The dog

For the works of the American artist Alexander Calder the 'king of the iron wire who are not set in motion by wind water or a motor, Arp introduced the term' stabiles'. This is in contrast to the 'mobiles' so named by Duchamps who made Calder from 1932 onwards. The Dog is a unique specimen from a series of large stabiles for a sensational traveling exhibition from 19591960 one of the key moments in Calder's long artistic development. At the request of architect Eliot Noyes, he then created a reinforced and successful version of the stable Black beast from 1940 as the occasion for the exhibition. With a simplicity of means, the dog, as a mythical creature, appeals to the imagination of man in the surrounding machine world.