Talk:Mobile (sculpture)

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I just had a quick question regarding this article. Carol Strickland's popular book "The Annotated Mona Lisa" lists French Artist Jean Dubuffet as the person who coined the term "mobile". Is there a dispute as to whether it is Duchamp or Dubuffet, or is Strickland's information incorrect?

I wanted to open this up for discussion before changing anything because I'm new to this website. Thanks!

-Terrill W.

Most sources quote Duchamp as suggesting the term 'mobile' and later Jean Arp for suggesting 'stabile' for Calder's static, self standing sculptures. You can confirm this by checking some of the external sources listed in the Alexander Calder article.

For example, to quote the biography on the official Calder website:

1931 Fall: Marcel Duchamp visits the studio at 14 rue de la Colonie again. He suggests calling Calder's new motorized sculptures "mobiles," a pun in French referring to both motion and motive.

I'm also not sure that Dubuffet was in the same circle of friends as Duchamp and Calder, although he was working in Paris at the same time, so it is possible. Without knowing the full context, I would suspect that the Strickland book is mistaken. -- Solipsist 06:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)