Artists & Works

STYLE: KINETIC ART, ABSTRACTION

Alexander Calder originally planned to become an engineer and received an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1918. In 1923, he committed to becoming an artist and studied at the Art Students League in New York. After a job illustrating the Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey Circus for a newspaper, the circus became a lifelong interest and many of his works were to reference the circus, including a miniature circus made from wire and other media, which led to the creation of the mobile works. Calder’s first mobiles were powered by motors, but he soon learned to make works that would undulate on their own .Calder’s commitment to making abstract art was inspired by his exposure to the work of Piet Mondrian, among other major abstract artists he met in Paris during the twenties.

Calder’s mobiles met with wide acclaim and the respect of his fellow artists and writers, including a famous essay written about them by Jean-Paul Sartre. He completed many major public art projects and his work is now featured in all major museum collections of modern and contemporary art.
This work on paper from the final stage of Calder’s career is evidence of Calder’s enjoyment in creating bright abstract watercolors and gouaches even as he was engaged in sculptural projects. He painted throughout his career.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Phyllis Tuchman, The Smithsonian, 5/01
"For him, circles and arcs resembled planets in orbit--monochromatic grounds had the look of infinity...
After rising early and going to the studio, Calder would return to the main house for a simple lunch with a glass or two or even three of red wine. If he'd been working on a mobile, he'd probably spend the afternoon painting gouaches...

Calder, it is clear, marched to his own drummer; no 24 hours were ever alike for him. There was always a new work, a visitor, a trip, another show. In many ways his life resembled the way Jean-Paul Sartre in 1946 famously explained that "what [a mobile] may do at a given moment will be determined by the time of day, the sun, the temperature or the wind."
When Calder died of a heart attack on November 11, 1976, his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art had been on view for a month. Celebrities had been at the opening gala dinner; hundreds of visitors had poured into the galleries daily; and hundreds of thousands had watched coverage of the show on television. The artist was at the top of his powers. He belonged to a rare species--a person who could touch the lives of young and old, rich and poor, the man, woman and child on the street, or the President of the United States. Learning of Calder's death, Gerald Ford said, "Art has lost a genius." Part of that genius was his ability to transform complex visual images into simple and direct works of art that possess the gift of making us smile each time we see them."

Robert Hughes, Time,5/04/98
Bringing metaphors of nature back into abstraction (or rather, perhaps, using abstraction to distill natural processes) lay at the core of his finest work. This he shared with Miro, whose sense of nature never deserted him and who scarcely ever painted a pure abstraction...

Calder never forgot a sight he had at dawn from the deck of a freighter going through the Panama Canal in 1921--the sun rising in the east, the still silver moon setting in the west. Cosmic clockwork displaying itself. No wonder many of his sculptures of the '30s resemble planetary models, abstract orreries. Another idea he seems to have got from Miro was that of the work halfway between painting and sculpture, hung on the wall, declaring itself to be pictorial but with three-dimensional elements.