Alexander Calder, renowned for his groundbreaking mobiles and stabiles, also made significant contributions to the world of painting, particularly through his gouaches. These works on paper reveal Calder's mastery of two-dimensional abstraction, employing a medium that allowed for quick execution and vibrant, opaque colors. Gouache, a water-soluble paint similar to watercolor but rendered opaque through the addition of white pigment, became a favored medium for Calder, particularly in the latter part of his career. This medium's quick-drying property and bold color rendition were perfectly suited to Calder's artistic language, allowing him to transcribe the sculptural forms he had developed over decades into a two-dimensional plane (Gagosian) (Heather James).
Calder's gouaches are celebrated for their luminous color palettes and dynamism, echoing the whimsical nature of Joan Miró’s work and the bright palette of primary colors reminiscent of Mondrian's, both of whom Calder greatly admired. These paintings, completed predominantly in the last decade of his life, reflect a full command of his distinctive artistic language, distilling his sculptural ideas onto the flat surface of the paper. Calder's return to painting in gouache towards the end of his life, after securing fame as a sculptor, marked a period of exploration of the two-dimensional representation of his sculptural vocabulary (Gagosian) (Heather James).
During a significant yearlong stay in Aix-en-Provence in 1953, alongside executing the first group of his large-scale outdoor works, Calder concentrated on painting gouaches, marking a prolific phase of his career that spanned various parts of the globe. These gouache paintings embody a synthesis of geometric forms with more earthly subjects, from solar systems to cacti, conveyed through exuberant lines and a vivid palette. Calder's gouaches delight in nature, evoking the subconscious and celebrating essential yet enigmatic forms. This period of his work provided a vivid palette reserved for a lifetime of spontaneous impressions, illustrating Calder’s capacity to convey depth and motion even in the confines of a paper surface (Calder Foundation) (Gagosian).