A rare wooden mobile by Alexander Calder is set to make auction history when it appears at Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17. The work, titled "Painted Wood" (1943), carries an unprecedented estimate of $15-20 million, marking the highest pre-sale valuation ever assigned to a piece by the Philadelphia-born artist. This monumental sculpture from Calder's celebrated "Constellation" series represents one of the most significant works from this period to come to market.

The mobile features eleven carefully balanced wooden forms suspended by wire and string, creating Calder's signature kinetic movement. Some elements are painted while others remain in their natural wood state, with forms ranging from childlike fish shapes to beguilingly abstract configurations. The work stands as one of the largest pieces from what became known as Calder's Constellation series, which he initiated in the early 1940s after being inspired by Joan Miró's series of 23 tempera paintings bearing the same name.

Calder's fascination with cosmic forms and celestial movement can be traced back to his time in Paris during the 1930s, when he began creating sheet metal and wire sculptures that evoked planetary motion. However, by the 1940s, wartime metal shortages forced the artist to explore alternative materials, leading to his groundbreaking work with wood. According to art historical accounts, Calder dismantled "The Crowd," an ebony sculpture he had created in 1929, sawing and carving it into smaller pieces that he then suspended in various mobile configurations.

This innovative approach gave birth to the Constellation series, and over the following years, Calder would continue to carve, paint, and assemble pieces using walnut, oak, and purpleheart woods. The series name was actually coined by Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney, who curated Calder's landmark 1943 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Their designation for the artist's newest body of work proved so fitting that it became the permanent title for the series.

The 1943 MoMA exhibition, titled "Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions," was a watershed moment for the artist's career. The show filled both indoor and outdoor spaces with approximately 100 works, and at 45 years old, Calder became the youngest artist to receive a solo exhibition at the prestigious institution—a record that stood until Frank Stella's exhibition in 1970 when he was just 34 years old.

The exhibition garnered impressive critical attention from notable intellectuals of the time. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote eloquently about the works, describing them as "mobiles, which are neither entirely alive nor wholly mechanical [and] are like aquatic plants swaying in a stream. [They] are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations." Even Albert Einstein was moved by Calder's innovation, offering the succinct but powerful response: "I wish I'd thought of that" when viewing one of the standing mobiles.

"Painted Wood" comes to auction from the distinguished collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a renowned collector who has focused primarily on Latin American art and acquired the piece more than three decades ago. The work maintains strong connections to Latin America through its provenance history. Shortly after Calder's successful MoMA retrospective, the artist met Henrique Mindlin, the influential Brazilian modernist architect credited with introducing the modern American skyscraper aesthetic to Brazil.

The friendship between Calder and Mindlin proved mutually beneficial, with the architect helping to organize a 1948 exhibition of Calder's works in Rio de Janeiro. This cultural exchange strengthened Calder's ties to Latin American artistic circles, and the artist eventually gifted "Painted Wood" to Mindlin, establishing the work's significant connection to the region that would influence its collecting history.

Stephen Jones, a contemporary art specialist at Christie's, emphasized the exceptional quality of the piece in his assessment. "This sculpture is the best in its class," Jones stated. "It's one of his supreme forms in which movement and color come together in a really exemplary way." The specialist's enthusiasm reflects the rarity and importance of Constellation series works appearing at auction.

Currently, Calder's auction record stands at $25.9 million, achieved by his 1957 hanging mobile "Poisson volant" (Flying Fish), which sold at Christie's New York in 2014. While "Painted Wood" carries a slightly lower estimate, its historical significance, exceptional provenance, and representation of a pivotal moment in Calder's artistic development make it one of the most important works by the artist to appear at auction in recent years. The November sale will test whether the art market's appetite for Calder's work has grown sufficiently to approach or potentially exceed his current record.