Biography

Regarded as one of the pivotal figures in 20th-century American art, Alexander Calder was the first sculptor to make movement a central aspect of his work. During the course of his prolific career, which spanned nearly six decades, Calder challenged the long-held notion that sculpture was static and stationary. His invention of colorful, animated “mobile” sculpture epitomized the innovative and optimistic spirit that characterized early-20th-century America.

Born in Lawton, Pennsylvania, in 1898, Calder was reared by a family of artists and encouraged to experiment with a variety of artistic media. Despite the creative atmosphere at home, Calder pursued a mechanical engineering degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. After working at an assortment of unsatisfying jobs in cities across the country, Calder enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1923. Two years later he traveled to Paris and became immersed in the germinal stages of European modernism, when artists such as Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Jean Arp were experimenting with a new vocabulary of biomorphic abstraction. Eventually, Calder himself would become an important conveyor of this new modernist style to America.

Throughout his life, Calder made several transatlantic trips between Europe and his American home in Roxbury, Connecticut. As early as 1932, he began to question the immobile nature of abstract art asking, “Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei. … It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step is sculpture in motion.”1 The following year, Calder built Cône d’ébène, which is generally regarded as his first mobile. Hundreds of mobiles followed over the next twenty years, and in 1959 Calder created the monumental Big Red.2

Although many of Calder’s sculptures from the 1950s were factory made, Big Red is one of the few mobiles from this era that the artist crafted by hand. Its assorted flat, abstract surfaces are carefully linked together with wire and propelled into motion with the slightest current of air. Calder hand-painted the mobile in primary red, a color he came to admire by way of his friend, the painter Piet Mondrian. “I love red so much,” Calder once declared, “I almost want to paint everything red.” In Big Red one easily discerns the artist’s inspiration in the universe and his fascination with the stars and planets. “I felt there was no better model for me to choose than the universe,” he once explained, “spheres of different colors, densities, volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds.”3

The unpredictable movements of Calder’s mobiles make them all the more engaging to watch. In 1947, French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre offered this perceptive response upon viewing one: “Calder establishes a general destiny of motion for each mobile, then he leaves it on its own. … It is the time of day, the sun, the heat, the wind which calls each individual dance. … One sees the artist’s main theme, but the mobile embroiders it with a thousand variations. It is a little swing tune, as unique as ephemeral as the sky or the morning. If you have missed it, you have missed it forever.4

Calder’s whimsical mobiles have entertained generations of viewers with their vibrant colors and dazzling movement. Big Red is among the very best created by the artist, and its spirited energy continues to captivate those who encounter it today. —A.W.

1. “Objects to Art Being Static, So He Keeps It in Motion,” New York World-Telegram, 11 June 1932.
2. A similar mobile with the same name is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. See Patterson Sims, Whitney Museum of American Art: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985).
3. Alexander Calder, quoted in Sims, 1.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialist on Mobilist,” ARTnews, December 1947, 22–23, 55–56.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died in New York City, New York.

Alexander Calder was born in 1898 into a family of artists in Lawton, Pennsylvania.  As a boy, he tinkered with hammers and drills to craft toys out of leather, wire, and wood. Despite his early artistic inclinations, Calder pursued mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. His exploration of the laws governing motion and the study of planes and shapes would subsequently inform his art. In 1923 Calder moved to New York, where he studied painting at the Art Students League. Two years later, he made his first trip to Paris. There, he created Cirque Calder, an assortment of miniature wood and wire circus performers, animals, and props. During his Paris years (1926 – 33), Calder met numerous prominent artists and intellectuals including the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose colorful gridlike compositions inspired Calder to investigate abstraction.  He began using wire and metal to fashion independent forms into “mobiles” with natural or mechanical movement. In the 1940s, he turned to painting with watercolors and gouache (opaque pigment diluted in water) on an almost daily basis. Calder eventually divided his time between France and his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. Toward the end of his career, he concentrated on numerous large-scale sculpture commissions. Calder died in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight, a few weeks after the opening of his retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. [Bio from "Alexander Calder: Color in Motion" Exhibition, input by R. Faust, 8/11/2010]

American artist Alexander Calder redefined the boundaries of sculpture. His method of sculpting, bending, and twisting wire created “drawings in space” through which he introduced line into sculpture as an autonomous element. Best known for his hanging "mobiles"—a term coined by Duchamp in 1931 to describe Calder’s work—Calder used wire with carefully counterbalanced thin metal fins, often boldly colored, to create abstract and randomly shifting shapes. The theatricality of his sculptures took a stage presence in Calder’s Circus (1926 – 31), an assemblage of some 200 miniature figures, animals, flags, musical instruments, and noisemakers that Calder choreographed, directed, and performed for live audiences.

In parallel to his sculptural work, Calder made gouache paintings throughout his career. The two-dimensional medium was a channel for quicker, more spontaneous creation exploring line, color, and form. Calder and Louise Nevelson began showing work together in the 1940s. While their individual styles varied drastically, both artists were true constructivists, creating sculpture through accumulation rather than elimination. The relationship between the two artists comes into focus in Untitled (To Nevelson) (1969), a colorful and freeform gouache inscribed in the lower right corner, “to Louise Nevslon - Sandy 69.”

This work joins four Calder works including the mobile Big Red (1959), one stabile, and two jewelry pieces in SJMA’s permanent collection.

Biography
Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania in 1898 and died in 1976. He studied at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and attended the Art Students League of New York (1923). Calder has been the focus of several large retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1952, Calder represented the United States at the Venice Biennale where he won the grand prize for sculpture. His work is held in numerous public collections including Kunstmuseum, Basel; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (acquisitions meeting February 20, 2018)

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