![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="4961px" width="4943px"></svg>)
Alexander Calder found inspiration and support in his close circle of creative friends.
A
rriving in France in 1926, Alexander Calder – known to his friends as ‘Sandy’ – found himself surrounded by the aesthetic and intellectual ferment of interwar Paris. Although he nurtured aspirations of painting, the erstwhile mechanical engineer was ineluctably drawn to the playful possibilities of movement. He began staging demonstrations of the Cirque Calder, a complex, manually manipulated assemblage of miniature circus attractions, which quickly drew the attention of the Parisian avant-garde. Through these inventive performances, Calder was introduced to friends and fellow artists, among them Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger and Jean Arp, who would profoundly influence the trajectory of his extraordinary career.
Although Calder and Picasso were never close friends, the two are linked through their shared exploration of alternate perceptions of reality through abstraction – themes explored in the recent touring exhibition Calder-Picasso, conceived by the artists’ grandsons. Calder was certainly aware of Picasso, who, 17 years his senior, was already an established fixture in the art world. During his time at the Art Students League in New York, Calder learned to draw single-line studies under John Sloan and George Luks, a technique pioneered by Picasso that would later manifest in Calder’s masterful wire “drawings in space.” In 1931, Calder had his debut exhibition of abstract constructions at Galerie Percier; his good friend Fernand Léger wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue. Eager to see the radical new work, Picasso arrived at the gallery early for a private viewing. The two artists were memorably reunited in 1937, when, along with Joan Miró, they were invited to create works for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, producing some of the 20th century’s most powerful artistic repudiations of Fascism: Picasso’s Guernica, Calder’s Mercury Fountain, and Miró’s The Reaper.
The intense friendship between Calder and Miró is the stuff of legend. In Calder’s own words: “The archaeologist will tell you there’s a little bit of Miró in Calder and a little bit of Calder in Miró." The artists met in 1928 after one of Calder’s circuses, and went on to forge an enduring personal and artistic relationship that would last until Calder’s death in 1976. While in outward presentation the two men could not have been more different – contrast the compact and fastidious Miró with Calder’s large, gregarious presence – they shared a strikingly similar aesthetic vision (so much so that in 1936, critic Emily Genauer described Calder’s work as “Miró abstractions come to life.”) After Calder’s return to the United States in 1933, they remained closely engaged with one another’s art. “The communion that existed between Calder and Miró,” remarked Joan Punyet Miró, the artist’s grandson, “was mystical.” Indeed, during World War II, despite their great geographical separation and the near impossibility of communication, both artists produced cosmologically suggestive bodies of work that would respectively become known as Constellations.
Piet Mondrian was another profoundly formative figure from Calder’s Paris years. On a 1930 visit, Calder was inspired by the immersive atmosphere of Mondrian’s studio, which featured a wall of colorful cardboard rectangles for the painter to manipulate and reposition. Calder likened the experience to that of “the baby being slapped to make his lungs start working,” a transformative encounter which “shocked” him into a full embrace of abstract art. His experiments in kinetic abstraction might also be traced back to Mondrian: surveying the Dutch visionary’s geometric arrangements, Calder mused: “perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate.”
Calder’s first such kinetic sculptures were motor-driven or powered by hand crank; only later would he leave his moving sculptures, the most definitive of his oeuvre, to undulate on their own with the air’s currents. Marcel Duchamp, upon seeing these remarkable pieces in 1931, christened them “mobiles” – in French, a word that connotes not only movement, but motive. He arranged for Calder to show the works at Galerie Vignon in Paris the following year; according to Calder, the characteristically witty Duchamp “suggested that on my invitation card I make a drawing of the motor-driven object and print: CALDER, SES MOBILES.” (His friend Jean Arp later coined the tongue-in-cheek term “stabiles,” to differentiate Calder’s self-supporting static abstractions from his kinetic work.)
Duchamp would remain an important supporter. In 1945, he paid a visit to his friend’s studio to see a new series of small scale pieces; inspired by the idea that they could be easily dismantled and shipped to Europe for exhibition, Duchamp planned a Calder show in Paris at Galerie Louis Carré. The new works debuted the following year, accompanied by a famous essay by Jean Paul Sartre.
Perhaps most critically, in 1943, Duchamp and curator James Johnson Sweeney mounted a retrospective of Calder’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Writing to the museum’s former director Alfred H. Barr Jr. a quarter century later, Calder said, “I have long felt that whatever my success has been has been greatly a result of the show I had at MoMA in 1943.” Indeed, the institution’s pivotal role in Calder’s career is front and center in MoMA’s new exhibition, Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start, now on view through August 7. Surveying the full breadth of Calder’s inventiveness, the show explores the artist’s work through the lens of his longstanding relationship with the museum.
Calder’s remarkable oeuvre – animated by an equally distinctive and dynamic personality, and shaped, nurtured and championed by epoch-defining friends and contemporaries – remains among the most critical bodies of work in the Modernist canon. Speaking about his friend, Miró observed: “Sandy, the man, the friend, has a heart as big as Niagara. Calder, the artist, has the force of the ocean. I salute you, Sandy."
