Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder, acclaimed creator of the wire mobile, was born into a family of artists in Lawton, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1898. In 1919, at age 21, he received an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, before attending the Art Students League in New York between 1923 and 1926. Here he studied amongst fellow artists Thomas Hart Benton and John Sloan. 1925 saw Calder commissioned as a freelance artist for the National Police Gazette, at which time he spent two weeks sketching at the circus. This sparked an artistic interest in the construction and theatrics of the circus and his future work would reflect this fascination. In 1926, at the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant, Calder began to making toys. He created Cirque Calder, a portable suitcase filled to the brim with circus characters, costumes and apparatus fashioned from wire, cloth, wood, rubber and other found objects.
In 1927, performances using this compact collection of cast and props was Calder’s means of supporting himself as he travelled across the Atlantic. Cirque Calder is considered the beginning of Calder’s interest and experimentation in wire sculpture and kinetic art. In 1929, Calder had his first solo show in Paris at Galerie Billiet where he exhibited wire sculptures. He met Frederick Kiesler and Fernard Lager in 1930, the same year that he visited the studio of Piet Mondrian, a dutch painter, and began experimenting with abstract sculpture. In 1931, he introduced moving parts into his work whose motion was procured from the air currents of the exhibiting room (wikipedia). This development gave way to a completely new type of art. In 1932 Duchamp christened Calder’s hanging sculptures powered by wind with the term ‘mobile’, a French phrase meaning ‘mobile and active’. His engineering background is thanked for his perfectionist tendencies with respect to the kinetic and balance aspects of his sculptures. Calder saw the circle and sphere as the simplest forms of the universe, this resonates though his mobiles where he uses disks as a base and varies them. In 1943, he was awarded the prestige of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Calder’s later years were devoted mostly to large scale public commissions. Later that decade, Calder worked expansively with gouache in his works and created numerous major monumental sculptures as public commissions including the .125 at JFK airport (1957) and La Spirale for UNESCO in Paris (1958) . During the mid 1960’s he explored variations of the standard mobile and in 1966 he developed the totem and in 1971, the animobile. In 1976 Whitney Museum of American Art held the Calder Exhibition in New York before his death on November 11 that same year. The Conceptual Framework is a tool for analyzing art through exploring the connection between the artist, artwork and audience. Calder’s works and processes were rich with inspiration from nature and his engineering background. His work as a puppeteer of likes is mirrored by his inviting, fun and whimsical public commissions. Calder was a pioneer of his time who processes, messages and works are opportune for rich learning experiences in visual arts.