Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976)
Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898 in Lawton - Pennsylvania. The son of artist parents, where his father was also a sculptor and his mother a painter, living with this universe was encouraged from an early age to create. At the age of nine he made his first sculptures, a small dog and a duck, to gift his parents for Christmas. They were made from pieces, cut and molded, from brass leaves. Since then it could be noticed that she had an ease in creating.
Despite this facility, Calder did not imagine a sculptor. He graduated in Engineering in 1919 from the Stevens Institute of Technology and had several jobs as a hydraulic engineer and automobile engineer, timekeeper in a logging field, and a firefighter in the bedroom of a boiler ship.
Desperated to artistic life after beholding the morning of a ship to which he was working, with this event Calder would have been delighted with what he had seen and from that moment on he decided that he would become an artist.
In 1923, moved to New York, and enrolled in the Art Students League. Still in NY, he worked as a painter and draftsman, this last work, at the National Police Gazette, opened the doors for his artistic career, since she had sent him to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey in order to hire him to sketch circus scenes at the Ringling Brothers Circus for two weeks in the year 1925. create the Cirque Calder, now in Paris in 1926. The circus Calder consisted of miniatures of artists and circus and animals, made with wires, wood, leather, fabric, among other materials that he had observed in the ringling. Brothers Circus. His sculptures were designed to be manipulated by Calder, in a way that he could take them wherever he wanted. His first presentation was for a group of friends and colleagues, to later learn in Paris and New Yorke, a highly successful presentation, making the performance of Cirque Calder to be executed for four years.
From this work with the Cirque Calder, the sculptor realized that he liked to work with wires and wires, making several other sculptures, until in 1928 Calder made his first exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery in New Yorke, and after that it was one after another, both in NY, as in Paris and Berlin.
On one of the trips of his expocission tour, Calder met Louisa James, the granddaughter of writer Henry James, and in 1931 he married her. In addition to meeting his wife on these trips, Alexander also became friends with 20th century intellectuals, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, James Johnson Sweeney, and Marcel Duchamp. After a visit to Piet Modrian's studio, when he came across a rectangle wall, made of colored paper, which Modrian often fitted for replacement experience, Calder decided to paint abstract canvases, just to make sure that he preferred the sculpture than painting. Consequently, he was invited to participate in the abstraction-creation, an influential group of artists including ARP, Mondrian and Hélion. That same year of 1931, Alexander created his first kinetic sculpture, powered by cranks and engine, nicknamed by Duchamp as "mobiles", for being mobile, and soon the sculptor abandoned the mechanical forms of this work when he realized that he could make others that would be driven by air currents. Jean Arp, wanting to differentiate his non-kinetic works from kinetic works, named his stationary objects "stabiles".
In 1933 he left Paris with his wife and returned to the United States, now in Roxbury - Connecticut, where he had bought an old farm, turning one of its compartments into his own studio. There was born his first daughter, Sandra, in 1935 and then his second daughter, Maria, in 1939. He also joined the Pierre Matisse Gallery in NY, where he held his first exhibition in 1934, still performing performances by Cirque de Calder.
At that same time he began his first outdoor sculptures. In 1937, Calder created his first outdoor sculpture all screwed and entirely in Metals, called Devil Fish, where he exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery Show, and the name of his sample was Stabilesmobiles.
From this sculpture Alexander took off doing much more of them and mostly by order, such as the Mercury Fountain, which symbolizes the Spanish republican resistance to fascism, among many other beautiful works, such as its giant mobiles that are the result of the lack of Steel, with the event of World War II, is therefore used by the sculptor, carved pieces of wood suspended by wires, called by Sweeney and Duchamp of "Constellations", although Calder had not done them with the intention of representing something in particular. These works were presented at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, which was the last solo exhibition of the sculptor, in 1943.
The 40s and 50s were many productive for Alexander Calder, making more and more sculptures ,big and small and having numerous orders and exhibitions as a retrospective, of his works in the great galleries such as the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield - Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art in New York Galerie Louis Carré in Paris Philadelphia Museum of Art's at the Third International Sculpture Exhibition Galerie Maeght among others.
In 1976 it was called by the Whitney Museum of American Art in NY, for another retrospective of its works with the name of the exhibition called " Calder's Universe", died a few weeks later. and is considered the greatest sculptor of the 20th century.
Curiosities
His first works were manually moved by the observer. But, after 1932, he found that if he kept the shapes suspended, they would move by the simple action of the air currents. Although mobiles seem simple, their assembly is very complex, as it requires a very well-studied weight and counterweight system so that the movement has rhythm and its duration will last. Its mobiles, such as coffee cans, sardine cans, matchboxes and chunks of colored glass. His favorite materials were wood and later metal, painted impressively in primary colors.
Calder was three times in Brazil and was passionate about samba. He adapted the steps of our rhythm to his work, hence the "Samba Rattles". He lived in Rio, in the neighborhood of Botafogo and made countless friends - in all social classes. Among them, the art critic Mário Pedrosa who, for 30 years, wrote about the sculptor.
