Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder
1898-1976
The American sculptor Alexander Calder is famed for his innovative ‘mobiles’, delicate yet playful moveable sculptures that make chance and interaction with their environment their core aesthetic. After graduating with a degree in engineering, Calder had a philosophical realisation that inspired him to redirect his path toward becoming an artist. The sculptures, graceful and balanced yet dense with kinetic potentials, which he went on to make continue to fascinate viewers with their uncanny perfection and whimsical, child‐like joy. Producing ever‐changing drawings in space, the ‘mobiles’ defined the visual language of non‐objectivity, predating the later experiments of Installation and Performance Art.
The American sculptor Alexander Calder is famed for his innovative ‘mobiles’, delicate yet playful moveable sculptures that make chance and interaction with their environment their core aesthetic. Activated by motors, wind or human touch, these sculptures were translated into large outdoor installations that today grace public spaces around the world.
Born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania into a family of artists, Calder was encouraged to create since his childhood, having produced his first sculpture at age ten. Despite his evident talent handling materials, he initially did not intend to become an artist. After high school he enrolled in the Stevens Institute of Technology, obtaining a degree in engineering in 1919. His choice to become an artist came rather suddenly in 1922, while he was working as a fireman in the boiler room of a ship bound for San Francisco. From its deck he happened to see both the rising sun and the setting moon, which prompted a lifelong fascination for the precise motions of the celestial bodies and the sublime workings of the universe.
Hoping to translate these philosophical concerns into art, in 1923 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. During this period he also worked as an illustrator, spending two weeks sketching scenes from the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1925. The circus became another lifelong interest, materialising in his ‘Cirque Calder’, an assemblage of mechanical toys produced in 1926 after he moved to Paris. Composed of wire, cloth and other found materials, this sculpture displayed performers, animals and props that could be manually manipulated by Calder to stage itinerant performances.
While in Paris, Calder became acquainted with avant‐garde artists such as Léger, Arp and Duchamp, who were particularly impressed with his work. After a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1931 where he saw his coloured paper rectangles and his moveable compositional experiments, Calder chose to fully embrace abstract art, joining the influential Abstraction‐Création group.
In 1931 Calder, wanting to replicate the motion of stars and other natural elements, created his first kinetic sculptures, which became his signature artworks. Generally composed of wires, strings and metals, these delicate objects were suspended in space and designed to move, their relation to space subtly yet constantly subject to change. Forcefully departing from traditional notions of sculptures as static objects, these works, dubbed ‘mobiles’ by Duchamp, were activated by motors, wind or human touch, integrating ephemerality and immateriality into their aesthetic. Immediately successful for their conceptual connotation and formal originality, Calder produced his ‘mobiles’ in infinitely variable forms and sizes, creating by the end of the decade monumental outdoor moving sculptures.
Between the 1940s and 1950s Calder’s art was subject to numerous international exhibitions which attracted the attention of celebrated critics, including the Existentialist philosopher Jean‐Paul Sartre. In his later years, Calder produced primarily large‐scale works for public spaces, continuing to exhibit his smaller works in private galleries and major institutions. In 1976, shortly after the opening of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Calder died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
Calder’s sculptures, graceful and balanced yet dense with kinetic potentials, continue to fascinate viewers with their uncanny perfection and whimsical, child‐like joy. Producing ever changing drawings in space, the ‘mobiles’ defined the visual language of non‐objectivity, predating the later experiments of Installation and Performance Art.
DERRIÈRE LE MIROIR
Alexander Calder
French for ‘Behind the Mirror’, ‘Derrière Le Miroir’ was the hugely influential Parisian publication which ran from 1946 to 1982 with the aim to make artworks accessible to the general public. Produced by Galerie Maeght in the period following World War II, ‘Derrière Le Miroir’ highlights the work of Modernist thinkers and artists, many of whom had returned to France from exile, including Giacometti, Kelly, Miró, Steinberg and Alexander Calder.
Identifiable for their use of primary colours and bold black lines, Calder’s lithographs depict abstract entities like biomorphic forms, geometric shapes and playful natural forms like a smiling sun. These
lithographs more closely recall Calder’s ‘Mobiles’, his signature works which attempt to imitate the movement of stars and other natural forms.
However, Calder also submitted to ‘Derrière Le Miroir’ lithographs containing human‐like forms and realistic scenes, straying from the visual language of geometric shapes and suggestive lines that he is so widely associated with. A notable example is ‘The Card Player’ (1975), which depicts five men, rendered almost like caricatures, sitting around a table playing cards. Though in form and subject ‘The Card Player’ is divergent from his more recognisable works, it nonetheless is consistent in its application of colour and employment of carefully considered colour relations to construct a lively composition.
Across the 40 years that the publication was active Calder contributed countless lithographs to ‘Derrière Le Miroir’. Like all other works included in the publication, Calder’s lithographs are noneditioned and unsigned, though some include his initials in the corner of the prints, a choice that made them affordable and accessible. Yet, the prints are nonetheless coveted, for they narrate on paper the various forms and colour techniques he employed in his monumental sculptures.
FLYING COLORS
Alexander Calder
In 1972, Braniff Airlines, a great collector of works by Alexander Calder, commissioned the artist to create designs for their airplanes. Using the exterior of the plane as his canvas, Calder developed six designs which were translated into maquettes for proposal.
Calder’s designs for the ‘Flying Colors’ project are full of a dynamism and luminosity capable of filling even viewers thousands of feet below with joy. Bold blues, reds, yellows, oranges and black assemble into his characteristic playful shapes. Wavy strokes of red are flanked by coloured spots while growing fields of orange, yellow and black overlap and flow into each other.
Of the designs submitted for ‘Flying Colors’, ‘Humor’ was the winner and sections of the design were converted into an editioned series of lithographic prints in 1974. Though planes are inherently connected to life and motion, concepts not quite as easily associated with the flatness of the lithograph, they are nonetheless present in his ‘Flying Colors’ works on paper. Calder renders these undeniably abstract forms in a manner that gives them life, a sense that they are growing and moving.
These designs were brought to life on the Braniff plane as they were painted by a specialist crew, with Calder having added whimsical details himself onto the engine. Unveiled in 1975 at Washington D.C.’s Dulles Airport in the presence of First Lady Betty Ford, the final airplane, which was devoid of the airline name but did bear the signature of the artist, emerged as an exceptional functional work of art.
LA MÉMORIE ÉLÉMENTAIRE
Alexander Calder
In 1978, Alexander Calder released ‘La Mémoire Élémentaire’, a portfolio of 12 mystical lithographs which positively exude a child‐like joy. Composed of pyramids, spirals, circles and celestial bodies, the prints of ‘La Mémoire Élémentaire’ abound with an undeniable sense of life.
Of the various forms of ‘La Mémoire Élémentaire’, rendered in Calder’s classic paired down colour palette of black, blue, red, orange and yellow, among the standout features are the pyramids. Likely based on the famous pyramids of Giza, the pyramids and their surroundings were subjects that Calder frequently returned to across his oeuvre, with the structure even appearing in his mobiles. In his works on paper, such attraction is likely indebted to the pyramid’s four‐sided nature, a structure that allowed him to create direct colour contrasts.
While some prints consist entirely of pyramids constructed of varying colour contrasts, others share focus with bouncing ball‐like forms of solid or patterned colour. Other works place at their centre natural and celestial bodies, including twisting and turning leafy branch‐like forms as well as the sun, stars and moon. These latter forms recall Calder’s interest in the motion of stars and other celestial bodies, those which inspired the formation of his mobiles. Indeed, in being included in the same portfolio as the enigmatic pyramids, the celestial forms of ‘La Mémoire Élémentaire’ recall the original alignment of the pyramids to the stars.
MOBILES
Alexander Calder
In 1931, Alexander Calder first produced his dynamic, awe‐inspiring and ground‐breaking abstract constellations of variously coloured shapes, now known as ‘Mobiles’. These kinetic sculptures hang from ceilings or jut out from inventive plinths as they constantly move to redefine the spaces around them.
Calder’s ‘Mobiles’ emerged out of his desire to replicate the motion of stars and other natural elements in visual art, which found its form following a visit to Mondrian’s studio in Paris. As he recalled in an interview ‘I was impressed by several coloured rectangles he had on the wall. Shortly after that I made some mobiles’. Mondrian refused to make abstract art physically move, inspiring Calder’s response by way of his ‘Mobiles’.
These kinetic sculptures deemed ‘Mobiles’ by Duchamp connect a series of metal shapes to wires, creating fantastic biomorphic forms that delicately, but nonetheless impactfully, move within space. The practice of making them is referred to as ‘drawing in space’ with the thinness of the wire evocative of the immediacy of the drawn line.
Perfectly balancing form and colour, ‘Mobiles’ were novel for their nature as sculptures that physically and independently engage with space in a manner that is both conceptually rich and undeniably enjoyable. Moving at their own pace through space, activated by touch or wind, the slow movement of ‘Mobiles’ has consequential effects on viewers as they seem to insist that viewers too slow down and meditate on the moments of quiet movement.
The power of Calder’s ‘Mobiles’ was felt across the art world, sparking awe in audiences and artists, with the likes of Martha Graham even using them in her own performances. Calder continued to produce ‘Mobiles’ for the duration of his short like, assembling small, contemplative structures as well as monumental outdoor sculptures.
