A Legacy of Collecting: Lydia Winston Malbin and the Art of the Twentieth Century

The present work belongs to the family of Lydia Winston Malbin, a trailblazing collector renowned for her extraordinary holdings of modern European art, particularly Italian Futurism. To build a collection of such caliber required not only enthusiasm, but also deep scholarship, perseverance, and conviction in her own eye—qualities that defined Lydia’s lifelong engagement with art. At a time when few collectors, and even fewer women, were seriously championing the avant-garde, she forged relationships with artists, dealers, and curators on both sides of the Atlantic. Her collection has been extensively exhibited and the artworks remain highly sought after by leading institutions.

In 1988, the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where Lydia Winston Malbin served as an honorary trustee—dedicated the catalogue of its Umberto Boccioni exhibition to her, recognizing the importance of her loans to the show. The museum would later acquire from her collection a superb cast of Boccioni’s 1913 artwork Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, one of three major Futurist sculptures she sourced directly from Benedetta Cappa, the wife of Filippo Marinetti, founder of the movement. The defining aim of Futurism was to capture the sensation of movement and dynamism—so it is perhaps no surprise that she was drawn to a work like Untitled, ca. 1949, in which Alexander Calder realizes ambitions sought after by the Futurists to a poetic and physical conclusion.

“‘The education of the eye never ceases,’ so Lydia Winston believes, and the Winston collection—remarkable for its peerless holdings in futurist art—is the result of a long voyage of visual exploration.”

—Gene Baro, Art in America, 1967

Lydia Winston Malbin was born in Detroit, Michigan and lived most of her life in the nearby suburb of Birmingham, only moving to New York much later. She was the daughter of the world-famous industrial architect Albert Kahn, who innovated the design of Henry Ford’s factories where the assembly line was pioneered. In 1927, she married Detroit lawyer Harry Lewis Winston.ⁱ By the late 1930s, she had begun amassing her art collection, making frequent trips to New York to consult with Alfred Stieglitz, the celebrated photographer and early promoter of modernist art. With Hilla Rebay, the first director of the Guggenheim Museum, she co-organized Detroit’s inaugural Abstract art exhibition in 1940. Her passion for collecting took her to Europe repeatedly over the years, where, encouraged by the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr., she met and acquired works directly from artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Gino Severini and the families of Boccioni and Giacomo Balla.

“The Winston collection contains works whose beauty has not been touched by the eternal transformation of the ephemeral.”

—Jean Arp

Equally attuned to the pulse of American art, she became the first private collector to acquire a Jackson Pollock painting in 1946, purchasing it from Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. In the following decade, she developed a close friendship with Guggenheim, visiting her home in Venice and corresponding regularly. In 1973, Lydia’s collection was featured in a major exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, presented in the museum’s iconic rotunda. Her service on committees at leading institutions, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, further reflects a lifelong passion for modern art and her belief in the importance of making it accessible for others. Museum directors, art critics, and graduate students alike were all equally invited to her home to see and study the collection first-hand.

Beginning in January 1949, Mrs. Winton Malbin was in correspondence with Calder regarding a large-scale mobile she was commissioning for her house in Birmingham. Her meticulously documented collection included notecards detailing the provenance, exhibition history, and publication references for every artwork. One such card notes that her large hanging mobile was commissioned and purchased directly from Calder in May 1949. A month later, in June of 1949 her daughter received this standing mobile, Untitled, as a wedding present, possibly as a gift from Calder himself. The sculpture has remained in the family’s collection ever since. Reflecting on its presence, one of Mrs. Winston Malbin’s grandchildren remarked that “it always occupied a special place in our house.”ⁱⁱ

Untitled, ca. 1949: A Standing Mobile in Poetic Balance

Distinguished by its elemental simplicity and delicate lyricism, Alexander Calder’s Untitled, circa 1949, distills the elegance-in-motion of the artist’s most memorable works into an intimate and personal scale. A symphony of form and movement, Untitled is an outstanding early example of Calder’s singular standing mobiles, which transformed the trajectory of twentieth-century sculpture. Balancing delicately atop its pyramidal base, the work achieves an arresting sense of suspension: at one end, a dark blue disc—perforated by two evenly placed holes that give it an almost anthropomorphic presence—soars skyward at the end of a delicate copper arm, while a vivid red counterweight at the opposite end holds it in perfect balance. Every element bears the trace of Calder’s hand, from the careful shaping of its components to the intuitive calibration of its weight and poise. The result is a composition that hovers between stillness and motion, tension and grace—animated by a sense of touch that is both precise and deeply personal.

“[Calder] created tiny tabletop standing mobiles with the spider-web strength and delicacy of an Emily Dickinson poem. And he produced stabiles fifty or sixty feet high that have the colossal impact of Melville’s Moby-Dick.”

—Jed Perl 

Executed around 1949, shortly before Calder's celebrated representation of the United States at the 1952 Venice Biennale, Untitled demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary sensitivity to spatial relationships, kinetic form, and sculptural choreography. Though small in scale, the work conveys an expansive sense of rhythm and structure, brought to life through air currents or a passing touch. Calder himself described this vital quality, stating, “To most people who look at a mobile, it is no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.”ⁱⁱⁱ In Untitled, that poetic impulse is fully realized—its elements shifting gently in response to their surroundings, animated by the invisible forces that shape our everyday world.

“How fine would it be, if everything there moved.”

—Alexander Calder

Beginning in 1930, Calder shifted from more figurative work to abstraction, and by 1931 he had begun experimenting with motion. Among his first mobiles was a motorized tabletop sculpture, for which Marcel Duchamp coined the now-familiar term—mobile, meaning both "motion" and "motive" in French. Calder embraced the concept and soon created mobiles propelled not by motors, but by air. These objects gave form to motion itself, collapsing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, line and space. Duchamp wasn't the only artist to name Calder's creations—when the abstract artist Jean Arp heard about the new title, he quipped, "Well, what were those things you did last year [for Percier’s] —stabiles?"^iv The question, referring to Calder's earlier stationary abstract works, was adopted by Calder, who appreciated puns and wordplay. The name stuck, and Calder embraced both terms to describe his bifurcated practice. "The mobile has actual movement in itself," Calder later reflected, "while the stabile is back at the old painting idea of implied movement."^v

Untitled fuses these two concepts into a hybrid form known as the "standing mobile.” Unlike Calder's hanging mobiles, these works are anchored to the ground but still incorporate kinetic components. In Untitled, harmony and balance are not incidental-they are embedded into the very design. Irregularly shaped plates of metal are arranged with meticulous precision, achieving a dynamic equilibrium that feels almost effortless. Despite its apparent stillness, the sculpture is never truly static. Instead, it exists in a state of continuous potential, sensitive to the slightest shift in its environment and activating an abstract meditation on time, space, and flux. These works enabled Calder to refine his practice to its purest expression, transforming sculptural form into lyrical performance. “Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe.”^vi

Although singular in development, Calder's standing mobiles are part of a broader dialogue with other modernist innovators. The flowing contours and vibrant palette of Untitled recall the cut-paper gouaches of Henri Matisse, who, upon seeing Calder's work in Paris in 1946, is said to have exclaimed, "You are a magician."^vii Like Matisse's compositions, Calder's sculptures animate the surrounding space with a sense of energy and rhythm. Likewise, parallels can be drawn with Joan Miró's surrealist vocabulary-his biomorphic forms and cosmic imagery resonant visually with Calder's floating shapes. In both artists' practices, abstraction is not an end, but a portal into vast and mysterious dimensions.

“The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.”

—Alexander Calder

The shifting forms of the present work are never the same twice, creating a new experience with each viewing. Calder once expanded on this formal dynamic, “What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.”^viii The careful application of color, the use of bolts in the base to hold the structure together, and the asymmetrical contours of the raised, creature-like paddle all evoke the hand of the artist—lively details that connect Untitled with the handmade quality of Calder's earlier works, including his Constellations, an important series of sculptures so named by James Johnson Sweeney and Duchamp that were executed in the early 1940s, characterized by hand-carved wooden elements joined with wire to create wall-mounted, hanging, and freestanding figures.

Calder's experiments with motion and industrial materials permeate his mobiles, stabiles, wire constructions, and works at every scale-even his earliest sculptures from 1909: a dog and duck fashioned from bent brass sheet; the duck was kinetic, rocking back and forth when tapped. Perhaps his most famous work is also his most unconventional: the traveling miniature circus he created in Paris between 1926 and 1931, a body of performance art which has been in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for over 35 years. Untitled offers a distillation of these ideas, distinguished by its poignant delicacy, curious charm, and technical grace.

Calder moved effortlessly between miniature and monumental throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a period that marked an extraordinarily productive chapter in his career. From mobiles just inches tall to stabiles towering over eighty feet, the artist explored scale as both a structural and emotional dimension of form. Following a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943, he began producing a series of smaller-scale works, often fashioned from leftover materials from larger projects. These compact sculptures were exhibited in Paris in 1946 and prompted Jean-Paul Sartre’s now-famous meditation on the mobile,  in which he wrote: " One of Calder’s objects is like the sea and equally spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new."^ix  In 1949—the same year Untitled was completed—Calder created International Mobile, his largest work to date, for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Third International Exhibition of Sculpture.

As art critic Jed Perl aptly put it, “He had a preternatural sensitivity to matters of size and scale,” adding that Calder possessed “not only the lyric wit needed to bring off a very small work but also the rhetorical sweep needed to realize a very large one. How he managed such feats of variegated artistic imagination remains one of the mysteries of modern art.”^x With Untitled, Calder combines these polarities into a single gesture—a sculpture that is modest in size but infinite in spirit.

ⁱIn 1966, following the death of her first husband, Harry L. Winston, Lydia Winston married Dr. Barnett Malbin of Detroit and thereafter became Lydia Winston Malbin.

ⁱⁱQuoted in personal statement provided by the family of Lydia Winston Malbin.
ⁱⁱⁱAlexander Calder, quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957.
^ivJean Arp, quoted in Alexander Calder, Calder, New York, 1966, p. 130.
^vAlexander Calder, quoted in conversation with Katharine Kuh, "Alexander Calder," The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York 1962.
^viAlexander Calder, “Comment réaliser l’art ?” Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932. Translation courtesy Calder Foundation, New York, online.
^viiHenri Matisse, quoted in Musée Matisse de Nice, "MAMAC's Calder set up on the museum's forecourt," online.
^viiiAlexander Calder, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3, spring 1951. Available through Calder Foundation, New York, online.

^ixJean-Paul Sarte, “Les Mobiles de Calder,” Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, Paris, 1946. Translation courtesy Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre, Calcutta, 2008.
^viiiJed Perl, "Alexander Calder: Multum in Parvo," Alexander Calder: Multum in Parvo, New York, 2015, p. 11.