Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder, an American sculptor and painter born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, came from a family of artists, with his father and grandfather being sculptors and his mother a painter. From an early age, Calder displayed a talent for creating. In 1909, at the age of eleven, he gifted his parents with his first sculptures, a tiny dog and duck made from a brass sheet. Even at a young age, Calder showcased his skill in handling materials, and the duck sculpture was kinetic, rocking back and forth when tapped.

Calder enrolled at the Art Students League in 1923, when he moved to New York. During this time, he worked as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette and had the opportunity to sketch circus scenes at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The circus became a lifelong interest for Calder, and after relocating to Paris in 1926, he created his renowned Cirque Calder, a unique body of art including acrobats, animals, and props made of wire and a spectrum of found materials. Cirque Calder, predating the concept of performance art by forty years, was designed to be manually manipulated by Calder and could be packed into five suitcases for performances anywhere.

In addition to his circus-inspired work, Alexander Calder sculpted wire portraits of friends and public figures. His inventive artistry gained attention, and in 1928, he had his first solo gallery show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. Numerous exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Berlin soon followed, leading to frequent travels across the ocean - during which he met Louisa James, who he married in January 1931. During his time in Paris, Calder met other influential artists and intellectuals, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, James Johnson Sweeney, Marcel Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian. A visit to the latter’s studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the studio environment, had a profound impact on Calder, pushing him toward creating abstract paintings. He soon shifted his focus from painting to sculpture, finding that he preferred sculpture to painting. He created his first truly kinetic sculpture in 1931, giving birth to a new form of art that were named "mobiles" by Duchamp. These early mobiles were often motorised, but Calder realised he could create sculptures that undulated on their own with the air's currents. To differentiate his stationary abstract sculptures, artist Jean Arp coined the term "stabiles" for Calder's non-kinetic works. Despite his preference for sculptures, Calder never ceased painting and drawing. He enjoyed working with gouache, which allowed for spontaneous expression. His works on canvas and paper blurred the boundaries between presence and absence, often with gestural undertones.

In 1933, Calder returned to the United States with his wife Louisa and settled in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, he converted an icehouse into a studio and continued to create art. Calder's association with the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York began in 1934, and he exhibited his works there. He also designed sets for ballets by Martha Graham and a symphonic drama by Erik Satie. During this time, Calder explored outdoor sculptures, and in 1937, he crafted his first bolted stabile, Devil Fish, enlarged from a maquette. His notable commissions included the Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the Parisian World Fair and, in 1939, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Calder applied to join and was rejected by the Marine Corps during World War II, thus he continued creating art. As metal became scarce during the war, he turned to wood as a sculptural medium, resulting in a series of works called Constellations. These sculptures, anchored by wire and carved wood elements, were exhibited in 1943, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.

The 1940s and 1950s were highly productive years for Calder, with major retrospectives of his work at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in 1938 and the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. He also created small- scale works using scraps of metal trimmed from larger pieces. As Calder's international fame grew, he received numerous exhibition invitations and public commissions. Notable commissions from this period include International Mobile for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, sets for theatrical productions, and large-scale sculptures like Flamingo in Chicago and La Grande vitesse in Grand Rapids.

Alexander Calder's artistic recognition continued to flourish throughout the 1960s. He received retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 1964 and the Fondation Maeght in France in 1969.

Calder's works inspired and influenced contemporary artists, leaving an unquestionable impact on art history. In 1976, Calder attended the opening of his retrospective exhibition, "Calder's Universe", at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Just a few weeks later, he passed away at the age of seventy-eight, leaving behind a remarkable artistic legacy that forever changed the rules of visual arts. He is widely considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century, known for innovative kinetic sculptures powered by air currents, the "mobile," and his static abstract monumental sculptures, or the "stabile".

Calder's public commissions are on view in cities all over the world and his work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1998, travelled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1998–99); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2000); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000); Iwaki City Art Museum, Japan (2000, travelled to The Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Hokkaido Obihiro Museum of Art, Japan; The Museum of Art, Japan; Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum, Japan; Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan); Storm King Art Center, New York (2001–03); Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2003, travelled to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, through 2004); Foundation Beyeler, Switzerland (2004, travelled to Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., through 2005); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2013); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2014); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2014); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2015); and Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis (2015).

Calder with 21 feuilles blanches (1953), Paris, 1954 Photograph by Agnès Varda © Agnès Varda

SELECTED WORKS

Alexander Calder, Black butterfly, 1969

Gouache and ink on paper

75,2 x 109,2 cm | 29.6 x 43 in