George Rickey (South Bend, United States, 1907 – Saint Paul, United States, 2002) came to Europe at an early age, where he learned Cubism in Paris in the late 1920s. Influenced by Alexander Calder, he started making mobiles. His introduction to Naum Gabo was also important to his work: Gabo’s Kinetic Construction (1920) was one of the first moving artworks. Combine that with Rickey’s appreciation for the ideas of De Stijl (especially those of Mondrian and Van Doesburg) and an idea emerges where his moving rectangles came from.
