In Higgledy Piggledy, the magic and lyricism of Alexander Calder’s celebrated ‘Mobiles’ are presented on an intimate scale. The sculpture stands only a little more than forty centimetres tall, its arms stretching out a similar distance in each direction as they rotate. The bulk of the sculpture is painted in a vivid red, with the paddles at each end of the wires in white, bringing a dynamic contrast to the ever-shifting composition. This is all the more effective in a sculpture such as Higgledy Piggledy: it is one of Calder’s ‘Standing Mobiles’, and is intended to be placed on a surface. While some of his ‘Standing Mobiles’ were intended to be put directly on the floor, in works such as Higgledy Piggledy, a table or desk is the more natural setting—and this allows the white and red elements to form a counterpoint to the world around it. This is in contrast to the hanging ‘Mobiles’, which are so often seen against the stark white of the ceiling or walls.

By the time he made Higgledy Piggledy in 1969, Calder was an international star. He had worked in many media, in many countries. He had managed to bridge the world of the Surrealists amongst whom he had lived in Paris in the years before the Second World War and that of the Abstract Expressionists who came to the fore in the later 1940s in his native United States. The movement and gesture that was so integral to Calder’s work served as a prelude to Abstract Expressionism, while his intuitive process resonated with Surrealist automatism. Both are in strong evidence in Higgledy Piggledy.

Calder’s success saw him working on an ever-increasing scale, eventually providing designs for concert halls and airplanes. While he relished these challenges, in works such as Higgledy Piggledy he was able to maintain a direct connection to the material which he manipulated in order to create the work. This introduced an intimacy that is all the more powerful in the relatively gem-like proportions of Higgledy Piggledy. It is a monument in miniature, yet also an ephemeral and ethereal sliver of movement and enchantment, and this effect is heightened by the artist’s own interventions.

Calder, after all, was an inveterate innovator and creator. The urge to make bubbled through almost constantly. He was able to transform the materials that he found around him, often discarded, placing them in new contexts that saw them elevated to the status of artworks. “Calder's characteristic material is metal,” wrote his friend, the veteran museum director James Johnson Sweeney. “He has always avoided modelling in favour of direct handling - cutting, shaping with a hammer, or assembling piece by piece. Such an approach has fostered a simplicity of form and clarity of contour in his work. It allies him with Brancusi, Arp, Moore and Giacometti in their repudiation of virtuosity” (James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, exh. cat., New York, 1951, reproduced in C. Giménez & A.S.C. Rower (ed.), Calder: Gravity and Grace, London, 2004, p. 72).

In addition to this involvement with his materials, Calder breathed extra life in them through the incorporation of movement. The inception of Calder’s abstract work had come about when he had visited the studio of his friend, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, in 1930. Mondrian’s studio was largely painted white, with rectangles in cardboard tacked to the wall for compositional experimentation. Calder mentioned that he thought they would be improved if they oscillated. Mondrian objected, but the notion gave rise to the ‘Mobiles.’ In a sense, the deliberately-restricted palette of Higgledy Piggledy echoes that of Mondrian, who focused so heavily on black, white, grey and the prime colors in so many of his own most revered works. Calder himself played down the role of colour in his sculpture, telling Katharine Kuh that he essentially used it to differentiate forms. “Black and white are first - then red is next - and then I get sort of vague… I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red. I often wish that I'd been a fauve in 1905' (Calder, quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 2000, p. 41).