Alexander Calder North American, 1898-1976

Born in 1898, Alexander Calder was the second child in a family of artists—his father worked as a sculptor, while his mother was a painter. In his mid-twenties, he relocated to New York City, where he attended the Art Students League and took a job at the National Police Gazette, illustrating sporting events and circus performances, including those of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. A few years later, in 1926, Calder moved to Paris, where he developed Cirque Calder (1926–31), a unique and intricate body of work. His performances of this miniature circus soon captivated the Parisian avant-garde.

 

A pivotal moment in Calder’s career came in 1931 when he created his first kinetic, nonobjective sculptures, pioneering an entirely new artistic style. Some of these early pieces incorporated motors, prompting Marcel Duchamp to call them "mobiles"—a term that in French signifies both "motion" and "motive." Calder later abandoned mechanical elements, instead designing suspended mobiles that moved naturally with air currents. In contrast, Jean Arp coined the term "stabiles" to describe Calder’s stationary sculptures.

In 1933, Calder and his wife, Louisa, returned to the United States, settling in a rundown farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, he began crafting outdoor sculptures, positioning large-scale standing mobiles across the rolling landscape of his property. A decade later, his artistic reputation soared when James Johnson Sweeney and Duchamp curated a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, firmly establishing Calder as a leading figure in contemporary American art.

 

By 1953, Calder and Louisa had moved back to France, eventually making their home in Saché, a small town in the Indre-et-Loire region. His focus shifted toward monumental commissioned works, which became central to his practice in his later years. Some of his most significant pieces from this period include Spirale (1958) for UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and Flamingo (1973), a striking installation in Chicago’s Federal Center Plaza.

 

Calder passed away in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight, just weeks after the opening of Calder’s Universe, a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His legacy endures through his groundbreaking contributions to kinetic sculpture and modern art.