By setting sculpture in motion, Alexander Calder revolutionised the artistic imagination of the 20th century. Confronting the medium’s inherited condition as static and grounded, he reimagined it as a vehicle for animating space. This experimentation found its fullest expression in Calder’s suspended mobiles, which became central to his practice from the 1930s until his death in 1976. Produced circa 1958, at the height of the artist’s international acclaim, Little White comprises 14 metal elements suspended from a red wire structure, their forms shaped with an economy that activates the surrounding space. Achieving equilibrium through cantilever and counterbalance, the work is a testament to Calder’s intuitive acuity and poetic intent, entrusting the ambient environment to activate and articulate its composition through motion. Ever shifting, each movement gives rise to a new configuration, enacting a choreography in which design yields to contingency. Formerly in the collection of the artist’s daughter, Little White is an intimate example of Calder’s monochromatic mobiles – many of which belong to major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York – in which he pared back colour to allow motion and spatial balance to take precedence.

Having spent the late 1920s working with wire in a figurative mode, Calder discovered his abstract language during a revelatory visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in Montparnasse, Paris in 1930, an encounter he would later describe as pivotal. Admiring Mondrian’s studio as an immersive artistic environment – where cardboard rectangles amassed on the main wall for compositional experimentation interacted with the architecture of the space and the light filtering through adjacent windows – Calder proposed that the coloured geometries could be made to ‘oscillate’. Mondrian, as Calder recollected, responded with conviction: his paintings were already ‘very fast’ (Alexander Calder, quoted in Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, Pantheon, New York, 1966, p. 113). Seeking a sculptural methodology predicated on kinetics, Calder moved away from figurative wire sculptures and turned to abstraction as a language uniquely suited to articulating the movement and energy of space. While many of his early standing mobiles relied on motors, his hanging constructions utilised the kinetic potential of air, working in concert with the physical laws of balance and inertia, to evoke the rhythms and responsiveness of the natural world. Motion in Calder’s aerial bodies became essential to their composition, operating equal to surface, form and colour in shaping the sculptural whole.

In the autumn of 1953, according to his biographer Jed Perl, Calder exchanged three of his mobiles for a property in Saché, France. From that point until the end of his life, he divided his time between his Roxbury studio in Connecticut and what would become his studio in Saché – a former wagon shed that was renovated by his daughter, Sandra. The pastoral setting proved a vital source of inspiration for Calder, whose mobiles possess a sentience that echoes the elemental motion of the landscape. It was in this rural atelier that photographer Ugo Mulas visited Calder in 1963, documenting a studio densely populated with mobiles in myriad configurations – including an image in which Calder’s hand can be seen gently framing Little White.

Upon acquiring the derelict building, Calder quipped that he would ‘make mobiles of cobwebs and propel them with bats’ – a notion that distils the poetic hybridity of his mature mobiles, such as Little White, where intentional making and nature’s indeterminacy are held in fertile tension (Alexander Calder, quoted in Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years, 1940–76, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020, p.295). As described by Jean Paul-Sartre, Calder’s mobiles ‘are like aquatic plants swaying in a stream; they are like the petals of the Mimosa pudica, the legs of a decerebrate frog or gossamer threads caught in an updraft’; ‘For each of them Calder establishes a general fated course of movement, then abandons them to it’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les Mobiles de Calder,’ Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, Galerie Louis Carré, Paris, 1946; translation courtesy Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre, Seagull, Calcutta, 2008).

The 1950s and 1960s proved a pivotal period in Calder's career; he represented the United States at the 1952 Venice Biennale and realised several major public commissions, including a monumental mobile installed at Idlewild airport (later renamed John F. Kennedy International) in New York in 1957. In 1964, a major retrospective was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, featuring numerous large-scale mobiles displayed throughout its iconic rotunda. The following year, Calder designed sets for Eppur Si Muove, a ballet choreographed by Joseph Lazzini and performed at Opéra de Marseille, underscoring Calder’s growing renown as a sculptor of kinetic expression across both stage and exhibition.

While Calder’s large-scale commissions were executed with the assistance of commercial fabricators, his more intimately scaled works – Little White among them – were made by his own hand, preserving Calder’s personal touch through an instinctive and improvisational process. These smaller mobiles reveal more experimental compositions, often offering moments of unexpected lyricism. Little White distils these qualities with particular clarity, its delicate constellation of elements moving with a balletic rhythm and, under certain conditions, casting shadows that seem to dance. Attuned to the hand and mind of the artist, the work offers a meditation on how motion itself can be held, suspended and made to speak.