Alexander Calder

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Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor who is best known for his innovative mobile sculptures (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their design and monumental public sculptures.

Calder's art first caught public notice in Paris in the 1920s and was followed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943, which culminated in a retrospective exhibition.

Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). Calder's work appears in several permanent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Georges Pompidou.

He created a number of notable public works, including.125 (at JFK Airport, 1957), Pittsburgh (Carnegie International Prize winner 1958), Spirale (both in Chicago, 1954), and Mountains and Clouds (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1996). Calder, who is best known for his sculpture, also produced paintings and prints, miniatures (such as his popular Cirque Calder), theater set design, jewelry manufacturing, tapestries, and rugs, as well as political posters.

Calder was honoured by the US Postal Service with a series of five 32-cent stamps in 1998 and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. The monumental "Floating Clouds" of the University City of Caracas, Mexico, is Calder's most significant work.

This work is part of the Unesco World Heritage Site.

Calder's clouds were specially crafted to blend art and technology, making the auditorium one of the world's top five university auditoriums in terms of sound quality.

Early life

Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania. His birthdate is still a point of confusion. Calder was born on August 22, but his birth certificate at Philadelphia City Hall, based on a hand-written ledger, said July 22. When Calder's family learned of the birth certificate, they immediately understood that city officials had committed a mistake.

Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and was most well-known for the colossal statue of William Penn on Philadelphia City Hall's tower. Alexander Stirling Calder, his father, was a well-known sculptor who created several public spaces, the majority of which were in Philadelphia. Calder's mother was a trained portrait artist who had studied at the Académie Julian and Sorbonne in Paris from 1888 to 1893. She migrated to Philadelphia, where she encountered Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On February 22, 1895, Calder's parents married. Margaret Calder Hayes, Alexander Calder's sister, was instrumental in the creation of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

Calder, a four-year-old boy, posed nude for his father's sculpture The Man Cub, a cast of which is now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant, in 1902. Calder's parents and his father contracted tuberculosis in 1905, and Calder's parents relocated to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year. The children were reunited with their parents in March 1906 and remained at the Arizona ranch during that summer.

The Calder family went from Arizona to Pasadena, California. Calder's first studio was acquired by the windowed cellar, and he received his first set of tools. He made jewelry for his sister's dolls out of copper wire scraps. Nanette Calder's son was sent by her father to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he witnessed a four-horse chariot contest. This performance became Calder's miniature circus performances's concluding act.

The family returned to Philadelphia in late 1909, where Calder briefly attended Germantown Academy, before transferring to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. He sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass for his parents that Christmas. The sculptures are three-dimensional, and when gently tapping, the duck becomes kinetic because it rocks. Calder was befriended by his father's painter friend Everett Shinn, who aided him in creating a gravity-powered train system in Croton during his high school years. "We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes," Calder explained; a chunk of iron racing down the hill sped the cars. And yes, we even lit up some cars with candle light. The Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio after Croton. Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers when he was living in Spuyten Duyvil. Calder's father was appointed acting chairman of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, in 1912, and he began work on sculptures for the exhibition, which was held in 1915.

The family moved back and forth between New York and California during Calder's high school years (1912-1915). Calder's parents reserved cellar space for their son in each new location. Calder stayed in California until his parents returned to New York in order to graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco near the end of this period. Calder was a graduate of 1915.

Personal life

Sandra (born 1935) and Mary (1939-2011) were Calder and his partner, Louisa. Howard Rower (1939-2000), Mary Rower's husband, had been chairman of the Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation's board. Alexander S. C. "Sandy" Rower (1963), founder of the Calder Foundation, and Holton Rower (1962), vice president of the Foundation. Alexander Rower founded the Foundation in 1987 with the encouragement of the Calder family. Gryphon Rower-Upjohn, a sound experimentalist, composer-performer, and curator in the field of audiovisual culture, as well as Gryphon Rue, has four children.

Sandra Calder Davidson and her late husband, Jean Davidson, have a son, Shawn (1956), as well as a daughter, Andréa (1961). The Calder Foundation's vice presidents, Sandra, Shawn, and Andréa are vice presidents. Jean Davidson was the son of singer Jo Davidson. Sandra is a children's book illustrator. In the 2013 book The Calder Family and Others Critters: Portraits and Reflections, she caricatured her family and friends as animals.

The Calder family has a long association with the Putney School, a Vermont co-ed boarding academy. Both Calder's children and great-grandchildren attended the kindergarten, as did many of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Around 2007, the Rower family donated a standing mobile (a mobile that stands on its own fixed base) to Putney. In Calder Hall of the Michael S. Currier Center on campus, a 13-foot mobile hangs.

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Life and career

Alexander Calder's parents did not want him to be an actor, so he decided to study mechanical engineering. Calder, an intuitive engineer who has been an engineer since childhood, had no idea what mechanical engineering was even known. "I wasn't positive what this word meant," he later wrote, "I was hoping I'd better adopt it." In 1915, he joined the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. "I wanted to be an engineer because some guy I really liked was a mechanical engineer," Calder said. Calder, a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and excelled in mathematics at Stevens. He was well liked and the class yearbook contained the following phrase: "Sandy is obviously always up for a joke, or perhaps up to some satisfaction because his face is always wrapped up in the same mischievous, juvenile grin." In this case, the man's character is evidently the determining factor, since he is one of the most likable fellows on the planet.

Calder spent five weeks at the Plattsburgh Civilian Military Training Camp during the summer of 1916. He joined the Student's Army Training Corps, Naval Section at Stevens in 1918 and was made captain of the battalion.

In 1919, Calder graduated from Stevens. He worked as a hydraulic engineer and draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. Calder took a mechanic job on the passenger ship H. F. Alexander in June 1922. Calder slept on deck and awakened one early morning off the coast of Guatemala, seeing both the sun rising and the full moon setting on opposite horizons as sailing from San Francisco to New York City. "It was early one morning on a calm sea off the coast of Guatemala" when my couch—a coil of wire—overcames it, and the moon appears to be a silver coin on the other."

In San Francisco and Calder, the H.F. Alexander docked in Aberdeen, Washington, where his sister and her husband, Kenneth Hayes, were born. Calder worked as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain views prompted him to write home to order paints and brushes. Calder rescheduled to New York to pursue a career as an artist shortly after.

George Luks, Boardman Robinson, and John Sloan all attended the Art Students League in New York City, Calder. As a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette, where one of his duties was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became captivated by the circus act, a theme that would resurface in his later work.

Calder moved to Paris in 1926, enrolled in Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in Montparnasse Quarter. When traveling by sea from Paris to New York in June 1929, Calder met Louisa James (1905–1996), his grandmother, Henry James, and scholar William James. In 1931, the pair married in 1931. Calder met a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp while in Paris. Leger wrote a preface to Calder's first exhibition of abstract works held at the Galerie Percher in 1931. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933, in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (Sandra born 1935, Mary 1939). Calder tried to join the Marines as a camofleur during World War II but was turned down. He and Louisa travelled through India for three months in 1955, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry.

Calder converted into a new workshop in 1963, overlooking the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He donated a sculpture to the town, which has been on display in the town square since 1974. Calder's career began in French, and he showed many of his works in French, regardless of where they were headed for eventual display.

Calder's Autobiography with Pictures was published in 1966 by Calder with the support of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.

Calder died of a heart attack in November 1976, shortly after the opening of a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York.

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