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Alexander Calder was an American artist best known for his innovation of the mobile suspended sheet metal and wire assemblies that are activated in space by air currents. Visually fascinating and emotionally engaging, those sculptures—along with his monumental outdoor bolted sheet metal stabiles,
- Lynne Warren
How Alexander Calder Became America’s Most Beloved Sculptor. In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Calder: The Conquest of Time, Jed Perl reveals a hidden side of the artist
- Jed Perl
Alexander Calder is known for inventing wire sculptures and the mobile, a type of kinetic art which relied on careful weighting to achieve balance and suspension in the air. Initially Calder used motors to make his works move, but soon abandoned this method and began using air currents alone.
- The term ‘drawing in space’ was first used to describe Calder’s wire sculpture. It is commonly believed that artist Julio González coined the term ‘drawing in space’ in 1932, when he wrote about Pablo Picasso’s iron sculptures of 1928, which Picasso had adapted from some of his earlier line drawings.
- He invented the mobile. The idea of a mobile is now so ingrained in the collective imagination that it is difficult to believe there was a time when it did not exist.
- Duchamp wasn’t the only artist to name Calder’s objects. After he heard that Duchamp had dubbed Calder’s moving objects mobiles, their mutual friend, the abstract artist Jean Arp, sardonically asked Calder, ‘Well, what were those things you did last year — stabiles?’
- In 1943 he was the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1929 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Alexander Calder was an American artist. He was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania, USA and died in 1976. Sculptures are usually still as people walk around them, but Calder's sculptures move.
Alexander Calder was born into a long line of sculptors, being part of the fourth generation to take up the art form. Constructing objects from a very young age, his first known art tool was a pair of pliers. At eight, Calder was creating jewelry for his sister's dolls from beads and copper wire.
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Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures.
