Tadpole 1961

Curator: What an effervescent scene! I feel as though I’m looking at a modernist playground rendered in flat planes of joyous color. Editor: Indeed! What we have here is Alexander Calder’s "Tadpole," dating to 1961. Calder worked in many media, but here he used acrylic paint to render biomorphic shapes and geometric forms on a cheerful yellow ground. Curator: Those black shapes, particularly the figure striding across the red oval, lend a sense of playful energy to the composition. Was Calder thinking about the evolving place of figuration amidst abstraction, or did these playful shapes find footing later in commercial imagery? Editor: Calder began his career in toymaking, an exercise in production using the same materials and tools he used to make sculptures. Later he innovated new structures for art distribution via galleries. It may have been intuitive for him to collapse the boundaries between functional, marketable objects and his more expressive visual artworks. Curator: Thinking about materials, what informs the selection of paint? Does it contribute to the overall feeling? Editor: Acrylic paint would have been a relatively new medium in 1961, cheaper to produce and buy, no doubt offering a vibrancy in pigment and efficiency of quick-drying. All of which contributed to expanding the consumption of his work in exhibitions and in prints for popular circulation. Curator: Fascinating! This little composition manages to be both deeply playful and a telling index of material availability. Editor: Yes, understanding the cultural and material history offers us a richer understanding of how an artwork becomes not just a unique aesthetic statement, but a mirror reflecting the circumstances of its creation.