Alexander Calder

American sculptor, painter, and illustrator Alexander Calder (1898-1976), through his construction of wire mobiles, pioneered kinetic sculpture.

Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia, the son of a well-known sculptor and educator and his wife, a talented painter. Calder's grandfather, also a sculptor, executed the figure of William Penn that graces the dome of the city hall in Philadelphia. Though he was brought up in an artistic atmosphere, Calder's own inclinations were mechanical. He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, studying such things as descriptive geometry, mechanical drawing, and applied kinetics—the branch of science that deals with the effects of force on free-moving bodies—in preparation for receiving his degree in 1919.

After working at a number of jobs that allowed him time for travel and reflection over the next few years, Calder decided to explore his growing interest in art. In 1923, two years after beginning his study of drawing in night school, he enrolled fulltime at the Art Students League in New York City. There he attended classes given by George Luks, Guy Pène Du Bois, and John Sloan, all important American painters of that period. Calder also did freelance work as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette for about two years. In 1926 he had his first one-man exhibition of paintings at the Artist's Gallery in New York City. While concentrating on painting, Calder also worked on wood sculpture, and when he visited Paris in 1926 he continued to carve.

Circus Brought Lasting Fame

Calder's first significant recognition as an artist came when he exhibited his now-famous miniature circus with its animated wire performers at Paris's Salon des Humoristes in 1927. The idea for the toy figures can be traced back to sketches he made in 1925 while reporting on the circus for the Police Gazette. Made from wire, rubber, cork, buttons, bottle caps, wood, and other small "found" objects, Calder's circus includes lions, acrobats, trapeze artists, elephants, a ringmaster, and numerous other figures. Unlike many art works of the period, the unusual creation drew crowds from outside the artistic community as well as within, and the thirty-year-old artist found himself suddenly widely known.

Calder's first wire sculpture, Josephine Baker (1926), a witty linear representation of the famous American-born chanteuse, was exhibited to the Paris art community during the same period that his circus was drawing attention. He decided to return to New York City late in 1927, where he gave a one-man show that included Josephine Baker, as well as several of his other wire portraits. Those portraits would grow increasingly three dimensional as the artist refined his technique.

Influenced by Modernists

In November 1928 Calder was again in Paris, supporting himself with performances of his miniature circus, one of which was attended by Spanish surrealist Joan Miró. Calder had his first one-man shows in Paris at the Galérie Billiet and in Berlin in 1929. In Paris he met a number of important modernists, including Fernand Léger, Theo Van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian, the latter whose work particularly impressed him. By 1930 Calder was making large-scale abstract wire sculptures using flat metal ovals painted black or bright colors, as well as small balls or other shapes suspended by long wires. Many of these work suggested the solar system in their design. From these beginnings he developed motor-driven sculptures, which featured objects hanging from large bases, although the artist had no fondness for the regular, predictable motion provided by motors. An exhibition of Calder's kinetic sculptures was seen by Marcel Duchamp, who referred to them as "mobiles"—a term which became associated with this work. He made a number of sculptures during the thirties which employed the same forms as the mobiles but were static, and known as "stabiles."

Meanwhile, in 1931 Calder was married to Louisa James, who he had met on a voyage to New York City; that same year he illustrated an edition of Aesop's Fables. Two years later Calder made his first draft-propelled mobiles. Rather than following a monotonous path of motion as did his motor-driven sculptures, these pieces create myriad patterns once they are set in action by a breeze or gentle push. Their shapes, largely ovoid and biomorphic, may have been inspired by the art of Miró. In 1933 Calder and his wife bought a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he established his studio. In 1935 and again in 1936 he designed stage sets for the dancer Martha Graham.

Commissioned Works Prompted Travel

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City gave a comprehensive exhibition of Calder's work in 1943, during which the artist gave performances of his famous circus; the show's catalog was the first extensive study on the artist. The following year he made sculptures out of plaster to be cast in bronze. These pieces moved at a slow, measured pace. During this period he illustrated Three Young Rats (1944), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with Robert Penn Warren's essay on Coleridge (1945), and The Fables of LaFontaine (1946). At this time Calder's international reputation was reinforced by exhibitions in New York, Amsterdam, Berne, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Boston, and Richmond, Virginia. In 1952 he designed the acoustical ceiling for the Aula Magna at the university in Caracas and received the first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Commissions for his designs continued to pour in as he created everything from jewelry to costume and stage-set designs for dance and theatrical performances. In the 1970s, at the height of Calder's fame, Braniff Airlines commissioned him to paint some of their jet planes with his unique, boldly colorful designs.

Calder's works are featured in permanent installations around the world. In 1955 he travelled to India to execute 11 mobiles for public buildings in Ahmadabad. He designed many monumental pieces, including those for Lincoln Center in New York City, for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, for the gardens of UNESCO in Paris, and for Expo '67 at Montreal. In 1964, when the artist was in his late seventies, he was honored with a comprehensive retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; a smaller one was given at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. At his death in 1976, Calder was eulogized by Minneapolis, Minnesota, curator Marvin Friedman as "one of the greatest form-givers America has ever produced."

Further Reading

Excellent for its plates and its interpretations of Calder's sculptures is H. H. Arnason, Calder (1966). Also recommended are Calder's own Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures (1966), and James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder (1943; rev. ed. 1951). □

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).

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.

Calder, Alexander (1898–1976). 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 of 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, but he also made much larger works in this manner. 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 a variety of other fields, painting gouaches and designing, for example, rugs and tapestries.

Calder, Alexander (1898–1976), sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker, designer.Born in Philadelphia into an artistic family, Calder had his own cellar workshop by age eight. In 1919 he graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a mechanical engineering degree. After studying painting under John Sloan and Guy Pène du Bois at the Art Students League of New York (1923–1925), Calder went to Europe in 1926, where he was warmly received by the avant‐garde. In Paris he began constructing miniature “toys” with movable parts that developed into the legendary Cirque Calder (1926–1932), a performance diorama admired by Calder's peers and patrons for its magical artist‐controlled interactive shows.

After visiting Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, Calder committed himself to a constructivist‐surrealist form of abstraction. In 1931 he produced motorized and manual kinetic sculptures that Marcel Duchamp famously called “mobiles.” Calder balanced diverse elements in innovative works that enabled separate and multiple movements controlled by random air currents. In these works, Calder introduced into modern sculpture a sense of time, immediacy, and chance that inspired subsequent generations experimenting with abstract, installation, environmental, and performance art.

Purchasing a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1938, Calder thereafter divided his time between Europe and the United States. From the 1950s until his death, he produced massive mobiles and nonmobiles, called “stabiles,” commissioned internationally for public spaces. Like his delicate mobiles, the most graceful stabiles absorb and incorporate their environment; they remain still while the viewer revolves around their ever‐changing open shapes.
See also Abstract Expressionism; Modernist Culture; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Katharine Kuh , Alexander Calder, in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1960, pp. 38–51.
Marla Prather , Alexander Calder: 1898–1976, 1998.

Robert Cozzolino

Alexander Calder , 1898–1976, American sculptor, b. Philadelphia; son of a prominent sculptor, Alexander Stirling Calder. Among the most innovative modern sculptors, Calder was trained as a mechanical engineer. In 1930 he went to Paris and was influenced by the art of Mondrian and Miró. In 1932 he exhibited his first brightly colored constellations, called mobiles , consisting of painted cut-out shapes connected by wires and set in motion by wind currents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, has several examples. These buoyant inventions and his witty wire portraits, his colorful and complex miniature zoo (1925; Whitney Mus., New York City), and his immobile sculptures known as stabiles , have brought Calder world renown. Many of his later works are huge, heavy, and delicately balanced mobiles produced for public buildings throughout the world. Calder is also noted for his book illustrations and stage sets. He had studios in Roxbury, Conn., and Paris.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (1966) and Mobiles and Stabiles (1968); biography by J. M. Marter (1991); J. Lipman, ed., Calder's Circus (1972); studies by J. J. Sweeney (1951), M. Gibson (1988), D. Marchesseau (1989), G.-G. Lemaire (1998), M. Prather et al. (1998), S. C. Rower (1998), and J. Simon and B. Leal, ed. (2008).

Calder, Alexander (1898–1976) US sculptor. Calder created the mobile, a type of delicate, colourful, kinetic sculpture with parts that move either by motors or air currents. He also developed non-moving scultpures called ‘stabiles’.

http://www.calder.org; http://www.nga.gov; http://www.guggenheimcollection.org