Alexander Calder

Art was in his genes. Alexander Calder was born in 1898 Pennsylvania to a family of artists. His mother was a painter, his father and grandfather were already famed sculptors, and even farther back, his Scottish forefathers were stonemasons. Calder grew up having his own artist workshop at home. He modeled for his parents, made jewelry with beads and copper wire for his sister’s dolls, and made his own toys – shaping pieces of metal into animals. This was the initial platform for his body of work.

But not really wanting to follow in his parents’ footsteps, Calder first studied mechanical engineering instead. The sciences of engineering taught him the intricacies of mathematics, physics, kinetics and the use of industrial materials. Little did he know that he would use that degree to change the course of art history.

Red Frame Construction, 1932. Philadelphia Museum of Art

After holding and losing several jobs in the engineering field, Calder decided to enter the Arts Student League in New York where his father taught sculpture. He was 25. In New York without a studio, he used the images of the city for his art. He made drawings of Central Park, Coney Island, and the Brooklyn Zoo. He honed his senses for public spaces early on. He also worked for the National Police Gazette, a social satire publication, and was sent to cover the Ringling Brothers. He was fascinated by the circus and loved sketching animals most.

Three years later, he decided to go to the center of the art world. 1920’s Paris – considered the birthplace of modernism with an art and literary circle that included Picasso, Mondrian, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, and Le Corbusier. There Calder discovered a cabaret dancer, Josephine Baker, and made dancing wire figures of her. These were among his first moving sculptures. As a street artist, he made wire caricatures of people outdoors and at parties.

Still fascinated by the circus, he crafted moving maquettes of animals and acrobats for what would become Cirque Calder. Some of the figures were made in the likeness of real-life American and French performers. He put on a one-man marionette theater complete with music, sound effects, and commentary. The shows became the new hot nights in Paris, especially for his artist friends.

Cirque Calder – endowed to the Whitney on condition that it’s never moved

In 1928, he packed his circus into trunks and headed back to New York, performing, exhibiting and selling his wire pieces. Traipsing back to Paris, he had his first exhibition there at the Gallerie Billet. It was filled with wire and wooden sculptures, painting, toys and jewelry. Back in New York, he was invited to show at the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art. He showed up with nothing but a spool of wire in his overcoat. He walked into the gallery and created the sculptures on the spot. And after an exhibition in Berlin, art critics and other curators began to pay attention to his work.

In 1930, he visited Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio. He saw walls covered with colored rectangles and imagined them moving. This inspired his next platform, shifting from figurative to abstraction. His first kinetic sculptures were motorized. The shapes and movements were inspired by an early memory of seeing the sun and the moon one morning when he was sailing through the Panama Canal. He said, “It left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system.” Albert Einstein once came to an exhibit at MoMA and stood mesmerized in front of a sculpture, A Universe, for 40 minutes. Calder later explained that Einstein instinctively knew to watch for the cycles of movement – all 90 of them.

A Calder hangs under the Oculus Bridge at SFMOMA at its 2016 reopening

But Calder thought the motorized movements too repetitive, and they always needed repair if overused. He sought ways to make his sculptures move freely and at random, hanging shapes from different lengths of horizontal wires at various angles. How the shapes are connected affect their movements. So do wind and vibrations. Marcel Duchamp coined the term “mobile” to describe them. Yes the mobiles that hung over our cribs was a Calder invention.

Everyone marveled at the perfect blend of pure abstraction and random motion. “What Einstein gave to science in the dimension of time, you gave to art in dimension of motion,” an interviewer told Calder. Even Jean-Paul Sartre was inspired to write an essay, Existentialist on Mobilist, describing the unpredictable movements of the mobiles and its effects on an endless imagination. He called them “an absolute purity of abstraction.”

Double Gong (1953) inside Calder’s Motion Lab and Trois disques (1967) by the Living Wall garden at SFMOMA

In 1937, Calder would receive his first public commission for the Spanish pavilion at the Internation Exhibition in Paris. He was the only non-Spanish artist to contribute. The Civil War was raging and he created Mercury Fountain as a tribute to the mine workers under siege by Franco’s army. It was placed across Picasso’s Guernica, another political anti-Fascist piece. Calder remained an activist all his life, donating artwork and money and supporting the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Ghost, 1964. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Mobil Blanc, 1971. MFA Boston

In 1943, at the age of 45, MoMA curated a lifetime retrospective of Calder’s work. Major exhibits followed in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Bombay. In 1952, he won the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. His works were acquired by every major museum in the world. As his fame grew, so did the scale of the pieces, especially in the form of “stabiles” (stationary sculptures).

And the commissions continued. Acoustic Ceiling (1953) for the university theater in Caracas; multi-sculpture installations for Sao Paolo (1954) and Rio (1959); La Spirale (1958) for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; Teodelapio (1960, at 59′ the largest stabile he built at that time) by a railway station in Italy; Three Quintains (1964) for LACMA; La Grande vitesse (1969) in Michigan; and Jerusalem Stabile (1976) were among many.

Saurien, 1975. A stabile in NYC

Eagle, 1971. At Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

In a time when abstraction was not an easily accepted form or art (there are still people today who do not like it), the public commissions were met with much resistance. But I think part of his genius was bringing abstract art out and accessible. He may have joked that his “fanmail is enormous, everyone is unde 6,” but the truth is his works have become beloved cultural icons of the cities and places that have them.

The Jousters, 1963. The Getty Center LA

Encompassing painting, abstraction, sculpture, visual and performance arts, Calder worked in many mediums – paint, aluminum, wood, plaster and bronze. His studio always looked like a mechanic workshop rather than an artist’s. He designed tapestries, commercial wallpaper, and stage sets. He illustrated books and made posters, prints and jewelry. Even his toaster and kitchen utensils were self-made. He had a prolific body of work. In an attempt to complete a Calder catalogue, his grandson identified over 16,000 objects. That’s one work per day for 45 years.

But his lasting legacy is in the mathematician/engineer pioneering kinetic art. The words “mobile” and “stabile” are now part of the lexicon of art history. His art is both avant-garde and iconic. He invented wire sculpture, brought abstract art to a wider audience and changed the landscape of public spaces. The same way that Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists redefined what painting could be, Calder redefined what sculpture could be.