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The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before...
- Jed Perl
- Summary of Alexander Calder
- Accomplishments
- Biography of Alexander Calder
American artist Alexander Calder redefined sculpture by introducing the element of movement, first through performances of his Cirque Calderand later with motorized works and, finally, with hanging works called "mobiles." In addition to his abstract mobiles, Calder also created static sculptures, called "stabiles," as well as paintings, jewelry, th...
Many artists made contour line drawings on paper, but Calder was the first to use wire to create three-dimensional line "drawings" of people, animals, and objects. These "drawings in space" introdu...Calder shifted from figurative linear sculptures in wire to nonobjective forms in motion by creating the first mobiles. Composed of pivoting lengths of wire counterbalanced with thin metal elements...Childhood
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. Over the next few years, as his family moved to Pasadena, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco, he crafted small animal figures and game boards from scavenged wood and brass, and in 1909, he mad...
Early Training
In 1922, he took evening drawing classes at the 42nd Street New York Public School. The next year he studied painting at the Arts Students League (1923-1925), with John Sloan and George Lukswhile working as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette. An assignment to illustrate acts at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus led to his interest in the circus. In 1926, after showing paintings at The Artists' Gallery in New York he moved to Paris. Once there, he began making the mo...
Mature Period
In the late 1920s Calder created more figurative oil paintings, but a 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian'sstudio led Calder to shift from figuration to abstraction permanently. Upon entering the studio, Calder became fixated on the overall space and the colored cardboard rectangles covering one of the walls: he said he would like to make them “oscillate.” Calder began painting and sculpting in the abstract. In 1931 he accepted an invitation to join the influential Abstraction-Creation group. That sa...
- American
- July 22, 1898
- Lawnton, Pennsylvania
- November 11, 1976
Nov 27, 2017 · When he steps out of narrative to place Calder’s work in a broader context—beyond the immediate art-historical circles, which he knows well—he often makes puzzling connections.
Calder’s libido, at least as far as art was concerned, seems to have been utterly redirected toward a more general and innocent idea of pleasure, which could err on the less compelling side as “fun” but also resulted later in his life in statements of clean, unfettered purity.
- Carroll Dunham
The much-used art term “drawing in space” was first used to describe Calder’s artworks by an art critic for the French newspaper Paris-Midi in 1929. As well as a sculptor, Calder was a highly skilled jeweller, and created more than 2,000 items of jewellery, often as gifts for family and friends.
Jul 22, 2021 · By Teresa Erskine Roth. One of the most acclaimed and influential sculptors of the 20th century, Alexander Calder is most renowned for his invention of the mobile, an abstract sculpture that moves.
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Mar 1, 2016 · Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, currently on view at the Tate Modern, is a monumental exhibition, less a retrospective than an exploration of the ways in which Calder’s art interacts with its viewers.
