In 1923, two years after beginning his study of drawing in night school, he enrolled fulltime at the Art Students League in New York City. There he attended classes given by George Luks, Guy Pène Du Bois, and John Sloan, all important American painters of that period.
Gallery of Alexander Calder
He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, studying such things as descriptive geometry, mechanical drawing, and applied kinetics - the branch of science that deals with the effects of force on free-moving bodies - in preparation for receiving his degree in 1919.
In 1923, two years after beginning his study of drawing in night school, he enrolled fulltime at the Art Students League in New York City. There he attended classes given by George Luks, Guy Pène Du Bois, and John Sloan, all important American painters of that period.
He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, studying such things as descriptive geometry, mechanical drawing, and applied kinetics - the branch of science that deals with the effects of force on free-moving bodies - in preparation for receiving his degree in 1919.
Alexander Calder: Artist as engineer : Bakalar Sculpture Gallery, List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 31-April 13, 1986
Alexander Calder was an American artist best known for his innovation of the mobile suspended sheet metal and wire assemblies that are activated in space by air currents. Visually fascinating and emotionally engaging, those sculptures — along with his monumental outdoor bolted sheet metal stabiles, which only imply movement — make Calder one of the most recognizable and beloved modern artists.
Background
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania. His actual birthday, however, remains a source of much confusion. According to Calder's mother, Nanette (née Lederer), Calder was born on August 22, yet his birth certificate at Philadelphia City Hall, based on a hand-written ledger, stated July 22. When Calder's family learned about the birth certificate, they reasserted with certainty that city officials had made a mistake.
Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in nearby Philadelphia.
Calder's mother was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia, where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895; his sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.
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.
Education
Though he was brought up in an artistic atmosphere, Calder's own inclinations were mechanical. He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, studying such things as descriptive geometry, mechanical drawing, and applied kinetics - the branch of science that deals with the effects of force on free-moving bodies - in preparation for receiving his degree in 1919.
In 1923, two years after beginning his study of drawing in night school, he enrolled fulltime at the Art Students League in New York City. There he attended classes given by George Luks, Guy Pène Du Bois, and John Sloan, all-important American painters of that period.
After graduating from college, Calder tried many jobs: automotive engineer, draftsman and map-colorist, steamboat stoker, and hydraulics engineer among them. In 1923 he was 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 moving toys and figures that would become "Calder's Circus" (1926 - 1931). He also began using wire to produce linear portraits and figurative sculptures. He became popular in the art world for his Calder's Circus performances during which he set in motion the many different characters and animals he had created.
In Paris, Calder met Joan Miró, who became an important influence and close friend. In 1929, Calder began producing jewelry with the same wire he used in his sculpture. He continued jewelry work throughout his career, primarily making necklaces, rings, brooches, and bracelets for friends. Calder moved frequently from studio to studio and between New York and Paris. On one of his many transatlantic boat trips, he met Louisa James, who he married in 1931.
In the late 1920s, Calder created more figurative oil paintings, but a 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian's studio led Calder to shift from figuration to the abstraction permanently. Upon entering the studio, Calder became fixated on the colored rectangles covering one of the walls: he said he would like to make them physically move. Calder joined the influential Abstraction-Creation group and focused on finding a way to make abstract color move through space.
A year later he exhibited his first abstract wire works and produced his initial, groundbreaking mechanized sculptures, pioneering kinetic art. Marcel Duchamp named these works "mobiles", a term that also encompassed the subsequent sculptures Calder created that relied on the movement of air rather than motors.
During the 1930s, Calder also began making non-kinetic sculptures, which Hans Arp referred to as "stabiles." Like the mobiles, Calder's stabiles openly incorporated the components of their fabrication, such as fastening flanges and bolts, as visible elements of the designs. Calder used soaring, outstretched, arching gestures to emphasize movement and energy in both his mobiles and stabiles.
The artist moved to Connecticut in 1933, where he sought space to create ever-larger hanging works and outdoor sculptures. Concurrently, Calder began making sets and costumes for theatrical productions by dancer Martha Graham and composer Erik Satie, work that he continued throughout his career. Through the end of the 1930s, he continued to stage performances of Calder's Circus. He held exhibitions and executed commissions across Europe, finally returning again to the U.S. in 1938. In 1939, The Museum of Modern Art commissioned Calder to create the large mobile Lobster Trap and Fish Tail.
During World War II, Calder made many brightly colored gouache paintings. He also continued making sculpture, primarily using wood instead of metal due to supply shortages. He created "Constellations", a series of airy three-dimensional stabiles of wire and carved wooden abstract shapes. In 1943, Calder was honored as the youngest artist ever to have a retrospective exhibition at the art world's most prestigious venue, New York's Museum of Modern Art. In 1946, Paris' Galerie Louis Carre organized another important exhibition of Calder's work, for which Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a landmark catalog essay.
Surrounded by his family and working in a large studio he built in Roxbury, Connecticut, from 1958 to the 1970s Calder created numerous, monumental public sculptures. While these included some mobiles, his outdoor works were more often large-scale stabiles. Among his many international commissions were those for the New York Port Authority (1957), UNESCO in Paris (1958) and, in 1969, the first public artwork funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. With his family he traveled and worked during these years in France; Beirut, Lebanon; Amedabad, India; London; and New York. He also continued creating smaller sculptures, jewelry, and set designs.
In 1960, Calder began designing tapestries to be crafted by weavers in the French villages of Aubusson and Felletin. In 1962 he built a huge studio in Sache, France, near the home of friend Jean Davidson, in which he built his largest works. In the early 1970s, he even created vibrantly colored designs to cover three Braniff jets and a BMW sports car. Calder died unexpectedly on November 11, 1976, of a heart attack, shortly after the opening of a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.
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 "linear sculptures" introduced line into sculpture as an element unto itself. Calder shifted from figurative linear sculptures in wire to abstract forms in motion by creating the first mobiles. Composed of pivoting lengths of wire counterbalanced with thin metal fins, the appearance of the entire piece was randomly arranged and rearranged in space by chance simply by the air moving the individual parts.
Quotations:
"People think monuments should come out of the ground, never out of the ceiling, but mobiles too can be monumental."
"Why must art be static?"
"Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions."
"My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement."
"The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof...What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form."
Membership
At Stevens, Calder was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and excelled in mathematics.
Personality
Easygoing and practical-minded, Calder was one of the few American visual artists who established himself in 1920s Paris. Calder also possessed a considerable intellect and a playful sense of humour along with his keen visual and sculptural skills.
Connections
In 1931 Calder was married to Louisa James, who he had met on a voyage to New York City. Calder and Louisa settled in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939).