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Alexander Calder
American, 1898-1976

The Yellow Dot, 1959
Painted Metal
12 2/4 in. h

SBMA, Presented to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art by Mrs. K.W. Tremain
1972.61.2



Undated photo of Calder

RESEARCH PAPER

“Sandy the man, has a heart as big as Niagara. Calder the artist had the force of the ocean. He gives pleasure, that’s his big secret.” Indeed, pleasure is what we feel when viewing Alexander “Sandy” Calder’s stabile-mobile the “Yellow Dot”.

Created in 1959 amidst a time of prosperity and optimism, the “Yellow Dot” brings to life a dry definition of a stabile, “an abstract sculpture or construction”2, and a mobile, “an abstract configuration of articulated parts, free to describe a movement of it’s own”.3 The viewer becomes drawn into the stabile, becoming one with it, balancing a universe of primary colors, always in motion. Calder’s use of crude materials, always something he could twist and bend, his respect for the elementary principles of machines developed through his engineering training, and his use of black and white and primary colors, never hiding the point of balance, makes the viewer feel a part of his universe of balance, color and humor.

The “Yellow Dot” was presented to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1972 by Mrs. K.W. Tremain. In 1983, it was sent to conservationists to have an accumulation of grime and rust removed and to have the bare spots repainted to match the original colors.

Calder was born into an artistic environment in Lawnton, Pennsylvania on June 22, 1898. His Grandfather, Alexander S. Calder sculpted the 37-foot high statue of William Penn which tops the Philadelphia City Hall Tower. His father, a successful classical sculptor, frequently used Sandy as a model as did his mother, a portrait painter.

By the time young Sandy was 5 years old, he was making wood and wire figures, and at 10, he had his first workshop in a wooden-floored tent. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey in 1919 where he excelled in mechanical drawing, descriptive geometry, drafting and applied kinetics. In 1923, at age 25, he enrolled in the Art Students League and shortly thereafter landed his first job as an artist with the “National Police Gazette” covering boxing matches and the circus. This assignment would influence much of his work.

In 1926, Calder began his travels between the U.S. and Paris. In Paris, he staged performances of a miniature circus, for which he sent out linoleum cut invitations. There he met many artists and critics. In 1926, Calder met his future wife, Louisa Cushing James, whom he married in 1931. During the next few years, he continued to exhibit his “circus” and moved to Paris where he met some of his contemporaries: Joan Miro, Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian. After meeting Miro and Mondrian, Calder’s work changed 180 degrees. Mondrian inspired him to make abstract shapes move. Calder began playing with the movement of abstract, primary colored sculpture, adopting many of Miro’s shapes and his abstract surrealism based on organic forms. Calder, however, never really allied himself with any movements but maintained common interests with other artists through friendships.Because of the political climate in Europe, the Calders returned to the United States and purchased a colonial farm in Roxbury, Connecticut. It is there that their first daughter was born in 1935 and the second in 1939.

During the war years, Calder exhibited his jewelry and created mobiles from wood, due to the metal shortage. After the war, he renewed his contacts in Europe, exhibiting his large mobiles in Paris and eventually bought a home in Sache, France. Until his death in 1976, Calder exhibited extensively around the world, receiving critical acclaim where he went.

The “Yellow Dot” was probably created while he was at the Roxbury home. The piece consists of various sized circles in the mobile, attached to each other and the stabile with thin metal wires. The stabile is a triangularly shaped, two-dimensional piece cut to appear three-dimensional. The shape of the stabile leads the eye to a black triangle balanced on the stabile, which in turn leads the viewer to the mobile. The texture is smooth and the lines continuous, never braking but constantly changing, and the point of balance always obvious. The red, white, black, and yellow colors do not compete, neither do they blend. Red is the predominant color, that of the stabile.

The “Yellow Dot” is typical of Calder’s work, showing a youthful, inventive American spirit, it’s humor, instability and anxiety. The work reflects the American heritage of coarseness, strength and individuality and is highly inventive in a technical sense, characteristic of the Eisenhower/Kennedy transition years. The “Yellow Dot”, like much of Calder’s work, characterizes the art of balance as well as balanced art, revealing what it’s like to live in a modern, mobile, miniature, floating world. “The first inspiration I ever had was the cosmos, the planetary system. That’s where the whole thing comes from.”4

Calder was a man of few words, happy by nature with earthy humor intended to amuse not embarrass. He had a restless and nervous energy but was always dignified and outwardly calm. He worked seven days a week and had an insatiable interest in fresh patterns of order. He had many friends who remember him as a generous host. Calder contributed posters, works and money for cultural, social and political causes; he was an inventive craftsman rather than a conventional fine arts practitioner; and a hoarder of scraps of material that might come in handy someday in sculpture. He was, like many persons of genius, a simple man with a love of life and of his work.

Sculpture is an art of space in which the key word is “illusion”. Calder has given sculpture a new dimension. As the only artist who invented and then practiced an art form, he will always be know as the artist who made sculpture move. He did not invent motion but found a place for it in his art.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council
by Pamela Simpson, 1987
Website preparer: Deanna Major, February 2004