Sometimes, all it takes is a current of air.

A red shape rises, another drops slightly, a rod turns and the entire structure searches for a new balance. Mechanically, nothing seems particularly dramatic. Yet when Alexander Calder began developing his mobiles in the early 1930s, the principle challenged an assumption that had governed sculpture for centuries: a sculpture no longer had to remain still.

That quiet revolution is at the heart of the summer exhibition at La Banque, Musée des Cultures et du Paysage in Hyères. Opened on 11 July and continuing until 31 October 2026, “Calder, équilibre en couleurs” brings together 69 works, including mobiles, gouaches, lithographs, bronzes and ink drawings. The exhibition is presented by the City of Hyères in partnership with the Fondation Maeght.

An engineer who became an artist

Calder’s background helps explain why his sculptures can appear to belong as much to mechanics as to poetry.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1898 into an artistic family — his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter — Alexander Calder did not immediately follow the same path. He first trained as an engineer before turning towards art. Far from being a minor biographical detail, that education would resonate throughout his work: weight, tension, gravity and balance became central elements of his artistic vocabulary.

After moving to Paris in the 1920s, Calder became involved with the artistic avant-garde. A visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930 contributed to his move towards abstraction. The following year, Marcel Duchamp gave Calder’s moving constructions the name by which they would become famous: “mobiles”. Jean Arp later used the term “stabiles” for Calder’s stationary abstract sculptures.

The word “mobile” has since become so ordinary that its artistic origin is easy to forget. The object suspended above a baby’s cot now bears the same name as works that helped transform modern sculpture.

Yet reducing Calder to that single invention is precisely what the Hyères exhibition avoids.

Beyond the mobiles

The selection at La Banque gives considerable attention to Calder’s drawing and use of colour. He worked extensively in gouache and also developed a significant body of lithographs. The primary colours, black and white immediately associated with many of his sculptures also appear on paper, where no physical movement is possible.

That shift is revealing. In a mobile, a shape genuinely changes position. In a gouache or lithograph, everything remains fixed. Rhythm, imbalance and energy therefore have to be produced by different means.

The exhibition highlights the links between these practices and presents an artist who never treated sculpture as an isolated field. The suspended works remain central, but they are no longer the only way into Calder’s world.

It also becomes clear how deceptive the apparent simplicity of his sculptures can be. A work that seems to float freely depends on precise relationships between mass and support. Calder experimented with various systems: some early mobiles used motors or manual mechanisms before he increasingly developed suspended structures responsive to their surroundings.

Allowing chance into the artwork

This may be one reason Calder’s work has retained its ability to surprise.

Inside a museum, visitors are generally accustomed to encountering an artwork in a fixed state. A painting remains the same when the next person enters the room. A traditional sculpture does not alter its position.

A mobile makes no such promise.

Air movement, the balance between its elements and the physical forces acting upon them can alter the composition in front of the viewer. Calder determines the conditions that allow movement to occur, but he does not dictate every second of it.

The artwork therefore accepts a degree of unpredictability.

That principle is familiar in many forms of contemporary art, but it was far more radical when Calder began exploring it. The Museum of Modern Art describes his sculpture as an experiment in space and motion, extending from delicate wire constructions to monumental works in which the surrounding space is almost as important as the material itself.

Calder and the Maeght family

The Hyères exhibition also follows another important thread: Calder’s relationship with Aimé and Marguerite Maeght.

The publishers and art dealers worked closely with some of the defining figures of modern art and maintained relationships with artists including Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. The Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul-de-Vence remains one of the lasting results of that artistic adventure.

In Hyères, this connection provides an opportunity to pay particular attention to Calder’s graphic work and lithographs — an aspect of his practice less immediately familiar to an audience that primarily associates his name with sculpture.

That is one of the exhibition’s strengths: it presents a famous artist without limiting him to the reason he became famous.

Balance that never quite stands still

“Équilibre en couleurs” is ultimately an appropriate title, provided that balance is not mistaken for rest.

For Calder, balance is provisional. One form remains in place because another answers it. A weight finds its counterweight. Then the air changes and the process begins again.

That simple principle gives many of his works an almost living quality. They do not necessarily tell a story or represent a person or landscape, and viewers do not need a lengthy theoretical explanation to understand the essential event taking place before them: they move.

The Hyères exhibition therefore offers an opportunity to reconsider what the now-familiar word “mobile” represented when it still described a radically new way of thinking about sculpture.

“Calder, équilibre en couleurs” remains on view until 31 October 2026 at La Banque, Musée des Cultures et du Paysage, 14 avenue Joseph Clotis in Hyères. Until 31 August, the museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Opening hours change from 1 September. Full admission is €7, with a €4 reduced rate and several free-admission categories, including visitors under 18 and everyone on the first Sunday of each month.