1959 Jerome Kirk Mobile
GUEST: I inherited it from my father when he passed a couple years ago. He got it directly from Jerome Kirk, uh, in 1960. Jerome, in 1960, had applied to get a fellowship with Alexander Calder, and he and his wife came to the East Coast, and his wife and my mother were friends. And so, they stayed at our house while they were, while he was applying, talking to Calder, and-and applying for a fellowship. After the interview with Calder, Kirk gave this mobile to my father...
APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.
GUEST: ...as thank you gift for letting him stay at our house. According to the story my mother told me, after Calder saw these pieces, he sent him a note telling him that he was not accepting him for a fellowship because he was, "obviously, there's nothing I can teach you..." Is what, is what he told him.
APPRAISER: Right. And this is the piece he actually brought to show to Calder to apply for this fellowship?
GUEST: Yes. And, uh, his wife, Honor, they had just had a child who was the same age as I am, and at the time, they had to leave their son in California, and, uh, she was nursing him. And so, when they came to Connecticut, she was worried about drying up her milk, and so, my mother lent me to her to, uh, to, to keep her milk flowing. And so, that's-- that was my part in the story. (soft chuckle)
APPRAISER: I've been doing the ROADSHOW for 29 seasons, and this is the most unusual acquisition story I've heard. Well, it's by Jerome Kirk. He was born in 1923, and he died in 2019. He was born in Detroit and moved to California. He's largely self-taught. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied mechanical engineering, and you can see how that comes into play with Kirk's work. He started out doing these things that look very much like a, a, um, a Calder. He was certainly influenced by Calder, as well as other artists of the period, especially Harry Bertoia who did things that move. We call them kinetic sculptures, and this is a prime example of, of a kinetic sculpture. But you can see how incredibly these are made. Very intricately balanced, and they look really, really wonderful, and they move so well. And it's very clearly signed here "Kirk. 1959."
GUEST: You know, I've-- I've had it in my family since 1960, and I've never noticed the signature.
APPRAISER: This is early in his work. He went on to do more tabletop things and outdoor monuments that moved also, but they really were not based on this sort of mobile format. His work is, is very highly collected, and they're very desirable. This would have a retail value in the $20,000 range.
GUEST: (stammering): That's, that's really good.
APPRAISER: Uh-huh.
GUEST: I have no plans on getting rid of it, though.
APPRAISER: Right.
GUEST: Been in my family, so...
APPRAISER: If it was a Calder, it'd probably be $2 or $3 million.
GUEST: (laughs): Yeah, yup, well, that's the difference.
$20,000 Retail
Production staff carry out careful fact-checking on all appraisals to be released by ANTIQUES ROADSHOW. In this segment, the guest told appraiser Eric Silver about a fellowship that Jerome Kirk — a personal friend of his father's — apparently was attempting to secure with artist Alexander Calder in 1960. Although ROADSHOW was unable to corroborate the existence of such a fellowship with Calder, we still decided to include the story as recollected by the current owner of this mobile.
When ROADSHOW is unable to independently confirm certain facts, it is usually for one of two reasons: either this is the first time that that information will have been documented, or the information is not true.
In this case, while the owner's parents are deceased and he is now unable to ask them for more details about his father's relationship with Kirk, we judged this his first-person story to be worth sharing.
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Understanding Our Appraisals
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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