Art Market
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, even as Calder’s international acclaim was growing, his works were still not highly sought after, and when they sold, it was often for relatively little money. A copy of a Pierre Matisse sales ledger in the foundation’s files shows that only a few pieces in the 1941 show found buyers, one of whom, Solomon R. Guggenheim, paid all of $233.34 — or about $3,500 in today’s money — for a work. (The Museum of Modern Art had bought its first Calder in 1934 for $60, after talking Calder down from $100.) In 2010, his metal mobile Untitled (Autumn Leaves), sold at Sotheby’s New York for $3.7 million. Another mobile, titled Red Curlicue (1973), brought $6.35 million at Christie's later that year. Also at Christie's, a standing mobile called Lily of Force (1945), which was estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million, was bought for $18.5 million in 2012.
Galerie Maeght in Paris became Calder's exclusive Parisian dealer in 1950. His association with Galerie Maeght lasted twenty-six years, until his death. After his New York dealer Curt Valentin died unexpectedly in 1954, Calder selected the Perls Gallery in New York as his new American dealer, and this alliance also lasted until the end of his life.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Calder
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“O thou weed!
Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)