the wire years

alexander calder the wire years

Alexander Calder will always be remembered as the man who put sculpture in motion. As the first art form to truly utilize motion as an element of form, Calder’s mobiles were a significant milestone in modern art.

Yet, were it not for his early sculptures and experimentation with wire, Calder’s later kinetic work would not have been possible.

Before Calder began creating mobiles and large scale commissions for which he is most famous, his career was devoted to creating small scale objects from found materials. Throughout the late 1920’s and 1930’s, these small sculptures defined Calder’s career, and awarded him international recognition.

before the mobiles

Philadelphia

New York

Calder’s prolific artistic career began in 1923, when he moved to New York from his hometown of Philadelphia at the age of 25. It was here that he began painting at the Art Student’s league, and took a job illustrating for the National Police Gazette, which sent him to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to sketch circus scenes.

Attracted by Paris’ reputation as an artistic center, Calder moved there in 1926 and earned his living as an illustrator and a toy designer. At the same time, he was developing a miniature circus. Calder created his circus figures and props mostly out of wire, a material he soon adapted for his sculptures.

Over the course of the next five years (1926–1931) Calder created and performed his miniature circus throughout Europe and America. This work proved to be a catalyst for his sculptures to follow, and brought him international recognition. Calder quickly became known as the “king of wire and string.”

globetrotting

Paris

Realizing the vast capabilities of his flexible and inexepensive materials, Calder expanded his wire creations to jewelry, appliances, and small portraits.

Calder soon began to sculpt portraits of his friends and public figures of the day. Like his Circus, Calder’s wire portrait heads span a considerable period of his Paris years of the late 1920s, and also serve as a diary of who he knew, and where he knew them. Calder’s subjects ranged from his close friends and family, to Josephine Baker, Joan Miro, and other well known names. Word traveled about the inventive artist, and in 1928 Calder was given his first solo gallery show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. The show at Weyhe was soon followed by others in New York, as well as in Paris and Berlin.

The Spirit of St Louis, c. 1928

wire bending

For his purposes, industrial steel wire was an ideal medium. It was cheap, malleable, portable and equally adaptable to precision work and doodling, which to him were almost the same thing. Wire was like three-dimensional ink; it was a means of combining drawing and sculpture in space.

Calder bending wire in his Paris studio, 1930

“I think best

Calder’s first wire portrait, Josephine Baker, 1926.

Josephine Baker IVc. 1928

in wire”

Although his wire portraits were quick and imprecise, Calder often made sketches prior to executing his portraits in wire.

TOP

Varese, 1930

MIddLE

Eduard Penkala, 1929

BOTTOM

Dr. Hans Curlis, 1929

LEFT

Head with Lock of Hair, 1929.

MIddLE

Marion Greenwood, 1928.

RIGHT

Portrait of a man, 1928.

LEFT

Head with Lock of Hair, 1929.

MIddLE

Self-Portrait, 1929.

RIGHT

Masque, 1929.

LEFT

Laura Canade Zigrosser, 1928.

MIddLE

Jenny McKean, 1930.

RIGHT:Joan Miro, 1930.

LEFT

Head with Lock of Hair, 1929.

MIddLE

Carl Zigrosser, 1928.

RIGHT:

Margie McKean, 1930.

“Mr. Calder, an ingenious Yankee, is in

a class by himself. Instead of squirting

tubes of paint on canvas or mutilating

marble, he twists pieces of iron wire —

with consummate skill into a likeness

of his model.”

Kiki —Queen of the Paris Artist’s Studio

Soda Fountain,c. 1927

In October of 1930, Calder visited Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio, which Calder credited as initiating the

“shock that started things.”

Calder noted that he was especially impressed by a wall of colored paper rectangles that Mondrian continually repositioned for compositional experiments, and imagined how he could bring this abstraction to three dimensions.

the shock that starting things

Calder’s studio at 14, rue de la Colonie, Paris, 1933.

1930 marked a major transition in Calder’s art, abandoning the wire and wood figures of the previous four years for abstract constructions.

“I was very much moved by Mondrian’s

studio, large beautiful and irregular

in shape as it was...and I thought how

fine it would be if everything there

moved...”

Pantograph, 1931.

Mobile au Plomb, 1931.

Many of Calder’s abstract creations show a clear reference to the cosmos, which would become even more pronounced in his mechanized works. Calder’s cosmic designs consist of simple points or lines suspended in space, projecting into an interstellar space. In these creations, Calder was exploring theories about the system of the universe, and planetary orbits.

LEFT

Half Circle, Quarter Circle, 1932.

RIGHT

Two Spheres within a Sphere, 1931.

Cone d’ebene, 1932.

Calder created motored objects that could move to create different visual effects. In a short while, however, he realized that the mechanized movement didn’t have the fluidity or the surprise he wanted in his work. He decided to let them hang and have the wind or a slight touch begin their movement.

Whe Marcel duchamp saw them, he named them “mobiles” (a pun on the French for “to move” and “motive”). These new sculptures, arranged by the chance operations of the wind, went against everything that sculpture had been. They were simply about form and color and the joy in creating both. By his early thirties Alexander Calder had not only found a project he would continue for the rest of his life, he had created a unique form of sculpture that broadened the parameters of art.

set in motion

Moves to Paris and begins his miniature circus

First wire sculpture, Josephine Baker

First one man show, Wehe Gallery, New York.

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8

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7

Exhibits toys

wire career

circus wire portraits

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819

23

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619

19

Born in Philadelphia

Moves to Paris

graduates from engineering school

Moves to New York, begins painting

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38

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3

begins mobile career

moves to Connecticut

first prize, Venice Biennale

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1

first retrospective of work

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3 MoMA retrospective

1976 dies in New York

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9

Begins making wire jewelry

Exhibits work at Galerie Billiet, Paris; Galerie Neumann Nierendorf, Berlin.

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0

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1

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2

Visits Mondrian’s studio, rethinks entire sculpture career

Experiments with abstract painting, and transitions to geometric abstraction in his wire sculptures.

Joined Abstraction-Creation group.

First mobile construction

First abstract constructions shown at Galerie Percier, Paris.

Mobiles exhibited at Galerie Vignon, Paris.

abstraction mobiles

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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Alexander Calder. New York: Library of Congress, 1964. Print.

Marter, Joan. Alexander Calder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.

Image CreditsSimon, Joan and Brigitte Leal. Alexander Calder: the Paris Years 1926–1933. New York: Yale University Press, 2009. Print.

references

This book was created by Julia Gordonfor Visual Information Studio, fall 2011 at Washington University in St Louis. Typefaces used include Vista Slab and Interstate.