Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (/ˈkɔːldər/; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture made with delicately balanced or suspended components which move in response to motor power or air currents. Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a miniature circus.
Sandy Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower. Sandy Calder's mother, Nanette (née Lederer), was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Sandy Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895; his sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, is considered instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.[2]
In 1902, Sandy Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub, which is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That same year he also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.[3] Three years later, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis, and Calder's parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year.[4] The children were reunited with their parents in late March 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.[5]
After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sister's dolls. On January 1, 1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder's wire circus shows.[6] (Thomas Wolfe mocks the performances in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, in which Calder appears as a character named "Piggy Logan.")[7]
In the fall of 1909, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Sandy briefly attended Germantown Academy, then moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York.[8] That Christmas, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three-dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped.[9] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described it, "We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded [sic] the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights".[10] After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Sandy Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers. In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California.,[11] and began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915.
During Sandy Calder's high school years (1912–1915), the family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder's parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated with the class of 1915.[citation needed]
In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1918, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.[15]
Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919.[12] For the next several years, he held a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulic engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. In June 1922, Calder found work as a mechanic on the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder worked on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. He described in his autobiography, "It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other."[16]
The H.F. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled up to Aberdeen, Washington, where his sister lived with her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.
Red Mobile, 1956, Painted sheet metal and metal rods, a signature work by Calder - Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan.[17] While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work.
In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, visited the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and he established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). In 1955 Alexander and Louisa Calder travelled around in India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry.[18]
In 1962, Calder settled into his new workshop Carroi, which was of a futuristic design and overlooked the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobiles to his friends in the country. He even donated to the town a stabile trônant (enthroned stabile), which since 1974 has been situated front of the church: an anti-sculpture free from gravity.[citation needed] Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display.
In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.
Calder died unexpectedly on November 11, 1976, shortly after opening a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.
In 1927, Calder returned to the United States. He designed several kinetic wooden push and pull toys for children, which were mass-produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. His originals, as well as playable replicas, are on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1930s, Calder continued to give Cirque Calder performances, but he also worked with choreographer Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrate in 1936.
In 1929, Calder had his first solo show of wire sculpture, in Paris at Galerie Billiet. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.[21]
It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys, that would become his signature artworks. Calder’s kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of motion and change as aesthetic factors.[22]
By the end of 1931, he moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room, using cutout shapes reminiscent of natural forms (birds, fish, falling leaves).[23] Dating from 1932, Calder’s first hanging sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by the wind were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp.[24] They were followed from 1934 by pieces which were set in motion by air currents.[25] At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. In 1935-1936 he produced a number of works made largely of carved wood. At Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) the Spanish pavilion included Alexander Calder's sculpture Mercury Fountain.
During World War II, Calder attempted to join the Marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. He continued to sculpt, adapting to a scarcity of aluminum during the war by returning to carved wood.[26] Calder set about creating new works such as Seven Horizontal Discs (1946), which he was able to dismantle and send by mail despite the stringent size restrictions imposed by the postal service at the time.[27]
Once the war was over, Calder began to cut shapes from sheet metal into evocative forms and would hand-paint them in his characteristically pure hues of black, red, blue, and white.[28] Calder created a small group of works from around this period with a hanging base-plate, for example Lily of Force (1945), Baby Flat Top (1946), and Red is Dominant (1947). His 1946 show at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, comprised mainly of hanging and standing mobiles, made a huge impact, as did the essays for the catalogue written, at the artist's invitation, by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and curator James Johnson Sweeney.[29] By the late 1950s, Calder produced mobiles almost exclusively for close friends and family.[30]
In 1951, Calder devised a new kind of mobile/stabile combination, related structurally to his constellations. These "towers," affixed to the wall with a nail, consist of wire struts and beams that jut out from the wall, with moving objects suspended from their armatures.[31] After 1965, an intermediate maquette, usually about one-fifth the final size, was often fabricated to test the wind resistance and to refine the structure.[32]
Man, a sculpture by Alexander Calder for Expo 67, on Saint Helen's Island Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montréal, Quebec
In the 1930s, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave Calder his first public commission, a pair of mobiles designed for the Museum's new theater.[36] In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures (his self-described period of "agrandissements").[37] Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, La Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Man (L'Homme), commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture until that time, 20.5 meters high, was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City.
In 1934, Calder made his first outdoor works in his Roxbury, Connecticut studio, using the same techniques and materials as his smaller works. Exhibited outside, Calder's initial standing mobiles moved elegantly in the breeze, bobbing and swirling in natural, spontaneous rhythms. In fact, the first few outdoor works were too delicate for strong winds, which forced Calder to rethink his fabrication process.
In 1936, he responded to the problem, changing his working methods. He began to create smaller scale maquettes that he then enlarged to monumental size. The small metal maquette, the first step in the production of a monumental sculpture, was already for Calder a sculpture in its own right. The larger works were made under his direction, using the classic enlargement techniques used in different ways by traditional sculptors, including his father and grandfather. Calder began to draw his designs on brown craft paper, which he enlarged using a grid. His large-scale works were created according to his exact specifications, while also allowing him the liberty to adjust or correct a shape or line if necessary.[38]
He made most of his monumental stabiles and mobiles during this time[when?] at Etablissements Biémont in Tours, France.
Calder would create a model of his work, the research department
(headed by M. Porcheron, with Alain Roy, François Lopez, Michel Juigner
...) would scale it up to final size, and then experienced boilermakers
would complete the actual metalwork — all under Calder's watchful eye.
Stabiles were made in carbon steel sheet metal, then painted in black or in primary colors. Some lightweight mobiles were made of aluminum or duralumin alloy. An exception was Man (L'homme), stainless steel 24 meters tall, which was commissioned by International Nickel Company of Canada (Inco).
In 1958, Calder collaborated with Jean Prouvé to construct the steel base of La Spirale, a monumental mobile for the UNESCO site in Paris. (Calder later gave Prouvé two mobiles—as well as a gouache with a dedication.)[39] In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first civic sculpture in the United States to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.[40]
Calder created a sculpture called WTC Stabile (also known as Bent Propeller), which in 1971 was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York City. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets.[41] The sculpture stood in front of 7 World Trade Center until it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.[42]
In 1974 Calder unveiled to the public two sculptures, Flamingo at Federal Plaza and Universe at Sears Tower,[43] in Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opened simultaneously with the unveiling of the sculptures.[44] Originally meant to be constructed in 1979 for the Hart Senate Office Building, Mountains and Clouds was not built until 1985 due to government budget cuts. The massive project, constructed of sheet steel and weighing 35 tons, spans the entire nine-story height of the building's atrium in Washington DC. Calder designed the maquette in the last year of his life for the US Senate, and designated his assistant Carmen Segretario to construct the massive stabile.[45]
As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale.[46]
Calders's South American-themed design applied to a Braniff Douglas DC-8-62 taken at Miami Airport in 1975
In 1972, Dallas, Texas, based Braniff International Airways commissioned Calder to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four engined airliner as a "flying canvas." George Stanley Gordon,
founder of the New York City advertising agency Gordon and Shortt,
approached Alexander Calder with the idea of painting a jet airliner.
Calder responded that he did not paint toys and Gordon told him it was a
real full sized airliner that he proposed that Calder paint. Calder
immediately gave his approval and George knew that Braniff
International, known for melding the worlds of fashion and design with
the mysterious world of aviation, would be the perfect company to
propose his idea of Calder painting one of their jets. Braniff Chairman Harding Lawrence
was highly receptive to the idea and a contract was drawn up that
called for the paining of one Douglas DC-8-62 jet liner and 50 gouaches
for a total price of $100,000.00.[48]
Models of the aircraft were sent to Calder at his Sache, France, studio in November 1972, and work commenced. Braniff announced the Calder collaboration to the public on June 4, 1973. The new Calder work was dubbed "South America With Flying Colors" to honor Braniff's service to South America, a region it had served since June 4, 1948. This was the first time that an artist had ever painted a jetliner used in regular airline service . Beginning in November 1972, Calder first painted six 1/25 scale Westway 6-foot (1.8 m) long models with unique designs that were inspired by Braniff's service to South America. The model painted with the design called "Humor" was chosen by Braniff to be painted on its Douglas DC-8-62 airliner which was registered as N1805 with the United States Federal Aviation Administration.[49][49]
Painting began at the carrier's Dallas Love Field Operations and Maintenance Base at 7701 Lemmon Avenue, Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1973. Calder supervised the painting of the aircraft at the Braniff base for a week and personally painted the two left side engine nacelles with two of his designs called "Beastie" and "Sunburst". While at the hangar Calder befriended many of the Braniff Maintenance and Engineering personnel and even painted his unique designs on their lunch pales and toolboxes. At the time, some of the employees did not like the designs but quickly changed their mind once they realized they became owner's of their own Calder masterpieces.[49][50]
In 1975, Calder was commissioned to create a second airplane design, this time a Boeing 727–291, as a tribute to the US Bicentennial celebration. Calder, once again, painted four different designs on 1/25 scale Westway models of the Boeing 727 in various red, white, and blue-themed color schemes. This time a group of noted art curators chose the final design that was painted on the Braniff 727-291 registered as N408BN. Calder arrived at the Dallas Operations and Maintenance Base at the end of October 1975, to oversee the painting, and painted the left and right rear engine nacelles with two designs called "Sneaky Snake" and "Stars and Stripes". First Lady Betty Ford dedicated the special 200th anniversary jet at a special ceremony at Washington Dulles International Airport on November 17, 1975. The jet entered service in late November 1975, flying throughout Braniff's domestic United States and Mexico route system. The engine nacelles were eventually removed from the aircraft and donated to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.[49][50]
Calder was working on a third Boeing 727 design for Braniff when he died in November 1976. The Mexico design was painted on several models for Braniff to select from. A dedication ceremony was conducted on February 18–20, 1977, at Acapulco, Mexico, for the "Salute To Mexico" themed aircraft, that included Calder's wife Louisa, who removed the cover over the 1/25 scale Westway model to reveal the new design. The scheme was never applied to any Braniff aircraft for an unknown reason. The Douglas DC-8-62 and Boeing 727-291 designs were removed and painted over, after 1978, in Braniff's new Ultra Color Scheme.[49][50]
In 1975, Calder was commissioned to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL, which would be the first vehicle in the BMW Art Car Project.
For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard that shimmered with dangling fish.[53] In 1942, Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one by Yves Tanguy to the opening of her New York gallery, The Art of This Century, to demonstrate her equal loyalty to Surrealist and abstract art, examples of which she displayed in separate galleries.[54] Others who were presented with Calder's pieces were the artist's close friend, Georgia O'Keeffe; Alexina Duchamp, wife of Marcel Duchamp; Jeanne Rucar, wife of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; and Bella Rosenfeld, wife of Marc Chagall.[55]
Alexander Calder (/ˈkɔːldər/; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture made with delicately balanced or suspended components which move in response to motor power or air currents. Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a miniature circus.
Early life
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1898. His father, Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in nearby Philadelphia.Sandy Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower. Sandy Calder's mother, Nanette (née Lederer), was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Sandy Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895; his sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, is considered instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.[2]
In 1902, Sandy Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub, which is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That same year he also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.[3] Three years later, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis, and Calder's parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year.[4] The children were reunited with their parents in late March 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.[5]
After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sister's dolls. On January 1, 1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder's wire circus shows.[6] (Thomas Wolfe mocks the performances in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, in which Calder appears as a character named "Piggy Logan.")[7]
In the fall of 1909, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Sandy briefly attended Germantown Academy, then moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York.[8] That Christmas, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three-dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped.[9] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described it, "We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded [sic] the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights".[10] After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Sandy Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers. In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California.,[11] and began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915.
During Sandy Calder's high school years (1912–1915), the family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder's parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated with the class of 1915.[citation needed]
Life and career
In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering, and enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.[12] When asked why he decided to study mechanical engineering instead of art Calder said, "I wanted to be an engineer because some guy I rather liked was a mechanical engineer, that's all." [13] At Stevens, Calder was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and excelled in mathematics.[14] He was well-liked and the class yearbook contained the following description, "Sandy is evidently always happy, or perhaps up to some joke, for his face is always wrapped up in that same mischievous, juvenile grin. This is certainly the index to the man's character in this case, for he is one of the best natured fellows there is." [13]In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1918, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.[15]
Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919.[12] For the next several years, he held a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulic engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. In June 1922, Calder found work as a mechanic on the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder worked on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. He described in his autobiography, "It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other."[16]
The H.F. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled up to Aberdeen, Washington, where his sister lived with her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.
In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, visited the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and he established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). In 1955 Alexander and Louisa Calder travelled around in India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry.[18]
In 1962, Calder settled into his new workshop Carroi, which was of a futuristic design and overlooked the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobiles to his friends in the country. He even donated to the town a stabile trônant (enthroned stabile), which since 1974 has been situated front of the church: an anti-sculpture free from gravity.[citation needed] Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display.
In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.
Calder died unexpectedly on November 11, 1976, shortly after opening a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.
Artistic work
In 1926, at the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant in Paris, Calder began to make toys. At the urging of fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft, he submitted them to the Salon des Humoristes. Later that fall, Calder began to create his Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other found objects. Designed to fit into suitcases (it eventually grew to fill five), the circus was portable, and allowed Calder to hold performances on both sides of the Atlantic. He gave improvised shows, recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his Cirque Calder[19] (usually on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde.In 1927, Calder returned to the United States. He designed several kinetic wooden push and pull toys for children, which were mass-produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. His originals, as well as playable replicas, are on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1930s, Calder continued to give Cirque Calder performances, but he also worked with choreographer Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrate in 1936.
Sculpture
The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures Marcel Duchamp would ultimately dub as "mobiles", a French pun meaning both "mobile" and "motive." He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. For other sculptures, such as Policeman (1928), Calder transforms the graphic, all-black wire into an elegant series of loops and twists to create an animated figure.[20]In 1929, Calder had his first solo show of wire sculpture, in Paris at Galerie Billiet. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.[21]
It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys, that would become his signature artworks. Calder’s kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of motion and change as aesthetic factors.[22]
By the end of 1931, he moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room, using cutout shapes reminiscent of natural forms (birds, fish, falling leaves).[23] Dating from 1932, Calder’s first hanging sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by the wind were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp.[24] They were followed from 1934 by pieces which were set in motion by air currents.[25] At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. In 1935-1936 he produced a number of works made largely of carved wood. At Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) the Spanish pavilion included Alexander Calder's sculpture Mercury Fountain.
During World War II, Calder attempted to join the Marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. He continued to sculpt, adapting to a scarcity of aluminum during the war by returning to carved wood.[26] Calder set about creating new works such as Seven Horizontal Discs (1946), which he was able to dismantle and send by mail despite the stringent size restrictions imposed by the postal service at the time.[27]
Once the war was over, Calder began to cut shapes from sheet metal into evocative forms and would hand-paint them in his characteristically pure hues of black, red, blue, and white.[28] Calder created a small group of works from around this period with a hanging base-plate, for example Lily of Force (1945), Baby Flat Top (1946), and Red is Dominant (1947). His 1946 show at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, comprised mainly of hanging and standing mobiles, made a huge impact, as did the essays for the catalogue written, at the artist's invitation, by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and curator James Johnson Sweeney.[29] By the late 1950s, Calder produced mobiles almost exclusively for close friends and family.[30]
In 1951, Calder devised a new kind of mobile/stabile combination, related structurally to his constellations. These "towers," affixed to the wall with a nail, consist of wire struts and beams that jut out from the wall, with moving objects suspended from their armatures.[31] After 1965, an intermediate maquette, usually about one-fifth the final size, was often fabricated to test the wind resistance and to refine the structure.[32]
Theatrical productions
As a renowned artist, part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions. Out of this numerous productions, his noted favorites were: Nuclea, Panorama, Horizon, Socrate, Work in progress.[33] Calder would describe some of his stage sets as dancers performing a choreography due to their rhythmic movement.[33] The production of the Socrate set in 1936 became a decisive moment in Calder's artistic development. Calder described it in these terms: «it serves as an indication of a good deal of my subsequent work».[34] It helped him move from small indoor mobiles to monumental outdoor forms he had just begun experimenting with. He also abandoned motorization for freely moving mobiles.[35]Monumental works
In 1934, Calder made his first outdoor works in his Roxbury, Connecticut studio, using the same techniques and materials as his smaller works. Exhibited outside, Calder's initial standing mobiles moved elegantly in the breeze, bobbing and swirling in natural, spontaneous rhythms. In fact, the first few outdoor works were too delicate for strong winds, which forced Calder to rethink his fabrication process.
In 1936, he responded to the problem, changing his working methods. He began to create smaller scale maquettes that he then enlarged to monumental size. The small metal maquette, the first step in the production of a monumental sculpture, was already for Calder a sculpture in its own right. The larger works were made under his direction, using the classic enlargement techniques used in different ways by traditional sculptors, including his father and grandfather. Calder began to draw his designs on brown craft paper, which he enlarged using a grid. His large-scale works were created according to his exact specifications, while also allowing him the liberty to adjust or correct a shape or line if necessary.[38]
In 1958, Calder collaborated with Jean Prouvé to construct the steel base of La Spirale, a monumental mobile for the UNESCO site in Paris. (Calder later gave Prouvé two mobiles—as well as a gouache with a dedication.)[39] In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first civic sculpture in the United States to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.[40]
Calder created a sculpture called WTC Stabile (also known as Bent Propeller), which in 1971 was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York City. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets.[41] The sculpture stood in front of 7 World Trade Center until it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.[42]
In 1974 Calder unveiled to the public two sculptures, Flamingo at Federal Plaza and Universe at Sears Tower,[43] in Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opened simultaneously with the unveiling of the sculptures.[44] Originally meant to be constructed in 1979 for the Hart Senate Office Building, Mountains and Clouds was not built until 1985 due to government budget cuts. The massive project, constructed of sheet steel and weighing 35 tons, spans the entire nine-story height of the building's atrium in Washington DC. Calder designed the maquette in the last year of his life for the US Senate, and designated his assistant Carmen Segretario to construct the massive stabile.[45]
Painting and printmaking
In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking after moving to Paris in 1926, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.[46] His many projects from this period include pen-and-ink line drawings of animals for a 1931 publication of Aesop’s fables. As Calder’s sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the mid-1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. Calder also used prints for advocacy, as in poster prints from 1967 and 1969 protesting the Vietnam War.[47]As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale.[46]
Painted aircraft
Models of the aircraft were sent to Calder at his Sache, France, studio in November 1972, and work commenced. Braniff announced the Calder collaboration to the public on June 4, 1973. The new Calder work was dubbed "South America With Flying Colors" to honor Braniff's service to South America, a region it had served since June 4, 1948. This was the first time that an artist had ever painted a jetliner used in regular airline service . Beginning in November 1972, Calder first painted six 1/25 scale Westway 6-foot (1.8 m) long models with unique designs that were inspired by Braniff's service to South America. The model painted with the design called "Humor" was chosen by Braniff to be painted on its Douglas DC-8-62 airliner which was registered as N1805 with the United States Federal Aviation Administration.[49][49]
Painting began at the carrier's Dallas Love Field Operations and Maintenance Base at 7701 Lemmon Avenue, Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1973. Calder supervised the painting of the aircraft at the Braniff base for a week and personally painted the two left side engine nacelles with two of his designs called "Beastie" and "Sunburst". While at the hangar Calder befriended many of the Braniff Maintenance and Engineering personnel and even painted his unique designs on their lunch pales and toolboxes. At the time, some of the employees did not like the designs but quickly changed their mind once they realized they became owner's of their own Calder masterpieces.[49][50]
In 1975, Calder was commissioned to create a second airplane design, this time a Boeing 727–291, as a tribute to the US Bicentennial celebration. Calder, once again, painted four different designs on 1/25 scale Westway models of the Boeing 727 in various red, white, and blue-themed color schemes. This time a group of noted art curators chose the final design that was painted on the Braniff 727-291 registered as N408BN. Calder arrived at the Dallas Operations and Maintenance Base at the end of October 1975, to oversee the painting, and painted the left and right rear engine nacelles with two designs called "Sneaky Snake" and "Stars and Stripes". First Lady Betty Ford dedicated the special 200th anniversary jet at a special ceremony at Washington Dulles International Airport on November 17, 1975. The jet entered service in late November 1975, flying throughout Braniff's domestic United States and Mexico route system. The engine nacelles were eventually removed from the aircraft and donated to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.[49][50]
Calder was working on a third Boeing 727 design for Braniff when he died in November 1976. The Mexico design was painted on several models for Braniff to select from. A dedication ceremony was conducted on February 18–20, 1977, at Acapulco, Mexico, for the "Salute To Mexico" themed aircraft, that included Calder's wife Louisa, who removed the cover over the 1/25 scale Westway model to reveal the new design. The scheme was never applied to any Braniff aircraft for an unknown reason. The Douglas DC-8-62 and Boeing 727-291 designs were removed and painted over, after 1978, in Braniff's new Ultra Color Scheme.[49][50]
Painted automobile
Jewelry
Calder created 1,800 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. Several pieces reflect Calder's fascination with art from Africa and other continents.[51] They were mostly made of brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or fashioned rivets.[52] Calder created his first pieces in 1906 at the age of eight for his sister's dolls using scraps of metal he found in the street.[51]For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard that shimmered with dangling fish.[53] In 1942, Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one by Yves Tanguy to the opening of her New York gallery, The Art of This Century, to demonstrate her equal loyalty to Surrealist and abstract art, examples of which she displayed in separate galleries.[54] Others who were presented with Calder's pieces were the artist's close friend, Georgia O'Keeffe; Alexina Duchamp, wife of Marcel Duchamp; Jeanne Rucar, wife of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; and Bella Rosenfeld, wife of Marc Chagall.[55]
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