Alexander Calder, a sculptor of international renown, was born in Philadelphia in 1898. He came from an artistic family; both his father and his grandfather were accomplished and dedicated sculptors, working within a tradition of heroically-scaled figurative monuments.
After receiving a degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, Alexander Calder traveled for the next four years and held a variety of jobs, all engineering-related. He took an evening drawing class in 1922 and the following year enrolled at the Art Students League where Calder's father, John Sloan and Boardman Robinson were teaching.
Calder's two weeks of sketching at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus on commission for the National Police Gazette in 1925 profoundly affected his career; the drawings were published as Animal Sketching in 1926, the year that Calder left for a sojourn in Paris. There he began to create a miniature animated circus, whose performances introduced the artist to the Parisian international art world. In 1926, Calder also began his first independent wire sculptures: his Brass Family (1927), Horse (ca. 1928), and Var‚se (193l) are all masterpieces in this media.
One of the reasons for Calder's decision, around 1930, to work abstractly was his attraction to the forms of Joan Miro, whom he first visited in 1928. The other was his oft-mentioned visit to Piet Mondrian in the fall of 1930, following the older artist's attendance of a "Calder Circus" performance. Looking at Mondrian's Neo-Plastic colored rectangles, Calder realized a vision of "oscillating" art. From that period on, his sculpture developed within the two modes he invented in the early 1930s---"stabiles" or stationary abstract sculpture, and "mobiles" or motor-powered art. He soon gave up mechanically-driven motion, however, for works produced naturally by air and wind.
Excepting the war years of 1938-46, when Calder lived in Connecticut, the artist commuted between the United States and France, exhibiting extensively in both countries. In l937, l939, and l94l, he received commissions for large-scale sculpture and increasingly, with a hiatus during World War II, commissions for monumental public projects occupied his time. After 1950, an extraordinary international enthusiasm for his art kept him moving around the world. By the end of his life, at numerous airports and in the public plazas of almost every major city, he would be greeted by his own work.
In 1976, the year of his death, Alexander Calder was given a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art; he has been the subject of hundreds of exhibitions and publications both here and abroad. Calder's work is represented in the Addison Gallery, Phillips Academy, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and countless other public and private collections.
LB
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