Alexander Calder

♡ Alexander Calder ♡    2012/07/22 14:29
● Calder Room at National Gallery of Art in Washington DC ●                                                       ●★ Alexander Calder 알렉산더 칼더 ★●                                (1898~~1976 American Sculptor)     Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor best known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture the delicately balanced or suspended components of which move in response to motor power or air currents; by contrast, Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a vast miniature circus.   ● Early life 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. Calder’s 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. Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie 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. Calder’s parents were married on February 22,1895. Calder's 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 father’s 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 Calder’s 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 sister’s dolls. on January 1, 1907, Calder’s 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 Calder’s 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 Calder’s skill.[7] In 1910, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Alexander briefly attended the Germantown Academy, and then moved 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 it, "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 Calder’s high school years between 1912 and 1915, the Calder family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder’s 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.   ● Life and career In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1918, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.[11] In 1919, 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. I learned to talk out of the side of my mouth and have never been quite able to correct it since.[12] Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919. For the next several years, he held a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulic 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."[13] 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.      Red Mobile, 1956, Painted sheet metal and metal rods, a signature work by Calder - Montreal Museum of Fine Arts   Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan.[14] While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris where he established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James, grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). In 1955 Alexander and Louisa Calder travelled around in India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewellery.[15] In 1962, Calder settled into his new workshop Carroi, which was of a futuristic design and overlooked the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobiles to his friends in the country, he even donated to the town a stabile trônant, which since 1974 is situated front of the church: an anti-sculpture free from gravity. Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display. In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson. Calder died unexpectedly on November 11, 1976, shortly after opening a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.     ● Artistic work ● Cirque Calder and toys In 1926, at the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant in Paris, Calder began to make toys. At the urging of fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft, he submitted them to the Salon des Humoristes. Later that fall, Calder began to create his Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other found objects. Designed to fit into suitcases (it eventually grew to fill five), the circus was portable, and allowed Calder to hold performances on both sides of the Atlantic. He gave improvised shows, recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his Cirque Calder[16] (usually on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. In 1927, Calder returned to the United States. He designed several kinetic wooden push and pull toys for children, which were mass-produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. His originals, as well as playable replicas, are on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1930s, Calder continued to give Cirque Calder performances, but he also worked with choreographer Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrate in 1936.   ● Sculpture The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures Marcel 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. In 1929, Calder had his first solo show of wire sculpture, in Paris at Galerie Billiet. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.[17] It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys, that would become his signature artworks. Calder’s kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of motion and change as aesthetic factors.[18] By the end of 1931, he moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room, using cutout shapes reminiscent of natural forms (birds, fish, falling leaves).[19] Dating from 1932, Calder’s first hanging sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by the wind were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp.[20] They were followed from 1934 by pieces which were set in motion by air currents.[21] At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. In 1935-1936 he produced a number of works made largely of carved wood. 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 again producing work in carved wood. Calder set about creating new works such as Seven Horizontal Discs (1946), which he was able to dismantle and send by mail despite the stringent size restrictions imposed by the postal service at the time.[22] Once the war was over, Calder began to cut shapes from sheet metal into evocative forms and would hand-paint them in his characteristically pure hues of black, red, blue, and white.[23] Calder created a small group of works from around this period with a hanging base-plate, for example Lily of Force (1945), Baby Flat Top (1946), and Red is Dominant (1947). Largely comprising a range of hanging and standing Mobiles, his 1946 show at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris made a huge impact, as did the essays for the catalogue which was especially written, at the artist's invitation, by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and curator James Johnson Sweeney.[24] In 1951, Calder devised a new kind of mobile/stabile combination, related structurally to his constellations. These "towers," affixed to the wall with a nail, consist of wire struts and beams that jut out from the wall, with moving objects suspended from their armatures.[25] After 1965, an intermediate maquette, usually about one-fifth the final size, was often fabricated to test the wind resistance and to refine the structure.[26]   ● Monumental works Man, a sculpture by Alexander Calder for Expo 67, on Saint Helen's Island Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montréal, Quebec   In the 1930s, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave Calder his first public commission, a pair of mobiles designed for the Museum's new theater.[27] In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures (his self-described period of "agrandissements")[28]. 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, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture until that time, 20.5 meters high, was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Calder made his first outdoor works in his Roxbury, Connecticut studio, using the same techniques and materials as his smaller works. Exhibited outside, Calder's initial standing mobiles moved elegantly in the breeze, bobbing and swirling in natural, spontaneous rhythms. In fact, the first few outdoor works were too delicate for strong winds, which forced Calder to rethink his fabrication process. In 1936, he responded to the problem, changing his working methods. He began to create smaller scale maquettes that he then enlarged to monumental size. The small metal maquette, the first step in the production of a monumental sculpture, was already for Calder a sculpture in its own right. The larger works were made under his direction, using the classic enlargement techniques used in different ways by traditional sculptors, including his father and grandfather. Calder began to draw his designs on brown craft paper, which he enlarged using a grid. His large-scale works were created according to his exact specifications, while also allowing him the liberty to adjust or correct a shape or line if necessary.[29]     La grande vitesse (1969), Grand Rapids, Michigan   He made most of his monumental stabiles and mobiles during this time[when?] at Etablissements Biémont in Tours, France. Calder would create a model of his work, the research department (headed by M. Porcheron, with Alain Roy, François Lopez, Michel Juigner ...) would scale it up to final size, and then experienced boilermakers would complete the actual metalwork — all under Calder's watchful eye. Stabiles were made in carbon steel sheet metal, then painted in black or in primary colors. Some lightweight mobiles were made of aluminum or duralumin alloy. An exception was Man (L'homme), stainless steel 24 meters tall, which was commissioned by International Nickel Company of Canada (Inco). In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental 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 in New York City. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets.[30] The sculpture stood in front of 7 World Trade Center until it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.[31] In 1974 Calder unveiled to the public two sculptures, Flamingo and Universe, in Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opened simultaneously with the unveiling of the sculptures.[32]   ● Painting and printmaking   1975 BMW 3.0 CSL painted by Calder   In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking after moving to Paris in 1926, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.[33] His many projects from this period include pen-and-ink line drawings of animals for a 1931 publication of Aesop’s fables. As Calder’s sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the mid-1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. Calder also used prints for advocacy, as in poster prints from 1967 and 1969 protesting the Vietnam War.[34] As Calder’s professional reputation erupted in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale.[33] By 1973, Braniff International Airways commissioned him to paint a full-size DC-8-62 as a "flying canvas." In 1975, Calder completed a second airplane, this time a Boeing 727–291, as a tribute to the US Bicentennial. In 1975, he was commissioned to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL which would come to be the first vehicle in the BMW Art Car Project. He had been working on a third airplane, entitled Salute to Mexico, when he died.   ● Jewelry Calder created 1,800 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. Several pieces reflect Calder's fascination with art from Africa and other continents.[35] They were mostly made of brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or fashioned rivets.[36] Calder created his first pieces in 1906 at the age of eight for his sister's dolls using scraps of metal he found in the street.[37] For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard that shimmered with dangling fish.[38] In 1942, Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one by Yves Tanguy to the opening of her New York gallery, The Art of This Century, to demonstrate her equal loyalty to Surrealist and abstract art, examples of which she displayed in separate galleries.[39] Others who were presented with Calder's pieces were the artist's close friend, Georgia O'Keeffe; Alexina Duchamp, wife of Marcel Duchamp; Jeanne Rucar, wife of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; and Bella Rosenfeld, wife of Marc Chagall.[40]   ● Exhibitions   Calder room at National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.   Calder's first solo exhibition came in 1927, at the Gallery of Jacques Seligmann in Paris.[41] In 1928, his first solo show in a US commercial gallery was at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. In 1933, he exhibited with the Abstraction-Création group in Paris. In 1935, he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. In New York, he was championed from the early 1930s by the Museum of Modern Art, and was one of three Americans to be included in Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art.[42] 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; the show had to be extended due to the sheer number of visitors.[43] 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, International Mobile was the centerpiece of the exhibition. Calder also participated in documentas I (1955), II (1959), III (1964). Since Calder's death, his work has now been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including Alexander Calder, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, 1995 (traveled to: Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d'art moderne, Paris, in 1996); Alexander Calder: 1898-1976, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998 (traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Calder: Gravity and Grace, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2003 (traveled to Reina Sofia, Madrid); The Surreal Calder, Menil Collection, Houston, 2005-2006 (traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts); Calder Jewelry, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, 2008 (traveled to Philadelphia Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art; San Diego Museum of Art; Grand Rapids Art Museum); Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2008 (traveled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art Gallery of ontario, Toronto); Calder, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2009–2010; and Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act, Seattle Art Museum, 2009–2010.[44] From February 11 through May 28, 2012 the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague has an exhibition about Calder, including his relationship with Piet Mondrian.   ● Collections Calder's work is in many permanent collections across the world. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has the largest body of work by Alexander Calder in any museum.[45] Other important museum collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.[46] The Philadelphia Museum of Art offers a view of works by three generations of Alexander Calders. From the second floor window on the east side of the Great Stair Hall (on the opposite side from the armor collection) there is behind the viewer the Ghost mobile from the 3rd generation (DOB 1898),[47] ahead on the street is the Swann Memorial Fountain by the 2nd generation (DOB 1870), and beyond that the statue of William Penn atop City Hall from the 1st generation (DOB 1846).   ● Recognition In 1952, Calder represented the United States at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the main prize for sculpture. He also won the First Prize for Sculpture at the 1958 Pittsburgh International.[21]                                                                      ■ W I K I P E D I A ■