GALERIE DE LA PRÉSIDENCE

Located opposite the Elysée Palace, the Galerie de la Présidence, founded in 1971, by Françoise Chibret-Plaussu, is now run by her daughter Florence.

We offer a selection of masters from the nineteenth to the twentieth century including Boudin, Buffet, Cross, Derain, Fautrier, Dufy, Giacometti, Gromaire, Hélion, Maillol, Marquet, Matisse, Poliakoff, Signac, Veira da Silva, Vlaminck and Vuillard.

We have mounted exhibitions devoted to Marquet, Vlaminck, Signac, Cross, Hélion, Maillol as to well as to Marcel Gromaire (producing the catalogue raisonné of his works in oil).

The gallery regularly works with leading museums, notably in 2016, on the Boudin retrospective held at the Musée d’Art moderne André-Malraux in Le Havre and on the Marquet exhibition at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Provenance

• Nicholas Guppy Collection, London (a gift from the artist in 1976)
• Private Collection, Istanbul
• Private Collection, Paris

Exhibition

« Calder », Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, July – August 1980, n°41

This work is registered in the Calder Foundation under n° A09277.

This drawing belonged to Nicholas Guppy. Botanist and ethnologist, a great friend of Calder.

He was also interested in art, so much so that he opened a gallery in London. He shared Calder’s great sensitivity to the elements, particularly the aquatic environment. Our painting is reminiscent of the seabed: gently agitated seaweed swaying in the currents.

Alexander Calder is an artist born in the United States in 1898. He came to Paris in 1926 and was part of the Abstraction-Création group that promoted non-figurative art with Delaunay, Arp and Hélion among others. His meeting with Mondrian in 1930 was capital. He was fascinated by abstraction, he added this movement to his work and built animated sculptures from 1931, which Marcel Duchamp baptized ‘mobiles’.

He was thus the first to place movement in sculpture and to detach himself from the academic tradition, long before American abstract expressionism. During the summer of 1953 – the date of our painting – Calder moved close to Aix-en- Provence with his family. He developed a real passion for gouaches.

These gouaches, works of art in their own right, are part of the continuity of his work as a sculptor, and they share his minimalist and joyfully colorful language. Calder succeeded in reaching a new modernity incorporating joie de vivre, freshness, simplicity and great freedom.

Certain themes recur regularly using primary colours: the cosmos with the sun, moon and stars.

It was a new language, more immediate and more direct, breaking with European tradition and borrowed from American modernity.