Alexander Calder

About the artist

Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia in 1898 and died in New York City on 11 November 1976 (Wikipedia). His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a sculptor and his mother a painter. He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919, enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1923 and, after moving to Paris in 1926, made Cirque Calder, a miniature circus of wire, leather and cloth figures that he performed himself (Calder Foundation).

In the autumn of 1931 Calder made his first kinetic sculptures, which Marcel Duchamp named "mobiles"; Jean Arp named the stationary works "stabiles". Calder soon gave up motors once he found he could make mobiles that moved on air currents alone. In 1937 he made his first large bolted stabile from sheet metal, Devil Fish (Calder Foundation).

The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of his work in 1943, the Guggenheim Museum another in 1964, and in 1976 the Whitney Museum of American Art opened Calder's Universe a few weeks before his death. His later years went mainly into large public commissions, including Spirale for UNESCO in Paris (1958) and La Grande vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969) (Calder Foundation). His print output grew from the late 1940s, when lithographs based on his gouaches were issued in quantity alongside deluxe illustrated editions (Wikipedia). In 2015–16 Tate Modern showed Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture (Tate).

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Alexander Calder
2. Calder Foundation: Introduction
3. Tate Modern: Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture