Calder Made These Jewels for His Own Family. They're for Sale for the First Time in Nearly 70 Years

Alexander Calder built his name on sculpture that moves. For nearly fifty years he also bent wire and hammered silver at the kitchen-table end of his practice, making jewelry by hand — about 1,800 pieces across his life, every one of them unique, most of them made for a specific person. Five of those people were his own family. On Thursday, November 19, Bonhams sells all five: a necklace, a pair of earrings, two brooches and a ring, made for his sister, his mother and his niece, and offered for sale for the first time in nearly 70 years.

The group leads Bonhams' Post-War & Contemporary Art sale in New York, and the house values it at nearly $300,000. It has been on view at Bonhams' flagship at 111 West 57th Street since November 7. Nothing about it is a reproduction or a line. Calder never put the jewelry into production, though he was offered the chance; Bonhams makes the point itself in announcing the sale. What exists is what his hands made, once.

The necklace

The top lot is the necklace in the photograph above: a band of silver hammered into a running zigzag, hung from a plain arc and closed with his spiral clasps. Calder made it around 1940 for his younger sister, Margaret Calder Hayes — Peggy — and Bonhams estimates it at $100,000 to $150,000. The house's lot record gives the piece its paperwork: registered in the Calder Foundation's archives, and carried down a family line that reads like the story in miniature — Peggy's collection in Berkeley, then her daughter Eva's, then the present owner, who acquired it from Eva Hayes in 2017.

That chain matters because it is the whole provenance. These were gifts, worn by the women they were made for, and then kept. The nearly 70 years in the headline is not salesmanship; it is the gap between the family receiving the pieces and anyone outside it being able to buy one.

The other four

Peggy gets a second lot: the earrings, circa 1944, estimated at $40,000 to $60,000. Each is a hammered silver bar with flat paddles hung from wire links, free to swing — the mobile principle shrunk to ear size, which is exactly what they are. His wearers noticed. Peggy Guggenheim wore Calder's jewelry; so did Georgia O'Keeffe and Anjelica Huston. The Met counted roughly 1,800 pieces when it staged the first museum show devoted to his jewelry in 2008, most of them in brass, copper and silver, each made for somebody.

Two brooches carry initials. The N.C., circa 1950, spells his mother Nanette's monogram in a single run of silver wire nearly seven inches wide — writing, done with a hammer — and is estimated at $20,000 to $30,000. The E.H., for his niece Eva, pairs a riveted letter bar with two tight spirals, at $18,000 to $25,000. Eva's third piece is the ring: one flat spiral of silver, estimated at $20,000 to $30,000.

The Venice moment

Calder's jewelry has been having a public moment. In September, Kendall Jenner wore a pair of his hand-hammered silver earrings — a separate pair, made in 1955 — at the Venice Film Festival, and Bonhams says the attention renewed interest in this side of his work. The sale-room logic follows from there: five pieces with family provenance, a documented line from the artist's hands to the block, and no second chance at the same objects once they scatter.

The sale starts at 2 p.m. Eastern on November 19, the day after Bonhams' 20th & 21st Century Art Evening Sale in the same rooms. Every figure in this piece is a pre-sale estimate, the house's own; what the room actually pays is a different number, and Previously will report the results against these estimates when the sale closes. More from the sale rooms lives on the Provenance front — including the Phillips Geneva watch auction record from earlier this month.