Getty Museum

The Jousters

Date

1963

Medium

Steel plate stabiles, painted black, white and red

Culture

American

Department

Sculpture

Institution

Getty Museum

The violent, adversarial imagery of the medieval joust is transformed into a playful meeting of two fanciful abstract forms. The large and small "knights" do not confront one another, but rather stand at oblique angles--more a composed than confrontational. Both of the stout, tank-like forms are equipped with a long lance that terminates not in a pointed tip but with a benign flat form--a feature that further undermines the traditionally brutal conception of this medieval court spectacle. Of differing sizes, the two forms are united by a shared color scheme of red, white, and black. Alexander Calder committed the latter part of his career to the creation of stabiles--stationary works in contrast to his kinetic mobiles. He produced his first large-scale, sheet metal stabile in 1937. In the 1960s and 1970s Calder created colossal stabiles for public sites around the world. This work is one of only a handful of stabiles composed of two completely discrete elements that rest on the ground. Like many of his later stabiles, Calder sent detailed designs of *The Jousters* to an ironworks, which then fabricated the sculpture.

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