Alexander Calder’s lyrical inventions

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Clare Finn looks at some work that changed the face of sculpture, on show at London’s Pace Gallery

Gently turning, changing in unpredictable directions, trembling in invisible air currents; the dance of light against a wall rebounding from unpainted elements; Alexander Calder’s post-war works are distinguished not only by the grace and balance of their systems, but their intricacy, their interacting forces that bring his work to a radical new level. They are not only pieces of their time – they exist in the present moment.

The exhibition at Pace Gallery shows almost 50 pieces from one of Calder’s most fertile periods, the late 1940s after the Second World War. The works in this museum-quality show are displayed in the spacious rooms at 6 Burlington Gardens; mobiles, stabiles and standing mobiles on the ground floor, paintings and gouaches on the first. The exhibition continues the gallery’s four-decade relationship with the Calder Estate and Foundation.

The catalogue, thanks to the Calder Foundation’s extraordinarily thorough archive, illustrates each exhibit and accompanies them with archival images from Calder’s Roxbury studio or showing them installed in historic exhibitions, together with Calder’s assembly sketches. Barbara Rose’s catalogue essay clearly and concisely lays out Calder’s biography and sets his work in the context of that of other artists’ and movements of the time. It also includes a chronology for the years 1945 – 1949 by the Foundation’s founder and president, Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder’s grandson. Again it is well-illustrated with archival documents relating to the period.

Trained as an engineer, ‘Sandy’ Calder (1898–1976) was 25 before he decided to become an artist and moved to New York where he spent three years taking classes at the Art Students League. At that time he thought of himself as a painter and his change to being a sculptor was gradual. The son and grandson of sculptors, Alexander Stirling Calder and Alexander Milne Calder, he went ‘into the family business’, but in a very different way to them. First, in 1926, he moved to Paris, then came the Calder Circus; animals, clowns and tumblers made of wire and given life by cranks, pulleys and Calder’s showmanship, which gave tension, anticipation and humour to each performance. Simultaneously he made larger works, portrait heads, his animated Josephine Baker, or Romulus and Remus, drawings in space in bent and twisted wire. Then, in 1930, came his visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio, which turned him from figurative to abstract art in both two and three dimensions.

Today it is easy to forget how radical Calder’s work was. At that time most modern sculpture was cast or modelled, a point illustrated in the chronology, which shows installation shots and catalogue covers for exhibitions of modern sculpture that included Calder. His work was juxtaposed with that of his contemporaries, Aristide Maillol, Jacques Lipchitz and Henry Moore, as well as that of Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957). It broke through fixed systems, did away with the plinth and incorporated time, the fourth dimension.

With the war came a shortage of sheet metal. So Calder turned to wood carving and recycling discarded materials. Once the war ended he again began working in metal. Among these pieces were small sculptures, made from scraps and off-cuts of sheets from larger works. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), a friend for many years, named Calder’s moving pieces ‘mobiles’. Painter and sculptor, Jean Arp (1886–1966) later called the non-moving works ‘stabiles’. On seeing Calder’s small sculptures Duchamp suggested they be dis-assembled and airmailed in 18-inch packages, the maximum size allowed, to Paris for a show. A regular trans-Atlantic airmail service had only recently been established. At that point Calder had never flown across the Atlantic.

Intrigued by the idea, Calder began making bigger sculpture that could be dismantled, packed into eight or ten packages, airmailed across the Atlantic and reassembled. Baby Flat Top is such a piece, with plates that bolt together and wires with folding hinges to facilitate packing for mailing to the  Galerie Louis Carré show of 1946, ‘Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations’, for which Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the catalogue essay, Les mobiles de Calder, reproduced in the present catalogue.

This ‘mailed’ work incorporated the anticipation of unpacking and can be related to Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, his portable ‘exhibition’ of his own work made between 1935–41. Calder’s gift for his wife, Louisa’s 43^th Birthday Gift – a collection of five miniature, standing mobiles in a felt-lined cigar box, included in the present show also allowed her to unpack them and have her own Calder show.

In the 1940s Calder travelled to Brazil for the first of three extended trips. There, the exuberance of Brazil’s daily life soon found its way into his work. Blue Feather is full of humour and surprise. These works are all, as Sartre said:

at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the tangible symbol of Nature, of that great, vague Nature that squanders pollen and suddenly causes a thousand butterflies to take wing.