Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder—the iconic 20th-century artist who is best known for his quirky mobiles and playful gouaches in primary colors—was born in Pennsylvania in 1898. Both of his parents were artists, his father a sculptor and his mother a painter. The family moved a number of times when Sandy, as he was called, was a child. They lived in Arizona, California, and New York. Although the young Calder had a strong artistic gift, his parents discouraged this life, as they knew how hard it was to make a living as an artist.
Calder instead studied engineering, earning a degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey in 1919. He took up drawing in the capacity of a draftsman during various miscellaneous engineering jobs he held from the time of his graduation until 1922. But he changed course completely in 1923 when he returned to school at the Art Students League in New York. Among the jobs that he took as an artist was making sketches of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus for the National Police Gazette. He became occupied with the circus motif, and the energy and movement inherent in circus activity. He moved to Paris in 1926, and after creating several individual wire sculptures of circus characters and animals, he made an entire kinetic wire circus of his own. This work, Cirque Calder, was a sculpture but also a performance piece, with Calder as the performer. Calder could pack the Cirque and take it to homes and galleries for individual, unique performances—something he would do for the next ten years.
The 1930s were an incredibly rich time for Calder personally and artistically. He began actively exhibiting his sculpture, paintings, and toys in New York, Paris, and Berlin. In 1930 he visited Mondrian's studio in Paris. This visit was incredibly energizing for Calder, who spent the next three weeks creating abstract painting exclusively. And while he then returned to sculpture, his work continued to be mainly abstract for the rest of his career. In 1931, he and Louisa James, who he had met onboard the ship De Grasse in 1929, were married. In these years Calder also became friends with a number of influential artists and critics including Joan Miró, James Johnson Sweeney, and Marcel Duchamp. His first exhibition of his now-iconic mobiles and stabiles—terms invented by Duchamp and sculptor Jean Arp, respectively, were held in the early 1930s. These types of sculptures—cut-out shapes that stand grandly in one position or move through space connected by a series of hanging wires, and which are now part of everyday thought and language—were revolutionary at the time and secured Calder's position in art history.
By 1933 the Calders had returned to the United States, where they bought an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. A daughter, Sandra, was born in 1935, and a second girl, Mary, in 1939. Calder began to show regularly in 1934 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, where he would show for the next decade. It was at this time that Calder began working in large scale for the first time, helped along by two major commissions—one for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair, and one for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. When the United States entered World War II, Calder tried unsuccessfully to enlist for the Marines. Because of metal rationing, he began working in wood. During the war, Calder—who had spent so much time in Europe—served as an American link for a number of the European artists who were exiled in the U.S. because of the war.
By the mid- to late-1940s and early 1950s, Calder exhibited in a number major museum solo shows around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943, the Museo de Arte, Sao Paulo, in 1949, and, in 1952, the Venice Biennale. Following this success, Calder and his family spent a year in France in 1953, and he bought a house there in Sache. In 1954 he became associated with the Perls Gallery in New York, where he would exhibit for the rest of his life.
It was also in the late 1940s and early 1950s that he began to actively work in the medium of gouache. This was the first time since his three weeks experimenting with painting following his visit to Mondrian's studio in 1930 that he had felt compelled to return to the medium of painting. What he discovered was a new artistic world, where he could create the shapes of his imagination at will and with a freedom that the technical process of his sculpture didn't allow. At the same time that he was finding ongoing satisfaction with his gouaches, he took on a number of large-scale commissions, including El Sol Rojo—the largest work Calder ever made at 67-feet high—installed in front of Aztec Stadium for the Olympic Games in Mexico City.
In 1976, when Calder was 78, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a retrospective of his work titled Calder's Universe. A few weeks following the opening, Alexander Calder died, leaving behind a truly unique body of work that continues to inspire and invigorate artists, art lovers, and anyone who can appreciate the movement, color, and energy that he brought to every work—large scale or small—he ever created.
