An Esteemed Provenance: The Collection of Ray and Sally Allen

Raymond and Sally Allen of Chicago, Illinois, began collecting art in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Initially focusing on works by American Impressionists, the couple discovered the Fauves while visiting a small museum in St. Tropez, entranced by the bold colors the artists used. Following their trip, the couple began collecting works by Fauvist artists and later expanded their collection to include works by German Expressionists and Contemporary American artists, representing their unique, wide-ranging aesthetic tastes. Across these genres, the use of bold color remains a constant theme in their collection, which includes exceptional works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, and Richard Diebenkorn, among other Modern and Contemporary masters.

A Suspended Vision: Alexander Calder’s Yellows in the Air

With its evocative title and ascending chromatic arrangement, Yellows in the Air, 1961 encapsulates the enduring brilliance of Alexander Calder’s late mobiles. Suspended in perfect poise, the kinetic sculpture features an orchestration of colored forms delicately balanced along a vertical axis, culminating in a cluster of vibrant yellow elements that seem to rise like sunlight dispersing through space. Yellows in the Air is a quintessential example of Calder’s ability to blend structure, color, and motion into a sculptural poetics that is at once rigorous and lyrical.

“Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions."

—Alexander Calder

Yellows in the Air emerges from a period of immense international acclaim for Calder. By the 1960s, his mobiles had become symbols of modernity, commissioned for airports, museums, and city centers worldwide. Works like Big Red, 1959 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Untitled, 1963 at the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art in Geneva, and .125, which was commissioned to inaugurate John F. Kennedy International Airport’s newly constructed terminal in 1957, demonstrate Calder’s ability to scale up his kinetic language without losing its elegance or spontaneity. Yellows in the Air, while less monumental in size, maintains this spirit through its vertical reach and luminous palette.

Created at the height of Calder’s career, the present work exemplifies the artist’s signature mobile form, a sculptural innovation so transformative that art critic Jean Lipman declared: “Calder has been called, because of the mobile, the only artist who has invented and then practiced an art of his own.”ⁱ Yellows in the Air reflects Calder’s interest in augmenting scale, even while maintaining the delicate interplay of color and balance found in his smaller works. He once observed, “People think that monuments should come out of the ground, never out of the ceiling, but mobiles can be monumental too.”ⁱⁱ In this sculpture, monumentality emerges not from mass or immobility but from its suspended dynamism and expressive presence in space.

“To most people who look at a mobile, it’s no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.”

—Alexander Calder

From its base of deeper hues—blues, reds, and blacks—the mobile gradually transitions to an airy canopy of yellow forms, establishing a color gradient that suggests both ascension and transformation. The title serves not only as a descriptive cue but also as a conceptual anchor. Calder frequently titled his works after completion, choosing words that captured the mood or associative possibilities of each sculpture. Here, “Yellows in the Air” conjures the ethereal drift of petals or light, evoking the changing seasons or the poetic atmosphere of a golden hour. The upward movement mimics the cycle of blossoming, perhaps even the early stirrings of spring.

Although the mobile is resolutely abstract, the organic silhouettes and movement in Yellows in the Air suggests a deep engagement with the natural world. The fluttering yellow elements can be read as leaves animated by a breeze or the burst of new blooms. This interest in nature and its invisible forces aligns Calder with Surrealist contemporaries like Joan Miró, with whom he shared a fascination for biomorphic forms and spatial relationships. As in Miró’s dreamlike canvases, Calder’s frond-like shapes evoke natural phenomena without directly representing them, animated by internal rhythms and the suggestion of unseen energies that govern their movement through space.

Motion, in Calder’s hands, becomes both a visual and philosophical language. The artist once remarked in a 1932 interview, “How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe… Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationship with the other elements in its universe.”ⁱⁱⁱ This cosmological vision permeates Yellows in the Air, where each form is held in tension, reacting to air currents or the movement of viewers in an ever-changing choreography.

Calder’s background in mechanical engineering played a formative role in shaping this vision. His technical precision—honed during his time as a draughtsman and hydraulic designer—enabled the delicate balancing acts of his mobiles. Yet it is not technical brilliance alone that defines Yellows in the Air; it is also Calder’s extraordinary sensitivity to color, motion, and emotion. His use of bold primaries was not symbolic but sensory: “I want things to be differentiated. Black and white are first—then red is next. I often wish that I had been a fauve in 1905,” Calder once said.^iv Like the Fauves, he used color as a vehicle for intensity, rather than representation.

The visual clarity of Yellows in the Air—its clean silhouettes, sharp color distinctions, and airy composition—belies its underlying complexity. Suspended by thin wires, each sheet metal form is positioned to react independently yet harmonize with the whole. As Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, “Calder does not suggest movement, he captures it... he imitates nothing, and I know no art less untruthful than his.”^v The mobile’s beauty lies in its interdependence, each part adjusting in real time to the actions of its neighbors. It is a system in flux—a sculptural model of balance and freedom.

This notion of relational motion was seeded in 1930 during Calder’s now-famous visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio. Observing the Dutch artist’s experimental compositions of colored rectangles, Calder proposed that the forms “oscillate.” This simple idea catalyzed a radical shift in his practice, moving him away from static abstraction to dynamic sculptural systems. Duchamp would soon coin the term “mobile” for Calder’s creations, a word imbued with dual meaning in French: movement and motive. Despite its playfulness, the mobile’s construction is profoundly rigorous. It calls upon Newtonian physics, subtle craftsmanship, and the poetry of abstraction. As art critic Jed Perl observed, Calder was “moved by a desire… to see the poetry of everyday life as shaped by heretofore invisible principles and laws.”^vi In this way, Calder’s work exists at the juncture of science and art—much like his admirer Albert Einstein, who once mused upon seeing Calder’s 1934 sculpture A Universe, “I wish I had thought of that.”^vii

Though Calder’s legacy includes standing stabiles and wire figures, it is in the mobile that his conceptual and aesthetic triumphs reach full maturity. Yellows in the Air stands as an exemplar of his late practice—a moment when intuitive balance and technical expertise converged to produce forms that are forever shifting, never still. Calder’s mobiles liberated sculpture from its pedestal and imbued it with the breath of life. As Sartre eloquently concluded: “A mobile is… like the sea, and casts a spell like it: forever rebeginning, forever new.”^viii In Yellows in the Air, Calder suspends not just shapes, but sensation itself, orchestrating an endless symphony of light, air, and motion.

ⁱ Jean Lipman, Calder’s Universe, New York, 1976, p. 267.
ⁱⁱ Alexander Calder, quoted in Jean Lipman, Calder's Universe, London, 1976, p. 268.
ⁱⁱⁱ Alexander Calder, quoted in Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932; translation courtesy Calder Foundation, New York, online.
^iv Alexander Calder, Calder, London 2004, p. 89.
^v Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialist on Mobilist," ArtNews, no. 46, December 1947, p. 22.
^vi Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science,” Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, Los Angeles, 2013, p. 41.
^vii Albert Einstein, quoted in Stephanie Barron, “Time, Space, and Moving Forms: Alexander Calder—Beyond the Beautiful,” Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, Los Angeles, 2013, p. 10.
^viii Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Mobiles of Calder,” Alexander Calder, New York, 1947.