The work Mobile as well as the four canvases in the museum’s collection, are gifts the artist made on the occasion of the exhibitions held in 1948 at the Ministério da Educação in Rio de Janeiro and at Masp. It refers to a moment in which the artist is recommencing his intense rhythm of travel and exhibiting outside the United States. For these he made smaller sized Mobiles, very similar to the Masp example (Dancing Stars, National Gallery, Berlin, c.1945; Blue Feather, c.1948, private collection). In 1946, Calder returned to Paris after a ten-year absence, in order to prepare his exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré. Sartre who was depicted by the artist in a very amusing fashion, in his preface to the catalogue left a noteworthy record of these chamber Mobiles, seen at times by candle light as a result of the power rationing in the immediate postwar period. His reflection (to which I was kindly referred some years ago by Simonetta Luz Affonso) throws a precise shaft of light on the small Masp Mobile perhaps from the same year: “a Mobile: a small local festival, an object defined by its motion and which does not exist outside of it, a flower that withers when it stops moving, a pure play of movement as there are pure plays of light”. The four oils painted by Calder in 1945 and 1946, evidently without one being able to string them together logically, follow a sequence of four tempos through which one passes from deep space and a rather withdrawn view, which gives an illusion of lively anthropomorphic forms, flanked by a “fish” (Inv. 584), to a more and more pronouncedly planned space, in which amoeboid forms can be seen, in the immediate foreground, as if magnified thousands of times by a microscope lens. It should be noticed that the cycle in question is very rare in Calder’s more mature work because with the exception of the years of 1945 and 1946, when the artist made some departures into the field of oil painting, the technique that he most favored was gouache.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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