FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2026 
An Unseen Alexander Calder Mobile Achieves €533,000 at Hôtel Drouot
P resented on the market for the first time by Oger-Blanchet, a mobile by Alexander Calder achieved €533,000 on Friday 22 May at Hôtel Drouot, selling for more than four times its initial estimate of €80,000–120,000.
Kept within the same family since its creation and never before offered at auction, this work executed in 1974 benefited from a particularly distinguished provenance. The mobile had been gifted by the artist to Mrs H. during a visit to the studio in Saché, before descending through the family to its present owner.
This small-scale sculpture – a stabile-mobile in sheet metal and wire composed of white lacquered discs on a red lacquered base – attracted strong interest throughout the exhibition, in a context particularly favourable to Calder’s work, as the Fondation Louis Vuitton is currently dedicating an exhibition to the artist.
A leading figure of twentieth-century sculpture, Calder revolutionised the history of art by introducing actual movement into sculpture. Inspired by his discovery of the work of Piet Mondrian, he developed his celebrated “mobiles” from the 1930s onwards, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp. Initially motorised and later animated solely by air currents, these works became the expression of a subtle balance between abstraction, space and movement.
Created towards the end of the artist’s career, the work presented by Oger-Blanchet fully embodied the formal and poetic mastery that established Calder as one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century.
This small-scale sculpture – a stabile-mobile in sheet metal and wire composed of white lacquered discs on a red lacquered base – attracted strong interest throughout the exhibition, in a context particularly favourable to Calder’s work, as the Fondation Louis Vuitton is currently dedicating an exhibition to the artist.
A leading figure of twentieth-century sculpture, Calder revolutionised the history of art by introducing actual movement into sculpture. Inspired by his discovery of the work of Piet Mondrian, he developed his celebrated “mobiles” from the 1930s onwards, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp. Initially motorised and later animated solely by air currents, these works became the expression of a subtle balance between abstraction, space and movement.
Created towards the end of the artist’s career, the work presented by Oger-Blanchet fully embodied the formal and poetic mastery that established Calder as one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century.
