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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
Jan 8, 2018 · Calder soon began sculpting exclusively in wire, earning him a nickname among French critics as the “king of wire.” Among the earliest of these works was Josephine Baker I, the first of five wire portraits he created of the African-American expatriate celebrated for her Parisian dance performances. (The 1926 version now survives only in ...
- 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 · He shows its origins in the special Parisian artistic world where cabaret culture and circus met high art; reveals compelling antecedents in toys that Calder would have known as a kid; and...
- 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.
Jul 22, 2024 · Celebrated for his abstract kinetic sculptures and his monumental public sculptures, Calder, together with minimalist artists such as Richard Serra and Mark di Suvero, defined the aesthetic of the city plaza and museum terrace in the twentieth century.
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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.
