Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder, in full Alexander Stirling Calder (born
July 22, 1898, Lawnton, Pa., U.S.—died Nov. 11, 1976, New
York, N.Y.), American sculptor best known as the originator
of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture the delicately
balanced or suspended components of which move in response
to motor power or air currents; by contrast, Calder’s
stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced
numerous wire figures, notably for a vast miniature circus.
Calder was the son and
grandson of sculptors, and his mother was an accomplished
painter. Despite growing up in an atmosphere of American
academic art, he seems to have had little inclination to
become an artist himself. Aside from an unusual amount of
traveling and moving around, necessitated in part by his
father’s health, Calder’s youth and interests were typical
of middle-class American boys growing up in the early years
of the century. His reminiscences—which are remarkable for
their completeness—of his early activities have to do
largely with family affairs, sports, and relations with his
classmates. Perhaps the only indication of his subsequent
career lay in his facility for making things and his
enjoyment of gadgets.
After study at the Stevens
Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, he graduated
in 1919 with a degree in mechanical engineering. For a time
he traveled widely and held various engineering jobs. In
1922 he took drawing lessons at a night school in New York
City, and in 1923 he entered the Art Students League, where
he was influenced by painters of the New York scene—the
Ashcan school, of which John Sloan and George Luks were
among the leading artists. At this point, Calder’s
aspirations, like those of many American artists of the
time, did not extend much beyond securing a well-paying job
in illustration or commercial art. In 1924 he began doing
illustrations for the National Police Gazette, for which he
covered prizefights and the circus.
After several other routine
commercial illustrating jobs, Calder decided in 1926 to go
to Paris, the world centre for modern art. While working on
sculpture there, he began for his own amusement to make
toylike animals of wood and wire. Out of these he developed
a miniature circus, performances of which were attended by
many of the leading artists and literary figures in Paris.
The little circus figures, as well as his interest in
continuous line drawings, led Calder to the creation of wire
sculptures, such as the figure of a woman 7 feet (2 metres)
high, entitled Spring, and Romulus and Remus, a group that
included a she-wolf 11 feet (3.4 metres) long.
Among the artists he met in
Paris through his circus exhibitions, perhaps the most
crucial for his subsequent career was the Spanish Surrealist
painter Joan Miró. Although Surrealism was reaching its
first major peak in the late 1920s, Calder does not seem to
have been conscious of the movement; in fact, throughout his
career he isolated himself from the “art world.” With Miró,
however, he established an immediate rapport, and a lasting
friendship was formed.
In 1930 Calder met the
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and visited his studio, an event
that made him suddenly aware of the modern movement in
painting and that influenced his work in the direction of
the abstract. In the winter of 1931–32 he began to make
motor-driven sculptures consisting of various geometric
shapes. The name mobile was given to them by Marcel Duchamp.
Aesthetically, movement, because of the changing
relationships among the various elements, gave each of these
sculptures a continually changing composition. The following
year, when Calder exhibited similar works that did not move,
Jean Arp described them as stabiles, a term that Calder
continued to use. Beginning in 1932, most of his mobiles
were given their movement by air currents.
In 1931, while fashioning a
wedding ring for his marriage, Calder developed an interest
in making jewelry. Also in 1931, he produced illustrations
for an edition of the Fables of Aesop. Illustrations for a
number of other books followed in the 1940s.
During the 1930s Calder
further developed the concept of the mobile. The first major
manifestation of his work was at the world’s fair in Paris
in 1937, where he created his Mercury Fountain for the
Spanish pavilion. In this sculpture, movement was introduced
by a stream of mercury striking a plate that was attached to
a swiveling rod. From this point, Calder’s reputation
expanded continually through annual exhibitions in Europe
and America, climaxed by a showing at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City in 1943.
Although Calder’s early
mobiles and stabiles were on a relatively small scale, he
increasingly moved toward monumentality in his later works.
One very large stabile organization was an acoustical
ceiling, which he designed in 1952 for the auditorium of the
Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. In 1961 an
exhibition on motion in art, which originated at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, emphasized the work of Calder
and his followers. During the 1960s his accomplishments were
recognized through major exhibitions in Kassel, West
Germany; at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City;
and at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
In 1931 Calder married
Louisa Cushing James, and after their marriage the Calders
traveled continually, not only between France and the United
States but also to South America and Asia. In 1955 and 1956
they visited India, where Calder created 11 mobiles.
In the 1970s Calder’s
studio was at Saché, near Tours. There he designed his major
stabiles and experimented with free-form drawings and
paintings. His normal method with large-scale works was to
create a small model the enlargement of which he supervised
at a foundry in Tours. Although Calder lived most of the
time in France, he maintained a home and studio in Roxbury,
Connecticut.
H. Harvard Arnason
Encyclopædia Britannica
