Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Calder, b. Philadelphia, July 22, 1898, d. November 11, 1976, one of the most innovative sculptors of the 20th century, is best known for bringing motion to sculpture through the ingenious mobiles he created from the early 1930s through the 1970s. The son of sculptor Stirling Calder, he studied mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology (graduating 1919) before enrolling in the Art Students League of New York (1923-26). In Paris from the late 1920s, Calder came under the influence of constructive Naum GABO and leading representatives of ABSTRACT ART. He first attracted European attention with his novel wood and wire creations, especially the Circus group of 1927 (Whitney Museum, New York City).

In 1930, after a visit to Piet Mondrian's Paris studio, Calder began expirementing with abstraction. Direct contact with painter Joan Miró and sculptor Jean Arp also stimulated Calder's move to free forms and kidney shapes. In 1931 he sought to create a dynamic sculpture through freestanding, mechanically driven structures. By 1932, Calder had abandoned representational wire sculpture. Synthesizing surrealist, organic form with constructivist kineticism and structure, he began making the delicately balanced, wind-propelled construction of painted sheet-aluminum, brass, or steel wired together (called "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp) with which his name has since become synonymous.

During the 1950s and 1960s Calder turned to monumental stationary pieces, a variation on his earlier smaller stabiles. Made of thin sheets of painted metal bolted together in the shape of soaring arches, these fin-and-tail-like configurations suggest the decorative cutouts of Henry Matisse. Proof of Calder's growing fame and acceptance, they now decorate outdoor public settings in such cities as Brussels, Montreal, New York, Chicago and Mexico City.

Barbara Cavaliere

Bibliography:
Arnason, H.H., Calder (1966)
Calder, Alexander, Calder (1966)
Lipman, Jean and Wolfe, Ruth, eds., Calder's Universe (1976)
Lipman, Jean, Calder Creatures – Great and Small (1985; repr. 1988)
Sweeney, James J. and Lelohn, Daniel, Calder (1977)

Additional Bio Information

Alexander Calder (1898-1976), was one of the first American sculptors of international significance, and one of the best-known American artists of the 1900’s. Calder became famous for his witty and elegant sculptures called mobiles. The works received this name because they actually move when they are pushed by air currents. Earlier sculptors had given movement to sculpture by using motors or clockworks. Calder’s mobiles are delicately suspended abstract constructions of sheet metal parts and wires.

Calder was born in Philadelphia. His father and grandfather were sculptors, and his mother was a painter. Calder received an engineering degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919. He then studied painting at the Art Students League in New York City, and moved to Paris in 1926. Calder divided his time between Paris and New York until 1933, when he established his first American studio in Roxbury, Connecticut.

The early work of Calder in Paris included wooden toys, miniature circuses, and wire sculptures. In the early 1930’s, he began constructing mobiles, a term invented by artist Marcel Duchamp. Calder also started to build stabiles, a name first used by his friend and fellow artist JEAN ARP. Stabiles resemble mobiles except that they do not move. Calder later created works that are combinations of the elements of both mobiles and stabiles.

Calder’s works have been exhibited in many countries, including major displays of his career in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and 1965, and at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1976. Some of his many important public sculptures can be seen in such places as UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Kennedy International Airport and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. He also created many lithographs.

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"In short, although Calder has no desire to imitate anything – his one aim is to create chords and cadences of unknown movements – his mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the perceptible symbol of Nature: great elusive Nature, squandering pollen and abruptly causing a thousand butterflies to take wing..."

– Jean-Paul Sartre

In a time of constant artistic upheaval, Alexander Calder’s aesthetic revolution concerned itself with a somewhat taboo topic in the art world – fun. His prolific and passionate output brought with it a humor and sense of play unlike any before. From a wire animal the size of a match box to a fountain filled with mercury to a seventy foot representation of a man in metal, Calder ignored the formal structures of art and in so doing redefined what art could be.

Born in 1898 in Philadelphia, Calder came from a family of artists. Both his father and grandfather were well-known sculptors, and his mother was a painter. Throughout his young life, Calder was more interested in mechanics and engineering than art. After graduating high school he attended the Stevens Institute of Technology, receiving his degree in 1919. Within a short while, however, his creative energies turned toward art and he enrolled in the Art Student’s League in New York. Working as a free-lance illustrator, Calder began to paint and sculpt. Soon after his first one man show in New York, Calder left for Paris.

It was then that he began work on one of his most famous projects, the "Calder Circus". The "Circus" was a miniature reproduction of an actual circus. Made from wire, cork, wood, cloth and other easily found materials, the "Circus" was a working display that Calder would show regularly. A mix between a diorama, a child’s toy, and a fair game, Calder’s "Circus" found many eager fans among the avant-garde. One of the methods used to create the "Circus" was the bending of wire to form realistic figures. Drawn to the ease and simplicity of it, Calder began to make wire portraits. A combination of a line drawing and of sculpture, these instant portraits represented a new possibility in three dimensional art.

By the early 1930s Calder had brought his "Circus" to the United States and back, and was living in Paris off the proceeds of his regular performances. While regularly fixing and adding to the "Circus", Calder began to show and work on wire and wood sculpture as well as painting. It was around this time that he became interested in the work of the Surrealist painter Joan Miró and the modernist painter Piet Mondrian. Both men had gone beyond abstraction and were making paintings of colors and shapes with no direct reference to the outside world. Enthusiastic about this embrace of form and color, Calder began to make moving sculptures in a similar vane.

Beginning with painted aluminum and wire, Calder created motored objects that could move to create different visual effects. In a short while, however, he realized that the mechanized movement didn’t have the fluidity or the surprise he wanted in his work. He decided to let them hang and have the wind or a slight touch begin their movement. When the experimental French artist Marcel Duchamp saw them, he named them "mobiles" (a pun on the French for "to move" and "motive"). These new sculptures, arranged by the chance operations of the wind, went against everything that sculpture had been. They were not monumental, nor were they sober. They were simply about form and color and the joy in creating both. So, in his early thirties Alexander Calder had not only found a project he would continue for the rest of his life, he had created a unique form of art, the mobile.

In 1933, Calder and his wife, Louisa James, moved to Roxbury, Connecticut, where they would spend the rest of their lives. Working on hundreds of small mobiles, Calder became interested in making large, more substantial works as well. Using similar colorful abstract forms, he made giant metal structures whose shapes and colors stood out bravely in both rural and urban settings. Known as "stabiles," these works often had a similar whimsical quality to the smaller kinetic pieces. By the time of his first major show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, Calder’s quiet revolution was known internationally. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he was commissioned to create site specific "stabiles" and had major retrospectives in a number of cities including Amsterdam, Berne, and Rio de Janiero.

By 1970, Calder had reached the height of his fame. He had worked regularly creating thousands upon thousands of objects – everything from jewelry to children’s toys to major monuments for the Lincoln Center in New York and UNESCO in Paris. That same year his gifts were honored again with a comprehensive show at the Guggenheim Museum and a smaller one at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1976, Alexander Calder died. Throughout his life, his commitment to creating work free from the pretensions of the art world and accessible to all, never stopped him from making exquisitely beautiful and important sculpture. In a century that saw the forms of art and literature reinvented regularly, Alexander Calder stands out as one of the great pioneers of his time.

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Alexander Stirling "Sandy" Calder was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, Nanette Lederer, was a painter and his father, Alexander "Stirling" Calder, and grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, were noted sculptors. During his childhood, the family moved back and forth from the east to the west coast as a result of his father’s work, finally settling in New York. Young Alexander broke the family tradition of studying art by enrolling at the Stephens Institute of Technology in New Jersey to major in engineering.

After graduating from college, Calder held a succession of jobs, traveled to Europe and eventually returned to New York to study art. Working part-time as a commercial artist with the National Police Gazette, he spent some time developing what would be a lifelong interest as he sketched people and animals at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. In 1926, after publishing his first book, "Animal Sketching," and exhibiting his first show of oil paintings, Calder took a job as a laborer on a British freighter, working his way to England and Paris. There he made his first contacts with the Paris art world, beginning serious work with wire sculpture. He produced and performed a miniature circus – a hodgepodge of wires, wheels, string, cloth with which he put on a show that revealed all his best qualities – or nearly all: his genius for capturing the individuality of things – a horse or clown or high wire performer – along with his fascination for the way things move.

A turning point in Calder’s career, and a swing in his work from representation to abstraction, resulted from a visit to Mondrian’s studio. In describing this experience he wrote, "It was a very exciting room. Light came in from the left and from the right, and on the solid wall between the windows there were experimental stunts with colored rectangles of cardboard tacked on. Even the victrola which had been some muddy color, was painted red. I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate. He replied, "No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast."

Association with Mondrian and other innovative artists working at the time influenced Calder to begin painting and constructing sculptures in the abstract manner. Traveling back and forth between New York and Paris, he pursued an active but not very lucrative career. On one of his journeys he met Louisa James (grandniece of philosopher William James and novelist Henry James) whom he married in 1931. Calder’s association in Paris with noted avant-garde artists was fundamental to his development from a talented illustrator and toymaker to a serious artist. He held strong ties to abstraction, and yet, in that pragmatic, tenacious American way, Calder clung to a basic love of the natural, the organic and the realistic. His friend, artist Fernand Leger said, "Calder could never accept the idea of neutral forms, forms with no reference to anything outside themselves, such as Mondrian proposed . . . his need for fantasy broke the tie." Going on to make motorized and hand-cranked sculptures, Calder is broadly recognized as the first artist "to make sculpture move." He credits his friend, French artist Marcel Duchamp, with the term "mobile," (meaning capable of moving) which was applied to his abstract sculptures based on motion produced naturally by air and wind. Static sculptures were dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp, an Alsatian artist working in Paris at the same time as Calder.

As Calder grew older, his work became monumentally larger, taking on epic dimensions. His outdoor sculpture in Spoleto, Italy, is a 30 ton, 60 ft. high stabile large enough to accommodate cars and buses beneath it, and his mobile in the American wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., occupies several floor levels and several hundred feet. Although Alexander Calder achieved international fame as the creator of the mobile, his fertile imagination led him to many other means of expression that form a body of work of remarkable versatility. During the full range of a prolific artistic career he produced line drawings, toys, jewelry, wood carvings, bronze figures, abstract constructions of varied media, mechanized objects, tapestries and paintings. His work is exhibited all over the world - the United States, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia. Calder died in New York in 1976, during the time of a major retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum.

Sheldon Statues to Sculptures