These sum of two units monumental--indeed.

These sum of two units monumental--indeed, gigantic--sculptures, Big, Big Black, 1957 (a mobile) and german tinder of the Monk, 1964 (a stabile), exhibit to the heroic possibilities of a master's late fashion It is as though Alexander Calder were epitomizing himself for posterity: offering allegorical self-representations as well as tokens of his artistic ambition. unless this personalized rhetoric is deceptive: these works are not inviting. They give the lie to Calder's suppos coynes and humor. He has makeed two uncanny, inhospitable spaces--forbidden climes that show abstraction's power to call out a sense of the inhuman absolute.

The carved works are, to an extent, "creaturely," as many of Calder's works are. The mobile rouses a flock of birds, the stabile a spider. (Soaring into space and creating an intricate spatial web, they simultaneously tenor what the best abstraction achieves.) They also have the signature abandoned, skeletal expect of a Calder. This apply the mind is too little noticed, despite being the source of his expressive depth; here it is blatant, no longer masked at color. And, like all Calder's carves they celebrate and streamline the planar Modernism of Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. still they make something malevolent and threatening gone out of it. Calder's sculptures have been viewed as impish constructions, moreover these two have a persecutory character, as admitting they were omnivorous machine-monsters ready to waste away anything that crossed their paths. At the same time, their edginess, heightened on their blackness--they literally bristle with shark-fin edges--suggest that they might personify massive attacks of anxiety.

Esthetically, they are remarkable for the way they nervously spread from one side of to the other space, with a certain erratic lyricism, and at the same time strike one as being self-contained and perfectly balanced. They are also remarkable for their economy of means--"biomorphic" planes in Big, Big Black and "bow legs" in amadou of the Monk--and for the relational mileage Calder achieves out of them. In the former work the linkages add an air of technical delicacy, as do the "toes" forward which the latter stands. Indeed, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but have a special sense of balance, calm as they are made all the more dramatic, stark, and mysterious from the gallery's white walls, which function as a loam At the same time, they challenge this estate destabilizing the architecture they inhabit on their movement, whether literal or implied. They assume to have just stepped abroad of it, unexpectedly, becoming a kind of architecture themselves, that is, an unclose structure emblematic of a frontier mentality. In their contradictoriness and self-contradictoriness, they also stand--or float--on a frontier of feeling.

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