In 1943 Alexander Calder was the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Raised in Pennsylvania, his father was a well-known sculptor and his mother and grandfather were painters. Calder did not want to follow in their footsteps. Instead, he undertook a degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey. Here he developed his dextrous skills and became familiar with materials and techniques that would later be fundamental in his sculptural works.

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By contrast to his complex technical degree, Calder was also fascinated by the circus; a place of comedy, surprise, space, movement and air. This interest influenced his entire artistic career which is underpinned by creative, performative, playful and aerodynamic art.

 Although Calder began creating works of art after completing his degree, he also worked on a ship in Central America. He experienced vast expanses of the ocean, the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon - all scenes and experiences that inspired his paintings and famous mobiles. Just like the seascape and the cosmos and even the circus, his sculptures represent movement, the natural world and the vastness of the universe. In 1923, once his travels were complete, Calder enrolled at the Arts Students League in New York City.

 

IBy 1926 Calder had determined to pursue an artistic career. He travelled to Paris where, as one of very few Americans on the art scene, he met a melting-pot of European modern artists including Joan Miro and Fernand Léger who noted that while artists like “Satie and Duchamp are 100 percent French,” Calder "is 100 percent American.”

 

Calder’s love for the circus came to artistic fruition, in the form of a miniature work 'Cirque Calder', 1931. The story goes that he would carry the model in a suitcase and perform the ‘circus’ for his artist friends and the public, too. Therefore, though light-hearted at the time, it could be interpreted that Calder actually created a form of performance art that was not officially born for another 40 years.

 

He was also preoccupied with sketching, but not like any other artist with pencil or charcoal. Calder “sketched”, as he called it, with wires and pliers. He would create the shapes in the air,  coined the art term, “drawing in space” and became known as“The Wire King”. At this time, Calder also made the most important works of his, the kinetic ‘Mobiles’. The name given to them by innovator artist and friend, Marcel Duchamp. It is said that the inspiration for these works was sparked during a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930. Calder asked the artist what he thought of making his static, rectangular shapes oscillate, to which Mondrian replied, “my works are fast enough already”. But Calder rejected this opinion. He changed the rectangular concept, making his shapes more organic by resembling leaves and planets. Originally, he thought these sculptures would have to be motorised in order for them to move. However, Calder realised that the air and gravity was strong enough to make the mobiles sway and turn before the viewers' eyes. This created an innocent magic for all that witnessed these seemingly live sculptures. It was this innovation in modern art that defined kinetic art yet rang true to the rules of abstraction.

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'Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.'

 

Calder met and married novelist Henry James' daughter Louise in 1930. They had a child and moved to New York in 1933.  By this time, he was a widely recognised artist in Europe and was entering a big break in his career. By the end of the 40s and beyond, Calder had branched out, focusing on many different art forms. He created ‘stabiles’, named by Jean Arp, stationary sculptures in bold colours, “I wanted to paint everything red”, confessed Calder.

 

His career reached new heights and he used this to fuel many other artistic ventures. He made paintings, prints, lithographs and even jewellery. When he dies in 1976 he left more than 22,000 works behind to mark a truly significant artistic career.

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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 with other museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Centre, Paris.