Sculpting a precarious balance into a lasting legacy: Alexander Calder was born today

July 22, On This Day

A groundbreaking American sculptor known for his innovative ‘mobiles’ (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents), his static ‘stabiles’, and his monumental public sculptures, Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898 in Pennsylvania, USA.

(Interestingly, his birthdate is a bit of a source of confusion, as his mother cleared that Calder was born on August 22, but his birth certificate at Philadelphia City Hall, based on a hand-written ledger, stated July 22 — which his family asserted that city officials had messed up.)

Calder came from a family of prolific artists and members of the art sphere. His grandfather was sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, and his father was also a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, Alexander Stirling Calder. His mother Nannette was a professional portrait artist and his Margaret Calder Hayes instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

Calder was a prodigy. At the age of four, he posed nude for his father’s sculpture ‘The Man Cub’, a cast of which is today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA) in New York City (NYC). In 1902, he completed his earliest sculpture — a clay elephant. In late 1909, at the age of 11-12, he made a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as 3D kinetic sculptures (the duck rocked when tapped) as Christmas gifts for his parents.

And yet, Calder’s parents did not want him to be an artist, so he decided to study mechanical engineering. Eventually though, art found him, and he moved to Paris in 1926, where he befriended a number of avant-garde artists, including names like Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp.

With a mixture of his own experiments, an inspirational visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930 led him to fully embrace abstract sculpture.

It led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, actuated by motors, which would become his signature artworks. Wikipedia writes: “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 gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors.” These were christened \”mobiles\” by Duchamp — a French pun meaning both “motion” and “motive”.

Later, finding these “monotonous” in their prescribed movements, Calder arrived at a solution of hanging sculptures that derived motion from touch or air currents.

Critics said: “The wind mobiles featured abstract shapes delicately balanced on pivoting rods that moved with the slightest current of air, allowing for a natural shifting play of forms and spatial relationships.”

The sculptor was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed “stabiles” by Arp to differentiate them from mobiles.

Many say that Calder’s turning away in the early 1930s from his motor-powered works in favor of the wind-driven mobile “marks a decisive moment in Modernism’s abandonment of its earlier commitment to the machine as a critical and potentially expressive new element in human affairs”.

During World War II, Calder continued to sculpt, adapting to a scarcity of aluminum during the war by returning to carved wood in a new open form of sculpture called “constellations”.

In the 1950s, Calder concentrated more on producing monumental sculptures (his agrandissements period), and public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. There are many notable examples, at JFK Airport in New York, UNESCO in Paris and even one for the 1968 Summer Olympics events in Mexico City. His installation at the entrance of the World Trade Center’s North Tower in NYC only came down when it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.

One of Calder’s more unusual undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a “flying canvas”.

In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.

In November 1976, Calder died unexpectedly of a heart attack, shortly after the opening of a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.