The Red Mobile

The Red Mobile

  • Submitted By: lanem
  • Date Submitted: 11/21/2008 9:53 PM
  • Category: Book Reports
  • Words: 507
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 539

2. Two artists working at the same time as Alexander Calder were, Jules Pascin, a Bulgarian painter and Jean Arp a sculptor, painter and abstract artist.

3. Calder’s sculptures can be broken into three main categories. They are sculptures, wire sculptures and mobile sculptures.

The wire sculptures were his early work. They involved Calder making many different people, animals and objects by bending wires into different positions with either his hands or pliers. Calder’s workshop was full of wire and other bits of pieces. Calder also made a circus for children out of the wire characters he created. The mobile sculptures were his next focus and this involved making the wires able to move be themselves and hang from above. Calder’s final focus was the monumental sculptures that were very abstract and placed in highly visited places like town centres.

4.

Title: Red Mobile
Date: 1956
Materials: Painted sheet metal and metal rods
Size: Unknown
Location: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

The sculpture is a mobile. It is made of metal rods and metal sheets. It is composed of rods stuck together at different angles and some that connect with each other so that there isn’t just one straight rod with metal pieces dangling off it. On the end of the rods there are sheets of red metal which vary in shape but remind me of arrow heads or leaves. The sculpture looks fairly simple compared to some of Alexander Calder’s other works. I’m not sure what inspired Calder to make this but it was in his mobile phase so he was probably just experimenting with different types, shapes and sizes of metal and rods. Alexander uses shape in the sculpture, this is the various shapes of the sheet metal, he uses colour because he could have just used metal that was a chrome or metallic colour, emphasis-we are drawn to the bigger sheets of metal in the centre of the sculpture, pattern- the repeated use of the metal sheets, unity-the mobile looks like it fits together perfectly as if it...

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