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- Alexander Calder had a profound influence on the evolution of art, particularly through his pioneering contributions to kinetic sculpture and the exploration of movement in art.
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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
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.
- 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
Jan 8, 2018 · Although Calder’s wire sculptures of the late 1920s simplified the human form, it was a 1930 trip to Mondrian’s Parisian studio that pushed him towards pure abstraction. The visit “was like the baby being slapped to make his lungs start working,” Calder wrote in the 1950s.
Feb 20, 2020 · One of the 20th century’s most pioneering sculptors, Alexander Calder merged mutual interests in art and engineering, with spectacular results. Asking “why must art be static?” he brought dynamism, energy and movement into his large- and small-scale creations, and will forever be remembered as the inventor of the hanging mobile.
- Rosie Lesso
Nov 27, 2017 · The premise of his project is that Calder is not a minor artist but seems so only because he has never slotted neatly into a fixed story of modernism. Calder fits...
Jul 22, 2021 · In the summer of 1926, Calder moved to Paris, the center of the Western art world and home to a vibrant community of artists interested in exploring new modes and methods of art. Soon after his arrival, Calder invented a new mode of sculpting in wire, a material he had used since childhood.
