Collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros will sell an Alexander Calder mobile at Christie’s next month during the season’s closely watched New York sales.
Painted Wood (1943) was given a $15 million–$20 million estimate, and will appear in an evening sale of 20th-century art, where it will be joined by works by David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, and other market stars.
It will not be the most expensive work at that sale, which also includes a $40 million Claude Monet painting from the artist’s “Water Lilies” series. That work, along with paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marc Chagall, and others, comes from Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, a Japanese institution that recently announced plans to downsize and relocate.
But the Calder work is sure to turn heads for a different reason: no other piece by the late modernist has ever been given an estimate quite as high. Whether it can exceed that estimate and mint a new record for Calder is less certain. That benchmark stands at $25.9 million and was set by a mobile that appeared at Christie’s New York in 2014.
Painted Wood was given such a high estimate in part because of its historical importance. The work appeared in Calder’s 1943 Museum of Modern Art retrospective and is related to his “Constellation” series, in which abstract elements that variously resemble animals, ships, and molecules. This one, like other works in that series, features pieces that move as air runs past them.
Originally given by Calder as a gift to the architect Henrique E. Mindlin, the piece was acquired by Cisneros over three decades ago, according to Christie’s. She has been a recurring presence on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list and is best known for her deep holdings of work by Latin American artists.
“An intricate and monumental system of eleven forms in midair, Painted Wood is a singular example of Calder’s mastery of the hanging mobile in wood,” said Ana Maria Celis, head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, in a statement. “We are delighted to present it at Christie’s this fall and look forward to seeing how collectors respond.”
The house is presumably hoping to ride momentum generated by the Calder Gardens, a newly opened Philadelphia sculpture park for work by the artist that was inaugurated in September.
Alexander Calder, Painted Wood, 1943.
Christie’s Images LTD. 2025
