Calder's mobiles fundamentally challenged traditional notions of sculpture. Believing that "art was too static to reflect a world of movement," he transformed the medium by introducing an unprecedented kinetic dimension. In the early 1940s, he began creating three-legged standing mobiles that combined solid forms with delicate linear elements. Having embraced Surrealism during his formative years in Paris in the 1930s, Calder continued to infuse his work with its imaginative and poetic sensibility.

Material scarcity during World War II led Calder to incorporate found objects into his constructions. He gathered fragments of glass by smashing bottles against his barn in Roxbury or collecting pieces from the shoreline, where they had been naturally "eroded by sea and sand." Reflecting on this practice, Calder remarked, "I like broken glass on stems, old car parts, old spring beds, smashed tin cans, bits of brass embedded in asphalt and I love pieces of red glass that come out of tail-lights" (Alexander Calder, cited in M. Prather, Alexander Calder 1898–1976, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 231). In Untitled (Carousel), he incorporated the broken necks of bottles, transforming discarded materials into evocative sculptural elements.

The playful spirit of Untitled (Carousel) can be traced back to Calder's celebrated Circus (1928). The stationary structure simultaneously suggests the central axis of a carousel and the dynamic form of a horse in motion, recalling one of the ride's seats. Suspended around it, colored shards of reflective glass evoke the sparkling lights that typically adorn a carousel's canopy.

Previous Owner Information

G. David Thompson (1899-1965) was an American investment banker, industrialist, and renowned collector of modern art based in Pittsburgh. He received an engineering degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1920. Shortly after, Thompson started as a banker and in 1933 cofounded Thompson and Taylor, a firm that took control of a number of steel manufacturing companies during the Great Depression. He developed his passion for art as a boy growing up in Indiana, and acquired a work by Paul Klee in 1928, the artist whose work would become a focal point of Thompson’s collecting. Thompson amassed works by Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Kurt Schwitters, as well as many lesser-known artists. He also collected Cubist works by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. Around 1960, Thompson had been negotiating with the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust to create an art center in Pittsburgh for his collection. When those plans fell through, he sold 88 works by Klee to the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, and a significant amount of his collection, approximately 350 objects, to the Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler (Galerie Beyeler). In 1966, a year after Thompson’s death, a group of 112 lots was sold at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, and the final group of approximately 100 works was purchased by the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). Throughout his lifetime, Thompson collected a large collection of modern art, American folk art, and Islamic art, and made small donations to various institutions, among them the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; and his high school in Peru, Indiana.

Henry Clifford (1904-1974) is recognized as one of the most distinguished curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He then worked in various positions, starting as the Assistant Curator of Paintings in 1932. In 1936, Clifford was promoted to Associate Curator of Paintings, and later served as full curator in 1942. He curated several significant exhibitions for the PMA, including: Mexican Art Today (1943); Matisse (1948); Toulouse-Lautrec (1955); Gustave Courbet (1950/60), and A World of Flowers (1963). He was also instrumental in the Museum’s 1950 acquisition of the Arensberg Collection of modern, pre-Columbian, and North American Indian Art. He and his wife, Mrs. Esther Clifford, were great patrons of art, music, and literature. Their own collections of modern paintings such as French impressionists and post-impressionists were regularly featured in the PMA’s “summer loan exhibitions” in the 1950s and 1960s; they donated several works of art to the institution. As a member of the Philadelphia Museum staff for 32 years, Clifford retired in 1965 and passed away in 1974.

This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A18659.