Abstract forms and strong colors are typical of Calder's sculptures and paintings.
Alexander Calder was an American artist who, in the words of the "Los Angeles Times" Culture Monster, "gave sculptural form to currents of air." Calder, who was born in 1898 and died in 1976, was educated as an engineer and was profoundly influenced by the natural world as well. Best known for his mobiles, Calder at first used gears to animate them then realized that air currents alone provided sufficient energy. While Calder was primarily a sculptor, he was also a painter. His works include two airplanes for the now-defunct Braniff Airlines.
Instructions
1. Examine each painting for a signature. Most Calder pieces are signed. Alternatively, a lucrative market exists for forged art and antiques. A signature and even a painting's known history, or provenance, do not guarantee authenticity. Forgeries can be of extraordinary quality.
2. Study each painting's style to determine whether or not it is modern art. If it is an early work by Calder, it may be a slightly surreal representation of a recognizable event or place, such as a circus act or New York cityscape. If Calder painted it after 1930, it will be abstract, often highly so, requiring the viewer to make an imaginative effort to understand the work. Calder's paintings of the 1960s and 1970s are simpler and more representational, but they are also less rich in imagery.
3. Check for the texture of brushstrokes on each painting's canvas, paper or wood. Calder's early paintings are oil, and they share the delicacy for which oil paintings are known. After 1930, when Calder's art became purely abstract, he continued to use oil but with a much more saturated brush. He increasingly worked in gouache, a heavily pigmented water soluble media capable of very intense colors, and ink, which produces a hard, flat line. Many of his works combine media, particularly ink and gouache. Calder also made many lithographs, a printing technique that does not texture paper in the same way as painting.
4. Look for vivid, saturated color. Calder used white and black as colors as well as to define positive and negative space. The rest of his palette was similarly intense but limited mostly to red, blue, yellow, orange and magenta. Green is noticeably rare. Often the color is rubbed or scratched away to reveal traces of underpainting, also in vivid, saturated colors. Equally often, colors, including white, are spattered with black. Occasionally, colors are almost translucent, but this is rare. Also rare in his paintings are pristine fields of a single color.
5. Compare each suspected Calder painting to known Calders of impeccable provenance. If after comparison a painting still seems to be a Calder, contact the Calder Foundation and apply to register the painting with the foundation. If the foundation registers the painting, it will not charge a fee. The foundation, however, does not issue certificates of authenticity or assist with appraisals.
