Alexander Calder: Artist Biography
Inventor of the Mobile and Stabile Combined Engineering, Art, Circus
All the rage in the 1950's the mobile is a staple in art class. But this type of sculpture was only invented in the 1930's by an American son of the European avant-garde.
Alexander “Sandy” Calder (b. July 22, 1898 – d. November 11, 1976) was an internationally admired American sculptor and artist who is best known for making sculpture move. In the 1930’s, he combined engineering and art to invent the mobile, a kinetic abstract sculpture of metal pieces connected by wires or rods that are delicately balanced to float in space and move in response to surrounding air currents or the push of a finger.
Calder also created wire sculptures, paintings and jewellery, illustrated books, designed sets for the doyenne of modern dance, Martha Graham, created one-off art covering airplanes, and stabiles, which are free-standing, static abstract sculptures.
Early Work & Non-artistic Career
Born into a family of artists in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, to sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder and portrait painter Nanette Lederer Calder, both Calder and his older sister, Margaret Calder Hayes, were encouraged to be creative from childhood.
Calder created his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant, at the age of four. From 1906, even though his parents moved several times, Calder would always have a studio in each house where he would make various objects including his apocryphal 1909 Christmas gifts to his parents; a three-dimensional dog and a rocking duck out of brass sheeting.
Discouraged from pursuing a career as an artist, Calder initially trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He worked as an insurance salesman, rototiller salesman, and engineer, but could not seem to find his niche. While in the merchant marine, he experienced an epiphany that turned him to art when he woke off the coast of Guatemala to see a fiery sunrise and a silver moon on opposite horizons.
Fascination With The Circus
Calder studied at the Art Students’ League from 1923 to 1926 and worked as a freelance illustrator and toy designer. His fascination with the circus began in 1925 when he spent two weeks sketching at Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus on assignment for the National Police Gazette. In 1926 he began creating the first few figures of wire and wood which were later to grow into the Cirque Calder
When he moved to Paris to continue his studies later that year, he took these figures with him, and in 1927 began giving improvised shows with his miniature circus. The shows were popular with the European avant-garde including Joan Miró (who became a life-long friend), Jean Arp (who first coined the term “stabile”), Jean Cocteau, Frederick Kiesler, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp (who first coined the term “mobile”), Piet Mondrian, Jules Pascin, Fernand Léger, Tsugouharu Foujita and Antoine Pevsner. Calder was to spend the 1920’s and 1930’s travelling between North America and Europe giving performances, and would meet his wife, Louisa James, on a transatlantic steamer.
Even though he eventually moved beyond the Cirque Calder, the aesthetics and qualities of the circus, mainly suspense, surprise, spontaneity, humour, gaiety, whimsy, wit, glee and playfulness, would form the foundation for his work over the next 50 years.
Career Milestones
In 1928, Calder enjoyed his first solo show in the US at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. His first solo show in Paris was held at the Galerie Billiet in 1929.
Under the influence of the avant-garde, and especially of Miró and Mondrian, Calder began creating purely abstract art and experimented with mechanical mobiles of brightly coloured geometric shapes which were articulated by means of cranks and pulleys. By 1931 the first of Calder’s true mobiles had been created.
By 1943, Calder had created enough significant work to merit a major retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when he was merely 45. This was followed by similar exhibitions in Amsterdam, Berne and Rio de Janeiro and numerous commissions. In 1952, he won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 25th Venice Biennale.
By the 1950’s Calder was focusing on working with gouache and in creating monumental works that would harmonize with their urban surroundings such as La Spirale for UNESCO in 1958, and El Sol Rojo for the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City.
Although Calder’s mobiles could measure upwards of 40 feet (13.3m), the concept he invented captured the popular imagination with its lightness, balance and colour, and small mobiles became the rage as interior decoration in the 1950's.
Peace Activism
Eccentric even by artistic standards, Calder nonetheless emphasized harmony and wanted audiences to enjoy his work; he reportedly loved it when people burst out laughing. He was also active in the peace movement and protested against the Vietnam War. For this, he received the United Nations Peace Medal in 1975 and Gerald Ford’s offer of a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976. Calder declined Ford's offer, saying that his acceptance would imply his agreement with the government’s “harsh treatment meted out to conscientious objectors and deserters.”
He died in New York at age 78, one month after the opening of his latest retrospective exhibit and while working on a project to transform a third aeroplane into a “flying canvas”. In 1977 he was posthumously awarded the same Presidential Medal of Freedom he had declined a year ago.
Calder is best known for Aztec Josephine Baker, a suspended wire frame “portrait” of the dancer created in 1929, 1949’s International Mobile which hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and 1974’s monumental stabile, Flamingo, which stands in the Federal Plaza in Chicago.
Detailed information can be found at the Calder Foundation or by reading Anne Douglas' biography of Calder in Suite's American Artists section.
Curious for more? Please visit the article archives and e-mail me with your questions.
