Sculpture In Paris in 1926, Calder began to create his
Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, cloth, string, rubber, cork, and other found objects. He likened his use of these miscellaneous objects, often old or discarded, to
Kurt Schwitters' use of found objects in his artwork, describing Schwitter's
Merz as the "[rejected], what is cast off". Designed to be transportable (it grew to fill five large suitcases), the circus was presented on both sides of the Atlantic. Soon, his
Cirque Calder (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented
wire sculpture, or "drawing in space", and in 1929 had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet.
Hi!, in the collection of the
Honolulu Museum of Art, is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter
Jules Pascin, a friend from the cafes of
Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to
Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing
abstract art, toward which he had already been tending. ,
Jerusalem, Israel It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, actuated by motors, that would become his signature artworks. Calder's kinetic sculptures are regarded as being among the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors. Dating from 1931, Calder's abstract sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened "mobiles" by
Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive". However, Calder found that the motorized works sometimes became monotonous in their prescribed movements. His solution, arrived at by 1932, was hanging sculptures that derived their motion from touch or air currents. The earliest of these were made of wire, found objects, and wood, a material that Calder used since the 1920s. The hanging mobiles were followed in 1934 by outdoor standing mobiles in industrial materials, which were set in motion by the open air. The wind mobiles featured abstract shapes delicately balanced on pivoting rods that moved with the slightest current of air, allowing for a natural shifting play of forms and spatial relationships. Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static,
abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by
Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Calder created a small group of works from around this period with a hanging base-plate, for example
Lily of Force (1945),
Baby Flat Top (1946), and
Red is Dominant (1947). He also made works such as
Seven Horizontal Discs (1946), which, like
Lily of Force (1945) and
Baby Flat Top (1946), he was able to dismantle and send by mail for his upcoming show at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, despite the stringent size restrictions imposed by the postal service at the time. His 1946 show at Carré, which was organized by Duchamp, was composed mainly of hanging and standing mobiles, and it made a huge impact, as did the essay for the catalogue by French philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1951, Calder devised a new kind of sculpture, related structurally to his constellations. These "towers", affixed to the wall with a nail, consist of wire struts and beams that jut from the wall, with moving objects suspended from their armatures. While not denying Calder's power as a sculptor, an alternate view of the history of twentieth-century art cites Calder's turning away in the early 1930s from his motor-powered works in favor of the wind-driven mobile as marking a decisive moment in Modernism's abandonment of its earlier commitment to the
machine as a critical and potentially expressive new element in human affairs. According to this viewpoint, the mobile also marked an abandonment of Modernism's larger goal of a rapprochement with science and engineering, and with unfortunate long-term implications for contemporary art.
Monumental sculptures , on
Saint Helen's Island Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montreal, Quebec, Canada In 1934, Calder made his first outdoor works in his
Roxbury, Connecticut studio, using the same techniques and materials as his smaller works. Exhibited outside, Calder's initial standing mobiles moved elegantly in the breeze, bobbing and swirling in natural, spontaneous rhythms. The first few outdoor works were too delicate for strong winds, which forced Calder to rethink his fabrication process. By 1936 he changed his working methods and began to create smaller-scale
maquettes that he then enlarged to monumental size. The small maquette, the first step in the production of a monumental sculpture, was considered by Calder a sculpture in its own right. Larger works used the classic enlargement techniques of traditional sculptors, including his father and grandfather. Drawing his designs on craft paper, he enlarged them using a grid. His large-scale works were created according to his exact specifications, while also allowing him the liberty to adjust or correct a shape or line if necessary. In the 1950s, Calder concentrated more on producing monumental sculptures (his
agrandissements period), and public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are
.125 (1957) for
JFK Airport in New York,
Spirale (1958) for
UNESCO in Paris, and
Trois disques, commissioned for
Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture, at high, was
El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the
Estadio Azteca for the
1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in
Mexico City. Many of his
public art works were commissioned by renowned architects; for example,
I.M. Pei commissioned
La Grande Voile, a 25-ton, stabile sculpture for the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. Most of Calder's monumental stationary and mobile sculptures were made after 1962 at Etablissements Biémont in
Tours, France. He would create a model of his work, the engineering department would scale it up under Calder's direction, and technicians would complete the actual metalwork — all under Calder's watchful eye. Stabiles were made in steel plate, then painted. An exception was
Trois disques, in
stainless steel at tall, commissioned by
International Nickel Company of Canada. In 1958, Calder asked
Jean Prouvé to construct the steel base of
Spirale in France, a monumental mobile for the UNESCO site in Paris, while the top was fabricated in Connecticut. In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental "stabile" sculpture
La Grande Vitesse in
Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first civic sculpture in the United States to receive funding from the
National Endowment for the Arts. In 1971, Calder created his
Bent Propeller which was installed at the entrance of the
World Trade Center's North Tower in New York City. When
Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets. The sculpture stood in front of
7 World Trade Center until it was destroyed on
September 11, 2001. In 1973, the vermillion-colored public art sculpture
Four Arches was installed on Bunker Hill, Los Angeles to serve as "a distinctive landmark". The plaza site was designed in tiers to maximize the sculpture's visual effects. In 1974, Calder unveiled two sculptures,
Flamingo at Federal Plaza and
Universe at
Sears Tower, in Chicago, Illinois, accompanied by the exhibition
Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago which opened simultaneously with the unveiling of the sculptures. Originally meant to be constructed in 1977 for the Hart Senate Office Building,
Mountains and Clouds was not built until 1985 due to government budget cuts. The massive sheet-metal project, weighing 35 tons, spans the nine-story height of the building's atrium in Washington, D.C. Calder designed the maquette for the United States Senate in the last year of his life.
Theatrical productions Calder created stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including
Nucléa,
Horizon, and most notably,
Martha Graham's
Panorama (1935), a production of the
Erik Satie symphonic drama
Socrate (1936), and later,
Works in Progress (1968).
Works in Progress was a "ballet" conceived by Calder himself and produced at the
Rome Opera House, featuring an array of mobiles, stabiles, and large painted backdrops. Calder would describe some of his stage sets as dancers performing a choreography due to their rhythmic movement.
Painting and printmaking In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals. His projects from this period include pen-and-ink line drawings of animals for a 1931 publication of
Aesop's fables. As Calder's sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the early 1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. Calder also used prints for advocacy, as in poster prints from 1967 and 1969 protesting the
Vietnam War. As Calder's professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings were marketed, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available. Two years later, Braniff asked Calder to design a flagship for their fleet celebrating the U.S. Bicentennial. That piece, a Boeing 727-291 jet N408BN called the
Flying Colors of the United States, and nicknamed the 'Sneaky Snake' by its pilots (based on quirky flight tendencies), featured a rippled image of red, white and blue echoing a waving American flag. painted by Calder In 1975 Calder was commissioned to paint a
BMW 3.0 CSL automobile, which would be the first vehicle in the
BMW Art Car Project.
Jewelry Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many as gifts for friends. Several pieces reflect his fascination with art from Africa and other continents. They were mostly made of brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or fashioned rivets. Calder created his first pieces in 1906 at the age of eight for his sister's dolls using copper wire that he found in the street. In 1942, Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one by
Yves Tanguy to the opening of her New York gallery,
The Art of This Century, to demonstrate her equal loyalty to Surrealist and abstract art, examples of which she displayed in separate galleries. Others who were presented with Calder's pieces were the artist's close friend,
Georgia O'Keeffe;
Teeny Duchamp, wife of
Marcel Duchamp; Jeanne Rucar, wife of the filmmaker
Luis Buñuel; and
Bella Rosenfeld, wife of
Marc Chagall. ==Exhibitions==