Calder, Alexander

Calder, Alexander (1898–1976). American sculptor and painter, born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania (now part of the city of Philadelphia); he is 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 graduating in mechanical engineering in 1919 and working at various jobs. From 1923 to 1926 he studied painting at the Art Students League, New York, where his teachers included George Luks and John 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, and from these he developed a miniature circus, with which he began giving performances in 1927 (again in Paris). He also made much larger works in this manner, including the well-known group Romulus and Remus (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1928), which features a wolf about 3 metres long. His first exhibition of such works was at the Weyhe Gallery, New York, in 1928.

From now on Calder divided his time between the USA and France, and he knew several leading avant-garde artists in Paris, most notably Miró, who became his lifelong friend. In 1931 Calder joined the Abstraction-Création group, and in the same year he produced his first abstract moving construction. In 1932 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 in 1932 he spoke of his desire to make ‘moving Mondrians'. Calder was in fact greatly impressed by a visit to Mondrian's studio 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.

In 1952 Calder won first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale and after this carried out numerous public commissions—both mobiles and stabiles—in the USA, France, and elsewhere. Some of his later works are very large: the motorized hanging mobile Red, Black, and Blue (1967) at Dallas Airport is 14 metres wide. Calder also worked in a variety of other fields, painting gouaches and designing, for example, rugs and tapestries, but his mobiles are far and away his most important and influential works: ‘They reached beyond Futurism and Constructivism because of their displacement of space by means of random as well as planned movement. Calder was the first sculptor, European or American, to explore so intently the implications of motion, and although his mobiles move through circumscribed spaces, he was also 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).