At the age of nine, the twentieth-century American sculptor Alexander Calder drew a self-portrait — a picture of a boy working on a block of wood with a hacksaw, a broad smile of contentment on his face. Every artist produces art that expresses in one way or another his personality. What distinguishes Calder from virtually every other artist, however, is that his own personality was so happy, apparently from birth. The joy he childishly depicted at nine never faded but matured into the uncomplicated, playful, happy art of his adulthood.
Repeatedly commissioned in later life to fill public spaces with his sculpture, Calder left an enormous body of popular work. There are his mobiles, the hanging sculptures he was renowned for inventing, like the brightly colored one that swings above the lobby in New York’s Kennedy Airport. And then there are what he called his “stablies,” massive structures of bent metal, like the bright-red sculpture that stands in Chicago’s Federal Center plaza.
In celebration of his centenary, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has gathered over 260 pieces for its exhibition Alexander Calder: 1898-1976, which opened on March 29 and runs until July 12. This retrospective is particularly noteworthy, for Calder’s mobiles and stabiles are almost all inevitably isolated in their public spaces. Not just in the airports and office buildings in which many of them are displayed, but even in sculpture gardens and museums, the works are difficult to place in their artistic and historical contexts. The National Gallery’s show allows viewers to see for the first time just how Calder grew as an artist, developing his sense of line, color, and motion. As he learned to amalgamate his love of invention and his whimsy with his training in art and engineering, he created a wholly new form of art. And yet, what visitors will at last take away from the exhibition is mostly a sense that there is no inner darkness or political agenda running through Calder’s work, but only his light-hearted attention to serious-hearted art.
As a young man, Calder had planned a different career. Born and reared near Philadelphia, he showed an early talent for construction, creating toys, games, and jewelry for his sister’s dolls. Although his father and his grandfather were both classical sculptors, and his mother a painter, the family urged him to find a more lucrative profession, and in 1915, at the age of eighteen, he enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, as a student of mechanical engineering. After graduation, however, the young man quickly grew dissatisfied with engineering and began studies at New York’s Art Students’ League in 1923.
Calder’s paintings from his student days are unimpressive, the best of them The Flying Trapeze — an early example of the circus scenes that would remain one of his favorite subjects. More important than the content, however, is what the painting reveals about even the young Calder’s fascination with motion. While detailed bodies of trapeze artists soar above a stationary and faceless crowd, protective nets form swooping rectangles and triangles — shapes that bear a strong similarity to the ones Calder would use later in his monumental steel sculptures.
Intent on improving his painting, Calder went to Paris in 1926. He managed, however, to do little painting there. What he did create was an enormously popular miniature circus. Calder captivated his friends with little clowns, sword swallowers, lions, and horses, all made of wire. Each act was a surprise of movement and cleverly timed tricks. The National Gallery’s exhibition includes a videotape of Calder ring-leading his wire circus, and it reveals his clever humor and joyful manner.
It was natural for Calder simply to adapt his techniques to a larger scale. Using wire in the same way his teacher, John Sloan, had taught him to use a brush to draw, Calder captured in formal outlines people, animals, and even classic themes. In the wire sculpture Rearing Stallion, for example, the stallion’s jutting chest and arched back make the creature look ready to leap off its stand. Calder’s artistic training taught him the economy of line necessary to shape the beautiful figure, and his mechanical training taught him how to balance it on just two pieces of wire.
In 1930, however, Calder caught the modernist, abstract bug. Visiting the studio of Piet Mondrian, he experienced what he called “the shock that started things.” “Though I had heard the word ‘modern’ before, I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract,'” he later wrote. “So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract.” He joined Abstraction-Creation, a group of artists formed in opposition to the Surrealists, and in 1931 held his first show.
Given his friendships with the Parisian avant-garde — Man Ray, Joan Miro, Jean Arp, Fernand Leger — Calder’s modernist transition is not surprising, and pieces from the early 1930s reveal the shift in his art. The works he called “constellations” are made in either black and white or primary colors. With bolder wire lines and simple, geometric shapes, the result is more abstract and more professional than he had achieved earlier. In Little Ball with Counterweight, for example, a white ball sits on a black square table supported by a wire tripod. A straight piece of black wire with a small red ball at the end shoots up from the white ball, and another black wire curves into the space below the table. In this study in perfect balance, the little white ball remains in place with simple color and simple lines.
Calder’s ultimate aim, however, was motion. “I suggested to Mondrian,” he wrote, “that perhaps it would be fun to make [his] rectangles oscillate, and he, with a very serious countenance, said: ‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.'” In 1933, Calder created his earliest and simplest mobile — Cone d’ebene, three ebony pieces attached to two metal bars hanging from the ceiling. During the 1930s and ’40s, Calder poured out his increasingly complicated and brightly colored mobiles, their counterweights balancing more and more delicate wire rods and panels, their forms and titles laced with his humor. Some hung from ceilings, some stood on the floor, some were small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, and together they brought Calder acclaim from the art world.
The number of mobiles in the National Gallery exhibition is impressive, but perhaps even more helpful for forming an impression of Calder’s career is the display of the drawings and paintings that sparked his drive to work in three- dimensional sculpture. Focusing on Calder’s career from the 1920s to the 1950s, the National Gallery includes Calder’s later accomplishments as a public artist only glancingly, with miniature models standing in for his twenty-, thirty-, and forty-foot sculptures. On view, however, are many privately owned works rarely shown, including his wire constellations, jewelry, and early mobiles. Several others have never been shown in public before: a wire sculpture of Calvin Coolidge, for example, and the simply titled Black Frame — a cross between sculpture and painting in which a sphere, a fiat circle, and a helix rotate, powered by a hidden motor and surrounded by a black frame.
Calder never took himself or his art too seriously, and he consequently ran the risk of not being taken seriously by others. Some critics claim that his range is too limited, his style now too familiar, and there are few scholarly studies of his work. Marla Prather, curator of the National Gallery’s exhibit, points out that most books about Calder are picture books that do not distinguish his major artworks from his toys and the things he made for his wife Louisa’s kitchen. One exception is the 1991 Alexander Calder, written by Joan Matter, a Rutgers University professor of art history. Analyzing Calder’s work in its historical context, Marter explores how Calder “relates to French modernism, how he relates to American art, what he contributes to kineticism, and the related contemporary art and technology of the time of his creations.”
With only Calder’s work shown, the National Gallery’s exhibition will not give viewers much of this context. But they will at least gain a sense of Calder’s own development. His world-famous mobiles were the result of a long process, and through this new retrospective, visitors can watch that process unfold.
It is not surprising that Calder became the first American sculptor to achieve an international reputation. He came from a family devoted to art, studied with some of America’s finest teachers, befriended some of the most influential modern artists, and developed a new form of sculpture. But his work, even at its most abstract, appeals to children, their parents, and art buffs alike for he added to his modernist talent and ingenuity what even the least sophisticated viewer can sense: There is in this man’s life and work something few other artists have, something deeply and genuinely happy.
Pia Nordlinger is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
