Alexander Calder

An engineer from a family of sculptors, 1898–1926

Calder was born on 22 July 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, into a dynasty of public sculptors: his grandfather made Philadelphia's William Penn, his father ran civic commissions, his mother painted. He trained as a mechanical engineer before drifting to art school in New York, and the engineering never left — balance, load and torque are the grammar of everything he made.[1]

Paris, and the Cirque Calder, 1926–1930

He moved to Paris in 1926, taking a studio in Montparnasse, and began building a circus in miniature: acrobats, lions, a sword swallower and a bearded lady made of wire, cork, cloth and found scraps, packed into suitcases. Performances of the Cirque Calder — Calder on his knees, animating each act by hand — became a fixture of the avant-garde calendar, and the wire portraits that grew out of it were his first mature works.[2]

The circus was his passport. Through its audiences he met Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp — the friendships that framed the rest of his career.[3]

Mondrian's studio, and the invention of the mobile, 1930–1933

In October 1930 Calder visited Piet Mondrian's studio at 26 rue du Départ, where coloured cardboard rectangles were pinned to white walls for endless rearrangement. The room converted him: he later said he wanted to make those rectangles oscillate. Within weeks he was making wholly abstract constructions.[2]

When the abstractions began to move — first by cranks and motors, then by air alone — Marcel Duchamp supplied the name: mobile, a French pun on motion and motive, coined in 1931. Jean Arp, asking what the non-moving ones were by contrast, gave the standing works their name too: stabiles. The vocabulary of Calder's whole career was minted in Paris by two friends.[4]

Scale, fame, and the late monuments, 1933–1976

In 1933 Calder and his wife Louisa bought a farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, and he worked between America and France for the rest of his life — from 1963 with a large studio at Saché, in the Loire valley. The mobiles grew from tabletop to ceiling to civic scale, and the stabiles became plaza landmarks: monumental steel arches and beasts in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Montreal and Paris, where La Défense keeps a giant red one.[1]

He died in New York on 11 November 1976, weeks after the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum. The Calder Foundation in New York documents the work; almost every major modern museum hangs at least one thing of his that moves.[1]