Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego
May S. Marcy Sculpture Court and Garden brochure c. 1975
From a family of distinguished artists, Calder has become America's most celebrated sculptor. He invented the stabile and the more familiar mobile, perhaps the most unique contribution to 20th century art. These are abstract forms, the latter using gentle air curents as an integral element in the art form. Stabiles imply the motion of the mobile by means of undulating contour lines and silhouettes. Thery are usually of sheet metal and painted black or a primary color. In size, the artist's work srange from intimate pieces to large public works.

San Diego Museum of Art
May S. Marcy Sculpture Court and Garden brochure c. 1978
From a family of distinguished artists, Calder has become America's most celebrated sculptor. He invented the stabile and the more familiar mobile, perhaps the most unique contribution to 20th century art. These are abstract forms, the latter using gentle air curents as an integral element in the art form. Stabiles imply the motion of the mobile by means of undulating contour lines and silhouettes. Thery are usually of sheet metal and painted black or a primary color. In size, the artist's work srange from intimate pieces to large public works.

Alexander Calder’s works—both his kinetic mobiles and his large painted iron stabiles—transformed entirely the nature of public sculpture in the United States. While inspired by the early experiments in purely abstract art that Calder witnessed during his early visits to Europe, Calder’s stabiles often play with references to forms from the natural world. Spinal Column, for example, is at first glance a series of non-representational curves slicing through space, but on further examination seems a fanciful play on the vertebrae of the human backbone. Commissioned for the Museum of Art in 1968, Spinal Column long stood with other large scale twentieth-century works in the Museum’s sculpture garden but has recently been reinstalled on the front steps of the Museum
Last Updated: 1/28/2016