quatre lances was installed on the Centennial Hall’s esplanade in Monaco in 1966. The mobile elements were immediately damaged due to harsh Mediterranean winds, and the work was sent back to France for treatment. In 1985, construction on the Grimaldi Forum forced the sculpture to be permanently moved from the esplanade. In the early 1990s, it was installed in Fontvieille. The conversation about restoring Quatre lances began in 2006, when the sculpture was put under the care of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.
In 2007, the work was deinstalled and placed in the NMNM’s storage facility in Nice. Following initial discussions in 2008, an agreement between the Calder Foundation and the NMNM was signed in 2011 concerning the restoration and proper presentation of the work.
After the idea of installing Quatre lances in Mareterra was first proposed in June 2018, L’Anse du Portier and the Calder Foundation formed a partnership to bring the project to fruition. While Quatre lances was never placed in the spot for which it was made, the installation at Mareterra realizes two of the artist’s intentions: for the work to be sited above a reflecting pool and experienced in the context of architecture. Quatre lances will remain under the care of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco upon its inauguration.
Collaboration with Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano has a long history with Calder, starting with the immense project he designed for the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Piano completely transformed the Palazzo a Vela, a multipurpose building in Torino, to house more than 450 works by Calder. The resulting exhibition, Calder: Mostra retrospettiva, ran from 2 July–25 September 1983. More recently, Piano designed the 2018 exhibition Calder Stories at his Centro Botín in Santander, Spain.
The Quatre lances project began with a meeting between Calder Foundation President Alexander S. C. Rower and Piano, followed by close collaboration between the Foundation, RPBW, and L’Anse du Portier teams. During Rower’s initial conversations with Piano, he urged the architect to create a “single-artwork museum” for Quatre lances, closely based on the artist’s original conception.
“It has been an extraordinarily rewarding process to collaborate on this project at Mareterra with Renzo, whose wisdom about space resonates deeply with my grandfather’s work. Open to the sky, this single-artwork museum for Quatre lances brings Calder’s original intent back to life: a synthesis of art, water, and place.”
About Quatre lances
Quatre lances was conceived as a site-specific work, in which the reflecting pool constituted an integral part of the sculpture. At first glance, it appears to be made of unpainted stainless-steel rods and mobile elements, all painted black. Four of these elements are horizontal and seem to float just above the water. Upon closer inspection, one discovers that they reflect colors on the water’s surface from their undersides. Calder was very interested in creating artworks that responded to a specific place. In an interview published in 1962, he said “I find that everything I do, if it is made for a particular spot, is more successful.”[1] He also felt strongly that his outdoor works should be installed in relation to architecture: “Most architects and town planners are bent on placing my objects in front of trees or greenery. They are making a tremendous mistake. My mobiles and stabiles must be put in open spaces, like city squares, or in front of modern buildings.”[2]
One of the most important aspects of Quatre lances is its relationship to water, an idea that preoccupied Calder for much of his artistic career. In the late 1930s, he conceptualized a water ballet for the Consolidated Edison Company pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Calder detailed his plan for a five-minute ballet that included several acts of water shooting out from nozzles in a basin in front of the pavilion in a variety of choreographies. Although water jets were installed around the pavilion, the work was never executed. In 1954, the architect Eero Saarinen commissioned a fountain from Calder to be installed within a twenty-two-acre artificial lake in front of his General Motors Technical Center building in Warren, Michigan. Calder conceptualized an ephemeral work called Water Ballet, building on his idea from the late 1930s. Two years later, Calder was commissioned to make The Whirling Ear for the 1958 Brussels Universal and International Exhibition. Calder placed his large-scale motorized standing mobile in an oval pool next to Edward Durell Stone’s United States Pavilion, surrounded by jets of water. Near the end of his life in 1972, Calder created the monumental stabile Stegosaurus for the Alfred E. Burr Memorial Mall in Hartford, Connecticut, to stand over a circular fountain. Quatre lances is part of this important lineage of Calder’s engagement with water in the context of his large-scale public sculpture.
Though the sculpture is titled Quatre lances, it is important to note that Calder didn’t prescribe meaning to his artworks through their titles. In 1932, he said of an early standing mobile: “This has no utility and no meaning. It is simply beautiful. It has a great emotional effect if you understand it. Of course if it meant anything it would be easier to understand, but it would not be worthwhile.”[3] His sculptures are nonobjective, titled after the fact of creation, often based on vague associations of form.
Alexander Calder
Calder (1898–1976) utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. Born in a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, he began by developing a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting wire, he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. Coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931, the word mobile refers to both “motion” and “motive” in French. Some of the earliest mobiles moved by a system of motors, although these mechanics were virtually abandoned as Calder developed mobiles that responded to air currents, light, humidity, and human interaction. He also created stationary abstract works that Jean Arp dubbed stabiles.
From the 1950s onward, Calder turned his attention to international commissions and increasingly devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale from bolted steel plate. Some of these major commissions include: .125, for the New York Port Authority in John F. Kennedy Airport (1957); Spirale, for UNESCO in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Trois disques, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); El Sol Rojo, for the Olympic Games in Mexico City (1968); La Grande vitesse, which was the first public artwork to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973).
Major retrospectives of Calder’s work during his lifetime were held at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts (1938); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1943–44); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964–65); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1964); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (1965); Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France (1969); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976–77). Calder died in New York in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight.
[1] Calder, quoted in Katharine Kuh, “Alexander Calder,” in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York and Evanston, Illinois: Harper & Row, 1962), 42.
[2] Calder, quoted in Maurice Bruzeau, Calder à Saché (Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 1975), 15.
[3] Calder, quoted in “Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It in Motion,” New York World-Telegram, June 11, 1932.