Alexander Calder

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), and S. C. Rower (1998).

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

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