Paris (AFP)
For 57 years, the monumental work has decorated a holiday village in the south of France: an extremely rare sculpture by Alexander Calder, 3.5 meters high, will be offered for auction Wednesday in Paris, the house announced on Monday. Artcurial sales.
Estimated between 2.5 and 3.5 million euros, this black painted steel sculpture was created by Calder in 1963. This fixed sculpture called stabile as opposed to mobiles, the best known works of the American artist, was installed six years later at the entrance of a VVF (Village Vacances Famille) residence dedicated to social tourism, in La Colle-sur-Loup (Alpes-Maritimes), near Cannes.
At the time, two other works by Calder had been installed in France, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and in front of a high school in Grenoble (Isère).
"It is the very first time that a monumental Calder stabile of this size is presented for auction in France", underlines Hugues Sébilleau, director of the Contemporary Art department of Artcurial, adding that the work is sold by the current owner of this holiday village, Belambra Clubs.
"Formally, this stabile is entirely characteristic of Calder's style of that era. The structure is very assertive, well set on its four support points. With space, rhythm is the essential composition, the curves responding at the corners, the surfaces to the voids ", according to sales expert Serge Lemoine.
Until Wednesday, the day of the sale, the Calder stabile is on display in the courtyard of the Artcurial building, Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées, in Paris.
During the same vacation dedicated to modern art, an oil on canvas by Pierre Soulages, the master of "the beyond-black", estimated between 800,000 and 1.2 million euros, should also be very disputed.
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