This biography from the Archives of AskART: One of America's best known sculptors, "Sandy" Calder became most

famous for his kinetic abstract mobiles. He also did floor pieces, was a painter in watercolor, oil and gouache, did etchings and serigraphs, and made jewelry and tapestries as well designed theater stage settings and architectural interiors. His art reflects his reputation of being a beloved, decent human being who continually searched for fun and humor in that around him. He was highly independent from luxuries and focused on creativity. His last words, "I'll do it myself", tell the story of his life. He was born in Philadelphia, the son of Alexander Sterling Calder and the grandson of Alexander Milne Calder, well-known sculptors of public monumental works. His mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter. Obviously he was nurtured in an environment of art, and from an early age, he was making figures from found objects. Because of the father's ill health and the necessity for a drier climate, the family moved to Oracle, Arizona in 1905, and five years later to Pasadena, California. When Sandy was a teenager, the family returned to Pennsylvania. He was unable to make a decision about a vocation, but his fascination with machines led to his earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919. He tried a variety of jobs including working in the boiler room of a cruise ship. In 1923, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City, where his teachers were John Sloan, Guy Pene Du Bois, and Boardman Robinson. In classes there he did numerous oil paintings and also humorous drawings of sporting events for the "National Police Gazette." In 1925, he produced an illustrated book titled Animal Sketching, one-line drawings that foreshadowed his early wire sculptures of figures and animals. In 1926, encouraged by an engineer friend of his father to follow his talent, he went to Paris where he lived the next seven years and shortly after his arrival began doing wire sculpture. During this period, his mother gave him seventy-five dollars a month for living expenses. He assembled a "Circus," of miniature, hand activated one-wire figures with which he gave performances in his studio. These pieces were made by bending and twisting a single wire into humorous portraits, animals, and figure groups. He also met many of the leading avant-garde artists of the day including Piet Mondrian, who influenced Calder's geometric, non-objective constructions that he began producing in 193 His 1. floor pieces, named "stabiles" by Jean Arp, were exhibited in a gallery exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp, who coined the word "mobile" for the hanging, kinetic pieces. Soon, Calder was creating many of these wind-driven works. Calder's mobiles were first shown in the United States in 1932, and the next year he returned to America and purchased a home in Roxbury, Connecticut where he lived the remainder of his life and gained much attention from that time. Dancer Martha Graham used several of his sculptures in her modern dance performances, and personnel at the Museum of Modern Art in New York began purchasing pieces from him including his first large-scale piece called Whale in 1937.

During World War II when metal was scarce, he made mobiles and stabiles from carved, painted wood, and in the early 1950s he added to his repertoire wall pieces and mobiles that incorporated sound. Many federal agencies and businesses commissioned works by him, and most major American museums have his pieces in their collections. His death in 1976 occurred coincidentally with a major retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Source: Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art

This biography from the Archives of AskART: CALDER IN BLOOM A walk in the park with the great American sculptor. by PETER SCHJELDAHL An interviewer once asked Alexander Calder if he ever felt sad. "When I think I might start to," he replied, "I fall asleep." On another occasion, he spoke of the "big advantage" he had because of his inclination to be "happy by nature." Calder, who died in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight, in fine productive fettle almost to the end, made many such remarks, which are certain to daunt ordinary maladjusted citizens. Perhaps vengefully, some people persist in regarding him as trivial, which he isn't. His work is often great, sometimes O.K., and once in a while fairly bad, but it always operates at a high level of formal and philosophical intelligence. It also wears well. The plangent insouciance of Calder's best work looks ever stronger and, in a real way, more serious than most other canonical styles of the twentieth century. (And the flat champagne of his failures comes across as a test to see if we're paying attention.) Above all, Calder was an extraordinarily successful maker of public art in an age when the terms "public" and "art" began to consort with each other like cats in a sack. It's not quite that we love his costume jewelry for the world's plazas. Better, we take it in stride as self-explanatory and all but inevitable. A Calder doesn't set off the questions that abort so much public art in our democracy: What is that? What is it doing there? When will it go away? A rangy outdoor and indoor exhibition, "Grand Intuitions: Calder's Monumental Sculpture," curated by Alexander S. C. Rower, a grandson of the artist, has just opened at the Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, New York; it will remain for three years.

Source: The New Yorker, June, 2001 Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, A -D):

Credited with the invention of the mobile, Alexander Calder revolutionized twentieth-century art with his innovative use of subtle air currents to animate sculpture. An accomplished painter of gouaches and sculptor in a variety of media, Calder is best known for poetic arrangements of boldly colored, irregularly shaped geometric forms that convey a sense of harmony and balance. Calder was born in a suburb of Philadelphia to a family of artists. His grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, and father, Alexander Stirling Calder, created sculptures and public monuments, and his mother was a painter. Accustomed to traveling in pursuit of public art commissions, the family moved to Pasadena, California, in 1906. The new environment with its expansive night sky studded with brilliant planets and starsfascinated the young Calder. These cosmic forms strongly influenced the structure and iconography of his future work. At a young age, Calder began using tools and found materials to create various structures and inventions. This constructive impulse led him to attend the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919. Yet by 1922 he had abandoned his new career. After a stint as a seaman, Calder began formal art study at the Art Students League in New York in 1923. During this period, Calder worked as a freelance illustrator and often visited zoos and circuses to sketch. Calder moved to Paris in 1926, and during his seven-year stay he delighted fellow artists including Man Ray, Joan Mir, Fernand Lger, Le Corbusier and Piet Mondrian and attracted the attention of art patrons with his whimsical wire figures and portrait heads. Most notably, he created small sculptures of circus animals and performers with movable parts and developed and toured a performance/demonstration dubbed the Cirque Calder. This series culminated in the completion of his most celebrated piece, Circus (1932, Whitney Museum of American Art). Calders use of irregular, biomorphic forms that recall the work of Mir reflected the influence of Surrealism and Dada, but it was the art and concepts of Mondrian that would have the most decisive impact on Calders work. Calder visited Mondrians studio in 1930 and later described how the experience transformed his understanding of abstract art. He wrote, This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word modern before, I did not consciously know or feel the term abstract. So now at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract. (1) Shortly thereafter, Calder was invited to join the international AbstractionCration group that included Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp, and many other artists working with geometric abstract forms. Calder was impressed by Mondrians reduction of visual imagery to a vocabulary of flat planes of primary colors. He suggested that Mondrian consider adding movement to the forms. Mondrian rejected the idea, stating my painting is already very fast. (2) Calder soon took his own advice and began experimenting with movement in his work. At first, he drew on his mechanical training to devise cranks and motors that would produce kinetic effects. The following year, Calder exhibited these new pieces, christened mobiles by Marcel Duchamp, as well as non-moving wire abstractions termed stabiles by Jean Arp. By 1932 Calder realized that ambient air currents were strong enough to move lightweight sculptures, and he abandoned prescribed pattern of s movement for more spontaneous rhythms.

In 1933, Calder reestablished his home base in the United States, on a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut. The years from this point to the late 1950s were the most varied and prolific of Calders career. As he emerged as an artist of international stature, with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, Calder continued to make mobiles (hanging and standing) and stabiles made out of sheet metal, as well as paintings, jewelry, and set designs for performances by Martha Graham, Eric Satie, and others. When scrap metal was in short supply during World War II, Calder turned to wood. In 1953, the Calder family purchased a home in Sach, France, and they began dividing their time between Connecticut, France and periods of extended travel. By the end of the 1950s, the proportions of Calders mobiles had dramatically increased and he was completing more site-specific commissions. Large-scale sheet-metal stabiles commissioned for public spaces dominate Calders late career in the 1960s and 1970s. Their vivid colors, sweeping arches and shapes evoking birds and animals offer a counterpoint to rectilinear modern architecture and breathe life into urban environments around the world. One notable example is Flamingo (1973, Federal Center Plaza, Chicago). Widely celebrated during his lifetime, Calder died just a few weeks after the opening of Calders Universe, a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 1. Alexander Calder, An Autobiography in Pictures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), p. 113. 2. Ibid. References Arnason, H. H. Calder. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1966. Calder, Alexander. An Autobiography in Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. Gimnez, Carmen, and Alexander S. C. Rower, ed. Calder: Gravity and Grace. London: Phaidon Press, 2004. Lipman, Jean. Calder's Universe. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976. Marter, Joan M. Alexander Calder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Prather, Marla. Alexander Calder 18981976. Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1998. Biography from Rogallery.com: Alexander Calder, internationally famous by his mid-30s, is renowned for developing a new idiom in modern art-the mobile. His works in this mode, from miniature to monumental, are called mobiles (suspended moving sculptures), standing mobiles (anchored moving sculptures) and stabiles (stationary constructions). Calder's abstract works are characteristically direct, spare, buoyant, colorful and finely crafted. He made ingenious, frequently witty, use of natural and manmade materials, including wire, sheetmetal, wood and bronze.

Calder was born in 1898 in Philadelphia, the son of Alexander Stirling Calder and grandson of Alexander Milne Calder, both well-known sculptors. After obtaining his mechanical engineering degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology, Calder worked at various jobs before enrolling at the Art Students League in New York City in 1923. During his student years, he did line drawings for the National Police Gazette. In 1925, Calder published his first book, Animal Sketches, illustrated in brush and ink. He produced oil paintings of city scenes, in a loose and easy style. Early in 1926, he began to carve primitivist figures in tropical woods, which remained an important medium in his work until 1930. In June 1936, Calder moved to Paris. He took some classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and made his first wire sculptures. Calder created a miniature circus in his studio; the animals, clowns and tumblers were made of wire and animated by hand. Many leading artists of the period attended, and helped with, the performances. Calder's first New York City exhibition was in 1928, and other exhibitions in Paris and Berlin gained him international recognition as a significant artist. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio proved pivotal. Calder began to work in an abstract style, finishing his first nonobjective construction in 1931. In early 1932, he exhibited his first moving sculpture in an exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp, who coined the word "mobile." In May 1932, Calder's fame was consolidated by the first United States show of his mobiles. Some were motor-driven, His later wind-driven mobiles enabled the sculptural parts to move independently, as Calder said, "by nature and chance." Calder returned to the United States to live and work in Roxbury, Massachusetts in June 1932. From the 1940s on, Calder's works, many of them large-scale outdoor sculptures, have been placed in virtually every major city of the Western world. In the 1950s, he created two new series of mobiles: "Towers," which included wall-mounted wire constructions, and "Gongs," mobiles with sound. Calder was prolific and worked throughout his career in many art forms. He produced drawings, oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, gouache and serigraphy. He also designed jewelry, tapestry, theatre settings and architectural interiors. Calder died in 1976. Biography from Denis Bloch Fine Art Lt d.: Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1898 to artist parents: his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter. From the age of 8 on his parents provided him with a workshop in which to create. For Christmas 1909, at the age of 11, he presented his parents with two of his first sculptures, a tiny dog and duck cut from a brass sheet. The duck was kineticit rocked back and forth when tapped. While working as a fireman on a ship bound from New York to San Francisco, Calder awoke on deck to see both a brilliant sunrise and a sparkling full moon; each was visible on opposite horizons. The experience made a lasting impression on Calder: he would refer to it throughout his life. Never interested in becoming an artist, Calder graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ with a practical degree in mechanical engineering in 1919. In 1923 he moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League where he and his fellow students made a game of rapidly sketching people on the streets & subways. Calder became known for his ability to convey a sense of movement with a single unbroken line. He took a job illustrating and was sent to sketch the Barnum & Bailey Circus--the circus would become a lifelong interest for the artist.

Calder moved to Paris in 1926 and befriended prominent artists and intellectuals such as Joan Miro, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. In 1931 Calder created his first truly kinetic sculpture and gave form to an entirely new type of art. That year he married Louisa James, a niece of writer Henry James. Their first daughter, Sandra, was born in 1935 and a second daughter, Mary, followed in 1939. In 1943 The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave a comprehensive exhibition of Cal ers d workthe shows exhibition catalogue was the first extensive study on the artist. By the mid 1940s Alexander Calder was given exhibitions in Berne, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Virginia and New York sealing his international status as an artist. Calder won the first place prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952. Numerous international public commissions followed including Braniff Airlines who asked the artist to paint a few of their jet planes as flying canvases in the 1970s. Calder, who described his mobiles as four dimensional drawings died in 1976 shortly after his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. QUOTE: "I paint with shapes." Select Museum Collections: Art Institute of Chicago, IL Detroit Institute of Arts, MI Walker Art Center, MN Guggenheim Museum, NY Museum of Modern Art, NY National Gallery, Washington, DC Norton Simon Museum, CA Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona Tate Gallery, London ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com.

Permanent Collection: Alexander Calder's Finny Fish

Alexander Calder, Finny Fish. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Tonight at Politics & Prose, writer and angler Paul Greenberg will read from his new book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. It's a book that's swum into stores at just the right time, as people turn their minds more to the repercussions of our consumption. Farmed versus wild salmon; rising mercury levels in tuna; sustainability and ethics: there's a lot to weigh up before we batter a bit of plaice and stick it next to some chips. Greenberg has done something smart in his book: rather than succumb to the fisherman's fetish of coming over all ADD and offering "a maze of all the different fish out there," he's focusing on four popular fish varieties. His menu reads salmon, bass, cod and tuna -- those we see most in our market-places -- all of which are on the cusp of domestication in some way. Apart from the fact that he's adamant that some fish are strictly not suited to taming, Greenberg's main concern isn't extinction: it's the loss of abundance in the wild. Time it right, and you can encounter that impression of precious, jewel-like nature at the National Gallery of Art, with this delightful Finny Fish (1948). It's by the American artist Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976), who worked variously as a sculptor, abstract painter and illustrator of children's books. He was born into a fertile artistic lineage: his father and grandfather (who both shared his name) were important sculptors, and his mother was a portrait painter. Calder worked originally as an engineer (he'd received a degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey) and a work like Finny Fish is essentially a marriage of his technical-engineering and artistic minds. It's dubbed a "mobile" (a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931) and Calder's "mobiles" (as well as their earth-bound counterparts the "stabiles") revolutionized sculpture.

Our fishy friend is a lot less abstract than Calder can get (you probably have one of his works that looks like an assemblage of suspended leaf and berry-like shapes swinging in your mind), but this still gives us a whiff of the tack Calder takes. He's able to manipulate painted steel rod and wire into a delicate construction that's simple and yet significant.

Alexander Calder, Finny Fish. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Imagine if you will our friend, the fish, suspended from a wire and bobbing along in space. Calder experimented with motorized mobiles in the 1930s but soon settled more and more with the idea of natural air currents animating his works. As the fish flows free in the breeze, all those small pieces of glass, shards of ceramics and other interesting knick-knacks tied over his side will start to twitch and tinkle: Calder has an enchanting and lyrical sense of play. The artist described his mobiles as "four dimensional drawings" and I can see why: this fish has an integral sense of flat line and strong design and yet exists so totally in the round. It's a clever tension and one that draws attention to the space it's in, sparking musings about habitat and wildlife. Which are important thoughts for us to be having about a fish. Aleid Ford is profiling 365 masterworks at the National Gallery of Art this year for her project Art 2010, which appears on her website Head for Art.

Alexander Calder Artwork Details

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Wall Color View to Scale Enlarge

Detailed Description
In 1975 the artist was involved in a major project called Flying Colours . This was designed to be part of the bi-centeneary celbrations of The United States. The project was worked with Branfiif Airlines who allowed one of their Boing 727 airccraft to be one of Calders flying canvases . The plane, N408BN was given the nickname Sneaky Snake by Braniff pilots. There were two reasons for this nickname: Calder had painted a snake on number 1 engine nacelle cover (the subject of our historic photograph) Secondly the aircraft had a trim problem inasmuch as pilots had to adjust altitude and heading by hand. Most pilots did not enjoy flying Calder 727 . This is a very famous moment in a very famous artists life.

Alexander Calder / MATRIX 56

November 1, 1982 - January 15, 1983

Cow, ca. 1968-69

Download the exhibition brochure (PDF).

If we accept Baudelaire's statement that "Genius is merely childhood retrieved," Alexander Calder (1898-197) is probably America's greatest genius. He is certainly a pioneering figure in American modernism. At a time when American art was largely timid and provincial, he responded to elements of the revolutionary art movements of Europe with a native American ingenuity. His inventiveness, his patient tinkering with scrap materials , and his playful understanding of form gave his art a lasting freshness. Alexander Calder (known as Sandy) moved with his family to San Francisco in 1913, when his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, became Chief of Sculpture of the Panama-Pacific International exposition. On the Berkeley campus (in Faculty Glade) A. S. Calder is represented by The Last Dryad, a gift to the University from his wife and daughter. After earning a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919, Calder studied at the Art Student's League in New York. It was during this period that he became enamored of the circus and spent much time observing and sketching animals at the zoo. Calder's sister Peggy says that when they were children she and Sandy worked out a formula for drawing birds with one uninterrupted line flowing around the entire body. The results can be seen in drawings like the comically ferocious Lions in the Ring (1932), one of the Works in MATRIX 56. Calder's many pen and ink drawings were inspired by the animal doodles he created in wire, his favorite medium. (Calder once told Peggy, "I think best in wire.") One continuous wire "line" travels from the snout to the ears, udders, legs and squiggly tail of Calder's Sow of 1928. A series of bobbing sheet metal circles on wire stems creates the plumage in the Crested Crow, 1972. In 1926 Calder went to Paris, where he continued making animals in wood and wire, and decided to create a complete circus, "...just for the fun of it." At first it was a two -suitcase circus, but by 1931 he had added so many new performers (55 people and animals altogether) that five suitcases were required to transport it. The Circus is now in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Through his performances of the Circus, Calder met many of the giants of the Paris art world-Piet Mondrian, Joan Mir?, Man Ray, Jules Pascin, Fernand L?ger, and Jean Arp. Calder's new friends had been liberated from tradition by the constant waves of new ideas that circulated in the Paris art world of the twenties. Dada, Surrealism, and Cnstructivism all provided Calder with an atmosphere conducive to the development of open-form sculpture and the free play of imagination. A visit to Mondrian's Paris studio in 1930 precipitated Calder's entry into the field of abstract art. When Calder saw Mondrian's red, yellow, and blue cardboard rectangles tacked on the studio walls, he suggested that "It would be fun to make those rectangles oscillate." (Mondrian did not agree.) From Mondrian he absorbed the essentials of Neo-plasticism: flat planes, the use of primary colors in opposition to black and white, and asymmetrical composition. Then he translated these formal elements into a personal idiom, using industrial materials. Among the series of wood and wire constructions he made at this time was a motorized, abstract sculpture for which Marcel Duchamp coiined the word "mobile." When Calder made his first large-scale stationary sculpture in 1935, Jean Arp came up with an appropriate term, "stabile." "Animobile," a portmanteau word combining "animaux" and "mobile," was invented by the artist's wife Louisa for a series of metal sculptures Calder made in 1971. The animobiles vary in size from the tiny Rat in this exhibition to huge beasts, but they are all endowed with Calder's humorous, irreverent and gentle good nature. Calder once said that his fan mail was tremendous-but all the writers were under six. Calder continued to show a partiality for animal sculpture throughout his life. In the mid-twenties Calder made prototypes for an American toy company that are similar to the dachshund and blue velvet cow in the MATRIX exhibition. In later years he turned beer and coffee cans into birds (The Only Only Bird, ca. 1950) and continued to make wire animal sculpture (Mule and Cart, 1968-69). Even his greatest abstractions refer to natural forms. The current MATRIX exhibition is occasioned by the loan of Calder's famous painting, Circus Scene, painted in oil on burlap in 1926 and sent to the Hayses as a tenth anniversary present. It is one of several circus scenes Calder painted at that time. "I love the feeling of space under the Big Top," he said. Norma Schlesinger Guest Curator MATRIX is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency.

Alexander Calder Biography

Philadelphia, PA, 22 July 1898 - New York, 11 Nov 1976 Sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker and designer, son of sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, and best known as a pioneer of KINETIC ART. Trained at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919. In 1923, Calder began studying at the Art Students League in New York, where he was inspired by his teacher, John Sloan and began creating oil paintings. He became a freelance artist for the National Police Gazette in 1924, sketching sporting events and circus performances. His first illustrated book, Animal Sketching (New York, 1926), was based on studies made at the Bronx and Central Park Zoos in New York. In the early 1930s, Calder joined the ABSTRACTION CREATION group and soon produced his first abstract moving sculpture. He is best known for his large- scale public installations, both mobiles and stabiles, such as RED, BLACK, AND BLUE at the Dallas Airport. SELECTED MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Museum of Modern Art, New York - National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC - National Gallery of Australia - Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - National Gallery of Canada - Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC - Cleveland Museum of Art Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC - Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland - Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid - The Smithsonian, Washington, DC - The Tate Gallery, London Walker Art Center, Minnesota - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Alexander Calder, Le Halebardier, 1971

Delightful Calder Toys and Sculptures at the Whitney

On view at the Whitney Museum of Art from now until February 15, 2009 is a delightful exhibit of toys, sculptures and toy-like sculptures by Alexander Calder (1898-1976). The exhibit covers Calder's early years in Paris, when he was first learning to transition away from painting to become a sculptor. Like a child playing with new materials, in those years he did loose wire sketches and ink drawings with a remarkable freedom of experimentation. They are a joy to see.

Above: Calder in Paris in 1930 (Image: Calder Foundation)

It is little-known that in his early years Calder made a living working as a toy designer for the Gould Toy Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The monthly fees he was paid enabled him to independently pursue his career as a fine artist.

The Whitney's exhibit also contains several playful films created by Calder, in which his creations are put into motion by the artist himself. This in particular makes the show a wonderful place to bring children, as in many of the films Calder lays on the floor like an overgrown child, literally playing with the toys he designed.

Children will love marching around the show identifying all the animals. There is an enthralling circus installation Calder made with wire, wood and painted fabric and its accompanying film. As well as being entertaining for kids, this work is considered critical in the history of Modern Art for including motion as an integral part of the artwork for the first time.

And because this is Art and Hunger, this post would not be complete if we didn't recommend a wonderful Italian cafe right down the street where you can sip an espresso after the exhibition.

Sant'Ambroeus is one of the most authentic, genuine Italian cafes in the city. The lovely, vintageinspired logo design and even the interior decor mimics every detail of what real cafes in Italy are like. You can grab a panini or a brioche to get your spirits back up for more art-viewing.

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Alexander Calder (American, 18981976) Aluminum Leaves, Red Post, 1941 Sheet metal, wire, and paint 61 x 61 in. (1,549 x 1,549 mm) The Lipman Family Foundation, Inc. Estate of Alexander Calder/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photograph: Jerry L. Thompson, New York

Alexander Calder
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Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder, by Carl Van Vechten, 1947

Birth name Alexander Calder

Born

July 22, 1898 Lawnton, Pennsylvania

Died

November 11, 1976 (aged 78) New York, NY

Nationality United States

Field

Sculpture

Training

Stevens Institute of Technology, Art Students League of New York Presidential Medal of Freedom[1]

Awards

Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.

Contents
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1 Childhood 2 Education 3 Art career 4 Calder's paintings 5 Commemoration 6 Quotes 7 Gallery 8 Selected works 9 References 10 Bibliography 11 External links

Childhood
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in Philadelphia. Calders grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. He is best-known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia's City Hall tower. Calders mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Acadmie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Calders parents were married on 22 February 1895. His sister, Margaret "Peggy" Calder, was born in 1896. Her married name was Margaret Calder Hayes, and she was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.[2] In 1902, Calder posed nude for his fathers sculpture The Man Cub, which is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That year, he completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.[3] Three years later, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis and Calders parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year.[4] The children were reunited with their parents in late March 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.[5] After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sisters dolls. On January 1, 1907, Calders mother took him to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calders wire circus shows.[6] In 1909, when Calder was in the fourth grade, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as Christmas gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three dimensional and the duck was

kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped. These sculptures are frequently cited as early examples of Calders skill.[7] In 1910, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Alexander briefly attended the Germantown Academy, and then to Croton-on-Hudson in New York State.[8] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights.[9] After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended Yonkers High. In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.[10] He began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915. During Alexander Calders high school years between 1912 and 1915, the Calder family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location Calders parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated in the class of 1915.

Education
In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering and enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and excelled in mathematics. In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1918, he joined the Students Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.
I learned to talk out of the side of my mouth and have never been quite able to correct it since.[11]

Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919. For the next several years, he held a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulics engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. In June 1922, Calder found work as a mechanic on the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder worked on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. He described in his autobiography "It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch a coil of rope I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other."[12] The H.F. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled up to Aberdeen, Washington, where his sister lived with her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.

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Red Mob e, 1956, Painte sheet metal and metal rods, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

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The Ci e C l er can be seen as the start of Cal er's interest in both wire scul ture and kinetic art He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utili ed these to develop the kinetic sculptures Duchamp would ultimately dub as "mobiles" a French pun meaning both "mobile" and "motive." He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. However, it was the mi ture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys. By the end of 1931, he moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room. From this, Calder's "mobiles" were born. At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased inRoxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). Calder continued to give Cirque Calder performances but also worked with Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrat in 1936. During World War II, Calder attempted to join the Marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. Instead, he continued to sculpt, but a scarcity of metal led to him producing work in carved wood. Calder's first retrospective was held in 1938 at George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a well-received Calder retrospective, curated by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp. Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. His mobile, I t rnational obil was the centerpiece of the exhibition.
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Man, a sculpture by Ale ander Calder for Expo 67, on Saint Helen's sland Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montral, Quebec

In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Notable examples are ".125" for JFK Airport in 1957, "La Spirale" for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and "Man" ("L'Homme"), commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal. Calder's largest sculpture until that time, 20.5 meters high, was "El Sol Rojo", constructed for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. In 1962, he settled into his new workshop Carroi, a very futuristic design and overlooking the valley of the Lower Chevrire to Sach in Indre-et-Loire (France). He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobile to his friends in the country, he e donated to ven the town of a stabile trnant since 1974 in front of the church: an anti sculpture free from gravity. He did make the most of its stabiles and mobiles at factory Bimont Tours (France), including "the Man", all stainless steel 24 meters tall, commissioned by Canada's International Nickel (Inco) for the Exposition Universelle de Montral in 1967. All products are made from a model made by Calder, by the research department (headed by M. Porcheron, with Alain Roy, Franois Lopez, Michel Juigner ...) to design to scale, then by workers qualified boilermakers for manufacturing, Calder overseeing all operations, and if necessary amending the work. All stabiles will be manufactured in carbon steel, then painted for a major part in black, except the man who will be raw stainless steel , the mobiles are made of aluminum and made of duralumin. He made most of his monumental sculpture during this time at Etablissements Bimont in Tours, France. Calder would create a model of the work, the research department would scale it to final size, then experienced boilermakers would complete the actual metalwork all under Calder's watchful eye. Stabiles were made in carbon steel; mobiles were mostly aluminum. In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-inlaw, Jean Davidson. In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental

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stabile La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first public work of art in the United States to be funded with federal monies; acquired with funds granted from the then new National Endowment for the Arts under its Art for Public Places program. Calder created a sculpture called WTC Stabile (also known as Bent Propeller), which in 1971 was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower. When [14] Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets. It stood in front of 7 World Trade Center when it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.[15] Calder died on November 11, 1976, shortly after opening a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York. He had been working on a third plane, entitled Salute to Mexico, when he died.

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In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. By 1973, Braniff International Airways commissioned him to paint a full-size DC8-62 as a "flying canvas." In 1975, Calder completed a second plane, this ti e a Boeing m 727-291, as a tribute to the U.S. Bicentennial. In 1975, he was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL which would come to be the first vehicle in the BMW Art Car Project.

Commemoration

Calder room at National Gallery of Art in Washington, D C.

Two months after his death, Calder was posthumously awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford. However,

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representatives of the Calder family boycotted the January 10, 1977 ceremony "to make a statement favoring amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters". In 1987, the Calder Foundation was founded by Calder's family. The Foundation "runs its own programs, collaborates on exhibitions and publications, and gives advice on matters [16] such as the history, assembly, and restoration of works by Calder." The U.S. copyright representative for the Calder Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.[17] Calder's work is in many permanent collections across the world.

Quotes
This section is c ndid t to be copied to Wikiquote usin the Trans iki process.
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"How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe. Out of different masses, tight, heavy, middlingindicated by variations of size or colordirectional linevectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc. . . .these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many. Spaces, volumes, suggested by the smallest means in contrast to their mass, or even including them, juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds. Nothing at all of this is fixed. Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life. Not extractions, But abstractions
[18] Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting."

- From Abstraction-Cration, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932.