Calder

While Calder began exhibiting these works immediately, he made the bulk of his jewelry as gifts for those in his inner circle. Calder’s jewelry is deeply engaged with his sculptural practice, resonating with such works as his wire portraits of Josephine Baker from the late 1920s and the silver bed head he made for Peggy Guggenheim in 1943. While most of his jewelry was made from wire, the artist also utilized pebbles, colored glass, and other found objects.

“The beauty of his jewelry lies primarily in its decorative linear qualities,” the curator and writer James Johnson Sweeney wrote in 1943. “Nevertheless just as its technique and its linearism had roots in Calder’s early wire sculptures, the grace of its lines and the fantasy of its forms had their echo in a new departure in Calder’s constructions of 1941 and 1942.”

The sculptures on view include the hanging mobile Tentacles (1947), whose wire limbs stretch in various directions, and the standing mobile Moths I (1947), the first work in a key series created by the artist that year. Balanced atop a single rod, Moths I has a delicate and dynamic motion. As the famed French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote of the mobiles’ uncanny movements and engagement with the shape-shifting natural world, “these mobiles, which are neither entirely alive nor wholly mechanical, constantly disconcerting but always returning to their original position, are like aquatic plants swaying in a stream; they are like the petals of the Mimosa pudica, the legs of a decerebrate frog or gossamer threads caught in an updraft.”

Also featured are three oil paintings—Lines of Flow (1947), Starfish on Pink (1949), and Onion Running Away (c. 1950)—and eight works on paper by Calder. The artist’s vibrant oils feature otherworldly forms that are imbued with a dreamlike sensibility. The works on paper in the show, created with gouache and ink, are in visual dialogue with Calder’s sculptures—featuring spirals, discs, and other motifs that appear elsewhere in his oeuvre.

Alexander Calder (b. 1898, Lawnton, Pennsylvania; d. 1976, New York, New York) utilized his innovative genius to profoundly change the course of modern art. Born into a family of celebrated though more classically trained artists, he began his career by developing a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting of wire, he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space. He is renowned for the invention of the mobile, whose suspended, abstract elements move and balance in changing harmony. The term mobile, coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931, refers to “motion” and “motive” in French. Some of the artist’s earliest mobiles moved by a system of motors, although these mechanics were eventually abandoned as Calder developed works that responded to air currents, light, humidity, and human interaction. He also created stationary abstract works dubbed stabiles by Jean Arp.

From the 1950s onward, Calder turned his attention to international commissions and increasingly devoted himself to making outdoor sculpture on a grand scale. Some of these major commissions include .125, for the New York Port Authority in John F. Kennedy Airport (1957); Spirale, for UNESCO in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Trois disques, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); El Sol Rojo, for the Olympics in Mexico City (1968); La Grande vitesse, the first public artwork to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973).

Calder is the subject of ongoing solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. In late October, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will open the exhibition Calder-Picasso, and the presentation Calder Now, which situates Calder in dialogue with contemporary artists, will open at the Kunsthal Rotterdam in November.

Calder’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; and other major art institutions around the world. Long-term installations of Calder’s monumental sculptures can be found at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunstmuseum Basel; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; and elsewhere.