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 initially enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology, but he soon turned back to his family's profession as he 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 wire sculptures of acrobats, animals, and props he had observed. Cirque Calder, predating the concept of performance art by forty years, was designed to be manually manipulated by Calder and could be packed into a large trunk 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, that 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 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". 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 showcased a visual vocabulary reminiscent of his sculptures, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, often with surrealistic undertones and the use of his iconic red.

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 Erik Satie and continued to perform Cirque Calder. During this time, Calder explored outdoor sculptures, creating smaller and delicate works for his garden. In 1937, he crafted his first large, bolted stabile, Devil Fish, entirely from sheet metal. His notable commissions included the Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the Parisian World Fair and the Lobster Trap and Fish Tail mobile installed in 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, suggested the cosmos and 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, and 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 career continued to flourish throughout the 1960s. He received retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 1964 and the Fondation Maeght in France in 1969 and installed the “Calder red” stabile, Calder’s Flamingo, a 53-foot-tall sculpture in Chicago.

Calder's works inspired and influenced contemporary artists, leaving an unquestionable impact on the art world. 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 colourful, whimsical abstract monumental sculptures, or "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