Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, A-C):
| Credited with the invention of the mobile, Alexander Calder revolutionized twentieth-century art with his innovative use of subtle air currents to animate sculpture. An accomplished painter of gouaches and sculptor in a variety of media, Calder is best known for poetic arrangements of boldly colored, irregularly shaped geometric forms that convey a sense of harmony and balance.
Calder was born in a suburb of Philadelphia to a family of artists. His grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, and father, Alexander Stirling Calder, created sculptures and public monuments, and his mother was a painter. Accustomed to traveling in pursuit of public art commissions, the family moved to Pasadena, California, in 1906. The new environment—with its expansive night sky studded with brilliant planets and stars—fascinated the young Calder. These cosmic forms strongly influenced the structure and iconography of his future work.
At a young age, Calder began using tools and found materials to create various structures and inventions. This constructive impulse led him to attend the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919. Yet by 1922 he had abandoned his new career. After a stint as a seaman, Calder began formal art study at the Art Students League in New York in 1923. During this period, Calder worked as a freelance illustrator and often visited zoos and circuses to sketch.
Calder moved to Paris in 1926, and during his seven-year stay he delighted fellow artists including Man Ray, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier and Piet Mondrian and attracted the attention of art patrons with his whimsical wire figures and portrait heads. Most notably, he created small sculptures of circus animals and performers with movable parts and developed and toured a performance/demonstration dubbed the “Cirque Calder.” This series culminated in the completion of his most celebrated piece, Circus (1932, Whitney Museum of American Art).
Calder’s use of irregular, biomorphic forms that recall the work of Miró reflected the influence of Surrealism and Dada, but it was the art and concepts of Mondrian that would have the most decisive impact on Calder’s work. Calder visited Mondrian’s studio in 1930 and later described how the experience transformed his understanding of abstract art. He wrote, “This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word ‘modern’ before, I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract.’ So now at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract.” (1) Shortly thereafter, Calder was invited to join the international Abstraction-Création group that included Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp, and many other artists working with geometric abstract forms.
Calder was impressed by Mondrian’s reduction of visual imagery to a vocabulary of flat planes of primary colors. He suggested that Mondrian consider adding movement to the forms. Mondrian rejected the idea, stating “my painting is already very fast.” (2) Calder soon took his own advice and began experimenting with movement in his work. At first, he drew on his mechanical training to devise cranks and motors that would produce kinetic effects. The following year, Calder exhibited these new pieces, christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, as well as non-moving wire abstractions termed “stabiles” by Jean Arp. By 1932 Calder realized that ambient air currents were strong enough to move lightweight sculptures, and he abandoned prescribed patterns of movement for more spontaneous rhythms.
In 1933, Calder reestablished his home base in the United States, on a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut. The years from this point to the late 1950s were the most varied and prolific of Calder’s career. As he emerged as an artist of international stature, with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, Calder continued to make mobiles (hanging and standing) and stabiles made out of sheet metal, as well as paintings, jewelry, and set designs for performances by Martha Graham, Eric Satie, and others. When scrap metal was in short supply during World War II, Calder turned to wood. In 1953, the Calder family purchased a home in Saché, France, and they began dividing their time between Connecticut, France and periods of extended travel. By the end of the 1950s, the proportions of Calder’s mobiles had dramatically increased and he was completing more site-specific commissions.
Large-scale sheet-metal stabiles commissioned for public spaces dominate Calder’s late career in the 1960s and 1970s. Their vivid colors, sweeping arches and shapes evoking birds and animals offer a counterpoint to rectilinear modern architecture and breathe life into urban environments around the world. One notable example is Flamingo (1973, Federal Center Plaza, Chicago). Widely celebrated during his lifetime, Calder died just a few weeks after the opening of “Calder’s Universe,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
1. Alexander Calder, An Autobiography in Pictures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), p. 113.
2. Ibid.
References
Arnason, H. H. Calder. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1966.
Calder, Alexander. An Autobiography in Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966.
Giménez, Carmen, and Alexander S. C. Rower, ed. Calder: Gravity and Grace. London: Phaidon Press, 2004.
Lipman, Jean. Calder's Universe. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976.
Marter, Joan M. Alexander Calder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Prather, Marla. Alexander Calder 1898–1976. Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1998.
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Biography from AskART:
| One of America's best known sculptors, "Sandy" Calder became most famous for his kinetic abstract mobiles. He also did floor pieces, was a painter in watercolor, oil and gouache, did etchings and serigraphs, and made jewelry and tapestries as well designed theater stage settings and architectural interiors.
His art reflects his reputation of being a beloved, decent human being who continually searched for fun and humor in that around him. He was highly independent from luxuries and focused on creativity. His last words, "I'll do it myself", tell the story of his life.
He was born in Philadelphia, the son of Alexander Sterling Calder and the grandson of Alexander Milne Calder, well-known sculptors of public monumental works. His mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter. Obviously he was nurtured in an environment of art, and from an early age, he was making figures from found objects. Because of the father's ill health and the necessity for a drier climate, the family moved to Oracle, Arizona in 1905 and five years later to Pasadena, California. When Sandy was a teenager, the family returned to Pennsylvania.
He was unable to make a decision about a vocation, but his fascination with machines led to his earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919. He tried a variety of jobs including working in the boiler room of a cruise ship, and in 1923 enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City, where his teachers were John Sloan, Guy Pene Du Bois, and Boardman Robinson. In classes there he did numerous oil paintings and also humorous drawings of sporting events for the "National Police Gazette."
In 1925, he produced an illustrated book titled "Animal Sketching," one-line drawings that foreshadowed his early wire sculptures of figures and animals. In 1926, encouraged by an engineer friend of his father to follow his talent, he went to Paris where he lived the next seven years and shortly after his arrival began doing wire sculpture. During this period, his mother gave him seventy-five dollars a month for living expenses.
He assembled a "Circus," of miniature, hand activated one-wire figures with which he gave performances in his studio. These pieces were made by bending and twisting a single wire into humorous portraits, animals, and figure groups.
He also met many of the leading avant-garde artists of the day including Piet Mondrian, who influenced Calder's geometric, non-objective constructions that he began producing in 1931. His floor pieces, named "stabiles" by Jean Arp, were exhibited in a gallery exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp, who coined the word "mobile" for the hanging, kinetic pieces. Soon Calder was creating many of these wind-driven works.
Calder's mobiles were first shown in the United States in 1932, and the next year he returned to America and purchased a home in Roxbury, Connecticut where he lived the remainder of his life and gained much attention from that time.
Dancer Martha Graham used several of his sculptures in her modern dance performances, and personnel at the Museum of Modern Art in New York began purchasing pieces from him including his first large-scale piece called "Whale" in 1937.
During World War II when metal was scarce, he made mobiles and stabiles from carved, painted wood, and in the early 1950s he added to his repertoire wall pieces and mobiles that incorporated sound. Many federal agencies and businesses commissioned works by him, and most major American museums have his pieces in their collections.
His death in 1976 occurred coincidentally with a major retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Matthew Baigell, "Dictionary of American Art"
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The following is from THE NEW YORKER, June, 2001I
CALDER IN BLOOM
A walk in the park with the great American sculptor.
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
An interviewer once asked Alexander Calder if he ever felt sad. "When I think I might start to," he replied, "I fall asleep." On another occasion, he spoke of the "big advantage" he had because of his inclination to be "happy by nature." Calder, who died in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight, in fine productive fettle almost to the end, made many such remarks, which are certain to daunt ordinary maladjusted citizens.
Perhaps vengefully, some people persist in regarding him as trivial, which he isn't. His work is often great, sometimes O.K., and once in a while fairly bad, but it always operates at a high level of formal and philosophical intelligence. It also wears well.
The plangent insouciance of Calder's best work looks ever strongerand, in a real way, more seriousthan most other canonical styles of the twentieth century. (And the flat champagne of his failures comes across as a test to see if we're paying attention.)
Above all, Calder was an extraordinarily successful maker of public art in an age when the terms "public" and "art" began to consort with each other like cats in a sack. It's not quite that we love his costume jewelry for the world's plazas. Better, we take it in stride as self-explanatory and all but inevitable. A Calder doesn't set off the questions that abort so much public art in our democracy: What is that? What is it doing there? When will it go away?
A rangy outdoor and indoor exhibition, "Grand Intuitions: Calder's Monumental Sculpture," curated by Alexander S. C. Rower, a grandson of the artist, has just opened at the Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, New York; it will remain for three years. |
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