Biography | Martin Weyl — The Red Stabile He Helped Place Overlooking the Jerusalem Forest

Alexander Calder's last major stabile stands in Holland Square, on the northeastern slope of Mount Herzl.

It is bolted sheet metal, painted a hard red.

Teddy Kollek asked Calder for a Jerusalem piece when the sculptor visited Israel with his wife in 1975.

The work is titled Homage to Jerusalem.

The components were crated, shipped by sea, and assembled on the slope in 1977.

Martin Weyl, as Kollek's art advisor, is credited in Israeli sources with helping land the sculpture in the city.

The first site looked over the Jerusalem Forest at the corner of Kiryat Hayovel Street and Ein Karem.

When the light rail was built, the stabile was moved to a site opposite Shaare Zedek Medical Center, then returned to Holland Square on Mount Herzl.

The red planes still read against the pines.

Weyl's other public-art file from the same years is Saint Phalle's Golem in Kiryat Hayovel.

The two works are how a museum man spent his advice: not only inside galleries, but on the slopes where Jerusalem meets a forest.

Photo: Marco Plassio, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons