Calder, Alexander

Calder, Alexander (b Lawnton, Pennsylvania [now part of Philadelphia], 22 July 1898; d New York, 11 Nov. 1976). American sculptor and painter, famous as the inventor of the mobile and thereby as one of the pioneers of Kinetic art. His grandfather Alexander Milne Calder (1846–1923) and his father Alexander Stirling Calder (1870–1945) were sculptors and his mother was a painter, but he began to take an interest in art only in 1922, after studying mechanical engineering. From 1923 to 1926 he studied at the Art Students League, New York, where his teachers included Luks and Sloan. Calder and his fellow students made a game of rapidly sketching people on the streets and in the subway and Calder was noted for his skill in conveying a sense of movement by a single unbroken line. From this he went on to produce wire sculptures that were essentially line drawings in space; the earliest, made on a visit to Paris in 1926, were amusing, toylike figures of animals, but he also made much larger works in this manner, including the group Romulus and Remus (1928, Guggenheim Mus., New York), which features a wolf about 3 m (10 ft) long. His first exhibition of such works was in New York in 1928. From now on he divided his time between the USA and France and he knew many leading avant-garde artists in Paris, notably Miró, who became his lifelong friend. In 1931 he joined the Abstraction-Création association and in the same year produced his first non-figurative moving construction. Marcel Duchamp baptized these constructions ‘mobiles’ and Arp suggested ‘stabiles’ as a name for the non-moving constructions.

Calder's first mobiles were moved by hand or by motor-power, but in 1934 he began to make the unpowered mobiles for which he is most widely known. Constructed usually from pieces of shaped and painted tin suspended on thin wires or cords, these were light enough to respond to the faintest air currents. They were described by Calder as ‘four-dimensional drawings’, and in a letter to Duchamp written in 1932 he spoke of his desire to make ‘moving Mondrians’. Calder was greatly impressed by a visit to Mondrian in 1930, and no doubt envisaged himself as bringing movement to Mondrian-type geometrical abstracts. However, the personalities of the two men were very different: Calder's delight in the comic and fantastic, which can often be seen even in his largest works, was at the opposite pole to the messianic seriousness of Mondrian. Nevertheless, for all his humour, Calder made a major contribution to the development of abstract and kinetic art: he was ‘the first sculptor, European or American, to explore so intently the implications of motion…the first to allow process and chance to alter the forms of his pieces. No other American had yet contributed so fundamentally to the progress of modern art’ ( Matthew Baigell, A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, 1984). After winning first prize for sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale, Calder received numerous public commissions. Some of his late works are very large: the motorized hanging mobile Red, Black, and Blue (1967) at Dallas Airport, for example, is 14 m (45 ft) wide. He also worked in other fields, painting gouaches and designing rugs and tapestries, for example.