Alexander Calder

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Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder
Born
Alexander Calder
NationalityUnited States
EducationStevens Institute of Technology, Art Students League of New York
Known forSculpture
MovementKinetic Sculpture

Alexander Calder (July 22 1898 – November 11 1976), also known as Sandy Calder, was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile. In addition to mobile and stabile sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs and tapestry and designed carpets.

Childhood

Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22 1898, Calder came from a family of artists. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them located in Philadelphia. Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[1] Calder’s parents were married on February 22, 1895. His older sister, Margaret “Peggy” Calder, was two years his senior. Her married name was Margaret Calder Hayes, and she was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.[2]

In 1902, at the age of four, Calder posed for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub that is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In that same year, he completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.[3]

Three years later, when Calder was seven and his sister was nine, 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, Calder’s mother took him to the Tournament of Roses and he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder’s wire circus shows.[6]

In 1909, when Calder was in the fourth grade, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as Christmas gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped. These sculptures are frequently cited as early examples of Calder’s skill.[7]

In 1910, Stirling Calder’s rehabilitation was complete and the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where he briefly attended the Germantown Academy, and then to Croton-on-Hudson in New York.[8] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by the painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. As Calder described:

We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights.[9]

After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended Yonkers High.

In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.[10] He began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915. During Alexander Calder’s high school years between 1912 and 1915, the Calder 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 in the class of 1915.

Early years

Although Calder’s parents encouraged his creativity as a child, they discouraged their children from becoming artists, knowing that it was an uncertain and financially difficult career. In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering after learning about the discipline from a classmate at Lowell High School named Hyde Lewis. Stirling Calder arranged for his son's enrollment at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. During his freshman year, Calder stayed in Castle Stevens, a 40-room Victorian mansion that was originally a summer home of the Stevens family. In 1959, Castle Stevens was demolished and replaced in 1962 by the 14-story Wesley J. Howe Administration Building.

It was a beautiful room in a square tower, really a wonderful room, with windows looking up and down the river and across—it was all windows.[11]

Calder joined the football team during his freshman year at Stevens and practiced with the team all four years, but he never played in a game. He also played Lacrosse, at which he was more successful. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He excelled in the subject of mathematics.

In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1917, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.

I learned to talk out of the side of my mouth and have never been quite able to correct it since.[12]

Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919. For the next several years, he worked a variety of engineering jobs, including working as an assistant to a hydraulics engineer and engineer in a Canadian logging camp, but he was not content in any of the roles.

Red Mobile, 1956. Painted sheet metal and metal rods, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

In June 1922, Calder started work as a fireman in the boiler room of the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder woke on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. Calder called this experience an "inspirational vision" and he continued to refer to it throughout his life. As 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.

Art career

Having decided to become an artist, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. Whilst a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette which landed him a job working with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, sketching a number of studies on circus themes and sculpting a number of wire frame circus animals and carnival performers. Upon graduating, Calder moved to Paris to continue his studies in art. He took his wire model circus with him and gave elaborately improvised shows recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his "Cirque Calder"[1] (now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde, and Calder began charging an entrance fee to see his two hour show of a circus that he could pack into a suitcase.[2][3]

In 1928, Calder held his first solo show at a commercial gallery at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. In 1934 he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

He spent much of the next decade criss-crossing the Atlantic to give shows in Europe and America. On one transatlantic steamer, he met his wife, Louisa James, 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. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.

File:Alexander Calder Mobile.jpg
An Alexander Calder mobile, c. 1943

The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire modeling 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 Duchamp would ultimately dub as "'mobiles". He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. However, it was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys.

By the end of 1931, he had quickly moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room. From this, Calder's true "mobiles" were born. At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Arp to differentiate them from mobiles.

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). Calder continued to give "Cirque Calder" performances but also worked with Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets with Erik Satie.

During the World War II, Calder attempted to join up as a marine but was rejected. Instead, he continued to sculpt, but a scarcity of metal lead to him producing work in carved wood. After the war, Calder held several major retrospective exhibitions, including one in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943.

Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. His mobile, International Mobile was the centerpiece of the exhibition and hangs in 2006 where it was placed in 1949.

In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Notable examples are ".125" for JFK Airport in 1957 and "La Spirale" for UNESCO in Paris 1958. Calder's largest sculpture, at 20.5 m high, was "El Sol Rojo", constructed for the Olympic games in Mexico City.

In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.

In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile “La Grande Vitesse” located in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first public work of art in the United States to be funded with federal monies; acquired with funds granted from the then new National Endowment for the Arts under its “Art for Public Places” program.

In 1973 Calder was commissioned by Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size DC-8-62 as a "flying canvas", In 1975, Calder completed a second plane, this time a Boeing 727-227, as a tribute to the U.S. Bicentennial.

Calder died on November 11 1976, shortly following the opening of another major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Calder had been working on a third plane, entitled Tribute to Mexico, when he died.

On January 10, 1977, Calder was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford.

Reporter: How do you know when its time to stop [working]?
Calder: When it's suppertime.
- From a television interview

Selected works

Man, a "stabile" by Alexander Calder; Terre des Hommes (Expo 67 fairground), Saint Helen's Island, Montreal
File:Alexander Calder Cheval Rouge 1.jpg
Cheval Rouge (Red Horse), 1974, in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Flamingo, 1974, in the Federal Plaza, Chicago
Eagle, 1971, Seattle, Washington
  • Dog (1909), folded brass sheet; this was made as a present for Calder's parents
  • The Flying Trapeze (1925), oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in.
  • Elephant (c. 1928), wire and wood, 11 1/2 x 5 3/4 x 29.2 in.
  • Aztec Josephine Baker (c. 1929), wire, 53" x 10" x 9". A representation of Josephine Baker the exuberant lead dancer from La Révue Nègre at the Folies Bergère.
  • Untitled (1931), wire, wood and motor; one of the first kinetic mobiles.
  • Feathers (1931), wire, wood and paint; first true mobile, although designed to stand on a desktop
  • Cone d'ebene (1933), ebony, metal bar and wire; early suspended mobile (first was made in 1932).
  • Form Against Yellow (1936), sheet metal, wire, plywood, string and paint; wall- supported mobile.
  • Devil Fish (1937), sheet metal, bolts and paint; first piece made from a model.
  • 1939 New York World's Fair (maquette) (1938), sheet metal, wire, wood, string and paint
  • Necklace (c. 1938), brass wire, glass and mirror
  • Sphere Pierced by Cylinders (1939), wire and paint [4]; the first of many floor standing, life size stabiles (predating Anthony Caro's plinthless sculptures by two decades)
  • Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile); design for the stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • Black Beast (1940), sheet metal, bolts and paint; freestanding plinthless stabile)
  • S-Shaped Vine (1946), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile)
  • Sword Plant (1947) sheet metal, wire and paint (Standing Mobile)
  • Snow Flurry (1948), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile)
  • .125 (1957), steel plate, rods and paint
  • La Spirale (1958), steel plate, rod and paint, 360" high; public monumental mobile for Maison de l'U.N.E.S.C.O., Paris
  • Teodelapio (1962), steel plate and paint, monumental stabile, Spoleto, Italy
  • Man (1967) stainless steel plate, bolts and paint, 65' x 83' x 53', monumental stabile, Montreal Canada
  • Eagle (1971), steel plate, bolts and paint, 38'9" x 32'8" x 32'8", Seattle, Washington

See Also

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.herbertpalmergallery.com/main_pages/artists/calder_nanette_bio.html
  2. ^ Hayes, Margaret Calder, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir. Middlebury, VT: Paul S Eriksson, 1977.
  3. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 13.
  4. ^ See website (Wikipedia blacklisted URL) -- www.suite101.com/article.cfm/american_artists/81069
  5. ^ http://www.calder.org/
  6. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, pp. 21-22.
  7. ^ http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/calder/calder_childhood.html
  8. ^ http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/calder/calder_childhood.html
  9. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 31.
  10. ^ http://www.calder.org/SETS_SUB/life/life_chron_results.php3?
  11. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 39.
  12. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 47.

External links

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