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1 16 A FINE BALANCE RENOWNED FOR HIS MOBILE SCULPTURES, HE WAS ONE OF THE 20TH CENTURY S MOST IMPORTANT ARTISTS. TODAY, THE FOUNDATION SET UP IN ALEXANDER CALDER S NAME NOT ONLY PRESERVES HIS LEGACY BUT ALSO PROMOTES CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS, EXPLAINS GEORGE PENDLE Even someone who s never been to an art museum in their life will have seen them. They crouch in corporate plazas like long-limbed metallic insects, or twist in the foyers of cultural centres like filigree spider webs. Starkly silhouetted on park hills and university campuses, they jaggedly fuse together ground and sky like massive steel sutures. It s uncanny, but wherever you go in the world, from India to Italy, from Cuba to China, the sculptures of Alexander Calder seem to have got there first. Long before today s global art scene existed, Calder was bestriding the world undaunted by distance or local tastes. Indeed, his creation of a sculptural language that was seemingly international in its scope prefigured by half a century the borderless range of today s superartists such as Takashi Murakami and Olafur Eliasson. However, Calder s global popularity has been something of a double-edged sword. While the near-universal love for his public-art projects has allowed him to avoid the fights that surrounded, say, Richard Serra s 1981 New York sculpture, Tilted Arc, which was destroyed after an outcry, it s also meant it has been somewhat ignored by recent critics. Alexander S C Rower, the artist s grandson, has made it his life s work to change this. In 1987, he set up the Calder Foundation, in part, to re-educate the critical establishment. I was disappointed that curators and other smart people didn t understand my grandfather s work. A puckish 48 years old, Rower is discussing the foundation s work from its breathtaking new exhibition space in midtown New York. In 1931, Calder has his very first show of abstract work in Paris. The artist Fernand Léger GETTY IMAGES

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3 wrote the text for the catalogue and compared him to Erik Satie and Marcel Duchamp. But, by 1971, he s not being compared to anyone. This was not entirely the fault of the critics by the end of Calder s life, his artistic reach and influence was so broad, it was almost impossible to see him clearly. Born into an artistic family in Philadelphia in 1898 his mother was a portrait painter, his father and grandfather were sculptors as a child, Calder would search out what he termed, all the prettiest stuff in the garbage can. He made wire jewellery for his sister s dolls and gave notice of his burgeoning talent when, on Christmas Day in 1909, he gave his parents a tiny dog and duck made from a brass sheet. The metal had been skillfully cut and bent so the dog stood on four legs and the brass duck rocked to and fro when tapped. It was his first moving sculpture. Calder studied mechanical engineering at school and seemed set on a path to become a hydraulics or automotive engineer. But, by 1923, the family trade had called him back and he had moved to New York to join the Art Students League. He was soon drawing illustrations for the pages of the National Police Gazette, and it was while covering a story on the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus that he found one of his earliest, and most famous, inspirations. The wire and canvas frame of the big top, the suspension of the trapeze artists in mid-air and the tightrope walker balanced implausibly above the horned swoop of the safety net, provided him with a quiver of motifs he would draw on for years. I was fond of the spatial relations, he would say, And I love the space of the circus. It would spark the creation of the Cirque Calder ( ) a collection of hundreds of tiny sculptural elements depicting jugglers, chariots, high-wire walkers, and trapeze artists made from wire, rubber tubing, cork and pipe cleaners. In 1926, Calder moved to Paris and began to put on performances of his circus. Crouching behind his little big top, he would solemnly move his cantilevered creations around the ring, creating an absorbing silent narrative. But the circus was something other than just a complex miniature. It was also a form of performance art. The pieces at the Whitney Museum [where the Cirque Calder now resides] were the tools to perform the art, explains Rower. But they re not the work of art. Watching him perform is the art. His performance was highly regarded. It wasn t for kids. Word quickly spread to the leading lights of the Paris art scene, and the circus was soon visited by Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian and Léger. The success of the circus opened up the world of the avant-garde to Calder. Invited to Mondrian s studio in 1930, he cheekily suggested

4 WHY MUST ART BE STATIC? THE NEXT STEP IN SCULPTURE IS MOTION POETRY IN MOTION Alexander Calder in his studio, c1951, previous page. Man (1967), opposite, now in Montreal. A Museum of Modern Art installation, 1944, left. The cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, 1946, below. Le Soleil sur la Montagne, 1975, Ville de Passy, France, bottom 19 CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK/ART RESOURCE, NY; CONDÉ NAST ARCHIVE/CORBIS; GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/THE ART ARCHIVE AT ART RESOURCE, NY the coloured rectangles of paper on the wall could be improved if they were made to oscillate in different directions and at different amplitudes. Mondrian did not agree, yet the question stayed with Calder. Why must art be static? he wrote in You look at an abstraction, sculpted or painted, and it is an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, but entirely without meaning. It s perfect, but always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. Calder s first steps towards applying motion to his sculptures can be seen in the offices of the Calder Foundation, where a wire sculpture of his wife Rower s grandmother hangs from the ceiling. Rower blows on it to get it moving. The idea that you could have sculpture that was immaterial was really, really radical, he says. Now we totally recognise it as a sculpture, but, in those days, the view was, it s not sculpture as it has no mass, but it s not drawing, so what the hell is it? The sculpture twists in the air like a wisp of smoke and, as it turns towards the viewer, it resolves momentarily into the powerful gaze of Louisa Calder. For a moment, the viewer s eyes are locked on a visage that has more weight, more reality, than you could think possible from a single piece of twisted wire, but before you know it the sculpture has moved on, the face losing narrative sense, becoming a lyrical cloud of abstract lines once more. Suddenly, there seems to be one fewer person in the room. One of Rower s main aims with the foundation is to reassert the experiential quality of Calder s work, most notably present in what Duchamp labelled his mobiles. These are perhaps Calder s most famous works kinetic abstract sculptures the articulated arms of which delicately pivot on fulcrums while pendulum-like appendages dexterously dangle brass balls and wire loops. Motion is the essence of these sculptures, whether it is provided by electric motor, hand crank or a simple breeze. They exist open-endedly, their multitudinous limbs moving in the air like a flock of swallows branching out and coalescing, but never repeating the same pattern. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote of Calder s mobiles that, they feed on air, they breathe, they borrow life from the vague life of the atmosphere. These words are equally true of his stabiles, or static sculptural works despite their sometimes

5 20 A NEW ARTISTIC MOVEMENT Calder s Red and Yellow Vane sculpture, 1934, left. Peacock, from 1941, below. Moluscs painting, 1955, bottom enormous bulk some are more than 60ft tall and weigh nearly 35 tons they, too, carry with them a sense of airiness, as if Calder were trying to break the sculpture free from the ground itself. Like the high-wire antics of his circus folk, these works often seem less joined to the ground than the result of the air itself solidifying into shape. What I would have liked to have done, Calder once wrote wistfully, would have been to suspend a sphere without any means of support, but I couldn t do it. But there is more to the Calder experience than movement. Rower is, by now, standing in front of Untitled (1934). It is a large black metal hoop in the middle of which hangs a tree of thin wire arms, each holding smaller coloured hoops. Rower moves towards one of the dangling arms and sets it in motion. The result is a chiming, clanging symphony as the hoops clash against the work s frame and each other, providing a uniquely atonal gong music, like a wind chime designed by Satie himself. I bought this at Christie s last year, says Rower, and I guarantee not one other person I was bidding against realised it was a musical instrument. It s surprising. There are so many works by Calder that include some sort of sound, some sort of tone, some sort of thing to wake you up, or bring you into the present. Your head s full of stuff and then this thing makes a noise and suddenly, he snaps his fingers, you re present. The foundation holds more than 600 of Calder s sculptures, as well as thousands of examples of his paintings, toys and jewellery, but Rower seeks to expand the foundation s horizons far beyond being just an archive of his grandfather s work. Since 2005, the foundation has awarded a biannual $50,000 Calder Prize to a living artist, which includes a six-month residency at Atelier Calder, the sculptor s former studio in Saché, France. It s a way of giving back, says Rower. Even further afield is the creation of the four-season, beyond organic Calder Farm, on Calder s former estate in Connecticut. Indeed, Rower has even mooted the idea of a Calder Foundation retirement home being established on the land one day. Like one of his grandfather s mobiles, he seems determined never to go in the direction you quite expect of him. CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK/ART RESOURCE, NY