In Philadelphia, a Stirring New Stage for Alexander Calder

At John F. Kennedy Airport, you may have walked beneath the stately mobile that Alexander Calder made in 1957 for what was then Idlewild, and not even realized it. Or perhaps, sightseeing in Chicago, you have gazed at his soaring 1973 “Flamingo,” in his signature “Calder red,” in Federal Plaza. Monumental Calders reside in public places in some 20 states and at least as many countries. If you have a child, a mobile (a medium Calder invented) probably spun above their crib. Such ubiquity can be a curse. An artist risks being taken for granted, typecast as an entertainer or a plaza-filler.

“My fan mail is enormous: Everybody is under 6,” Calder quipped in 1965. But the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was a fan, too, and he understood that the easygoing charm of Calder’s art cloaks slow-unfolding mysteries. Sartre wrote in a 1946 essay that “Calder’s objects are like the sea, and they cast its same spell — always beginning again, always new. A passing glance is not enough to understand them. One must live their lives, become fascinated by them.”

How might it feel to live their lives? An ambitious new institution opening in Philadelphia on Sunday invites us to find out. Celebrating one of the city’s native sons, the site, Calder Gardens, is small but potent, an exhibition space and philanthropic project, a civic gift with a radical slant. Stuffed with both prime Calders and more obscure material, it revivifies the artist’s expansive powers, and it ought to inspire similarly adventurous single-artist museums, which are still a rarity in this country (though “museum” is a word the Calder Gardens team rejects). Its premise is almost a riddle: If you own no art, stage no special exhibitions, and offer no didactic material about the work on display, what can you do instead?

On Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the city’s museum hub, it’s clear that something peculiar is afoot: Behind an intricate field of plants — conceived by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf — is a new, low-slung building with a facade of hazy metal. “It duplicates the garden and reflects the city,” its creator, the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog, of Herzog & de Meuron, told me by video from Basel. “It’s so not Calder.” He likened it to “a coat of invisibility, like Harry Potter.”

The alluring building sits across from the small Rodin Museum, which might have amused Calder, who died in 1976 at age 78. As an on-the-make artist in 1920s Paris, he visited the Musée Rodin there, and later said, dismissively, “I did not think much of the shaving cream — the marble mousse out of which blossoms the kiss of love.” The Rodin Museum is a classical Beaux-Arts manse with a rectilinear garden out front, the antithesis of this new endeavor’s venturesome design.

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