Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976)
Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898, in Lawnton, Pennsylvania. The son of artists—his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter—he grew up in this world and was encouraged to create from an early age. At nine, he made his first sculptures, a small dog and a duck, as Christmas presents for his parents. They were made from cut and shaped pieces of brass sheet. From then on, it was clear that he had a talent for making things.
Despite this talent, Calder did not imagine himself becoming a sculptor. He graduated in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919 and held various jobs, as a hydraulic engineer and an automotive engineer, a timekeeper at a logging camp and a fireman in a ship's boiler room.
He awoke to artistic life after watching the dawn aboard a ship on which he was working. Calder is said to have been enchanted by what he saw and, from that moment on, decided that he would become an artist.
In 1923, he moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League. Still in New York, he worked as a painter and illustrator; the latter job, at the National Police Gazette, opened the doors to his artistic career, as the paper sent him to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to sketch circus scenes for two weeks in 1925. His contact with the circus held his interest for a long time and later led him to create the Cirque Calder, by then in Paris, in 1926. The Cirque Calder consisted of miniature performers, circus objects and animals made of wire, wood, leather, fabric and other materials, inspired by what he had observed at the Ringling Brothers Circus. The pieces were designed to be manipulated by Calder, so that he could take them wherever he wanted. His first performance was for a group of friends and colleagues; he later presented it in Paris and New York to great success, and the Cirque Calder continued to be performed for forty years.
Through his work on the Cirque Calder, the sculptor discovered that he liked working with wire, and he made many other sculptures until, in 1928, he held his first exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery in New York; after that came one exhibition after another, in New York, Paris and Berlin.
On one of these exhibition trips, Calder met Louisa James, grandniece of the writer Henry James, and married her in 1931. On these trips Alexander also befriended 20th-century intellectuals such as Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp. After a visit to Piet Mondrian's studio, where he came across a wall of colored paper rectangles that Mondrian frequently rearranged in his experiments, Calder decided to paint abstract canvases, only to confirm that he preferred sculpture to painting. He was then invited to join Abstraction-Création, an influential group of artists that included Arp, Mondrian and Hélion. That same year, 1931, Alexander created his first kinetic sculpture, driven by cranks and a motor, which Duchamp nicknamed a "mobile" because it moved; the sculptor soon abandoned the mechanical forms when he realized he could make works moved by air currents. Jean Arp, wishing to distinguish the non-kinetic works from the kinetic ones, called the stationary objects "stabiles".
In 1933, he left Paris with his wife and returned to the United States, settling in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he had bought an old farm and turned one of its buildings into his studio. His daughters were born there: Sandra in 1935 and Mary in 1939. He also joined the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where he held his first show in 1934, while continuing to perform the Cirque Calder.
At the same time, he began making his first outdoor sculptures. In 1937, Calder created his first large sculpture made entirely of bolted metal, Devil Fish, shown in the exhibition Stabiles and Mobiles at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.
From then on, Alexander made many more, mostly on commission, such as the Mercury Fountain, which symbolizes Spanish Republican resistance to fascism, among many other beautiful works. With the shortage of steel caused by World War II, the sculptor began to use carved pieces of wood suspended by wire, which Sweeney and Duchamp called "Constellations", although Calder had not intended them to represent anything in particular. These works were shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1943.
The 1940s and 1950s were very productive for Alexander Calder, who made more and more sculptures, large and small, and received countless commissions and exhibitions, including retrospectives, at major institutions such as the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Galerie Louis Carré in Paris; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the Third International Sculpture Exhibition; and Galerie Maeght, among others.
In 1976, he was invited by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for yet another retrospective of his work, entitled "Calder's Universe", and he died a few weeks later. He is considered one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century.
Curiosities
His first works were moved by hand by the viewer. But after 1932, he found that if he suspended the forms, they would move by the simple action of air currents. Although mobiles look simple, their assembly is very complex, requiring a carefully studied system of weight and counterweight so that the movement has rhythm and lasts.
For his mobiles he used very unexpected, ordinary everyday objects, such as coffee cans, sardine tins, matchboxes and pieces of colored glass. His favorite materials were wood and, later, metal, strikingly painted in primary colors.
Calder visited Brazil three times and was passionate about samba. He adapted the steps of its rhythm to his works, giving rise to the "samba rattles". He lived in Rio, in the Botafogo neighborhood, and made countless friends from every social class. Among them was the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who wrote about the sculptor for 30 years.
