NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Calder’s spectacular work, The Mountain (1960), will be auctioned in the Post-War & Contemporary Art sale at Bonhams New York on May 12. It has an estimate of $600,000-800,000.

Calder, one of America’s greatest artists, shows his unparalleled mastery of line in The Mountain by creating a sculpture that crafts a landscape out of form and air. According to Megan Murphy, Head of Sale of the Post-War of Contemporary Art Department at Bonhams, “The piece is an introduction to Calder’s exquisite control of line. As one’s eye meanders around the work, the horizon line rises and dips like cresting wave. It changes the viewer’s perspective on sculpture, forcing a shift in thought – and thus, a shift in understanding.”

Born in Pennsylvania, Calder (1898-1976) originally trained as a mechanical engineer, earning his degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1919. He held a number of engineering posts in the years that followed, before moving to New York where he enrolled at the Artist Students’ League and studied with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks and John Sloan.

Moving to Paris in 1926, Calder established his own studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quartier, and consequentially became close friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and Jean Arp. It was in Paris that Calder began experimenting with creating mobiles, kinetic sculptures that were among the first examples of art which consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static and unchanging object, and so introducing motion and modulation as new aesthetic elements. By 1934, after producing a series of wire works and developing his mobiles, Calder began constructing self-supporting, abstract sculptures – nicknamed ‘stabiles’ by Arp – of which The Mountain is a magnificent example.

In his article in the spring issue of Bonhams Magazine, Jonathan Jones of The Guardian remarks that The Mountain evokes ‘the origins of the world and the strangeness of the cosmos’.