ALEXANDER CALDER

Alexander Calder, (born July 22, 1898, Lawnton, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died November 11, 1976, New York, New York), American artist best known for his innovation of the mobile suspended sheet metal and wire assemblies that are activated in space by air currents. Visually fascinating and emotionally engaging, those sculptures—along with his monumental outdoor bolted sheet metal stabilities, which only imply movement—make Calder one of the most-recognizable and beloved modern artists. He also made a smaller number of sculptures in the more-traditional materials of wood and bronze and did paintings, mostly in gouache, as well as drawings, including illustrations for books, and prints, and was an inventive designer of jewerly.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Calder continued to be the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective staged in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1964, and his position as a well-known, even greatly beloved, artist was solidified. In large part that was because his colourful works—he generally used red, blue, and yellow, along with black and white—are directly experiential, requiring no particular artistic expertise to appreciate. His mobiles are commonly described as evoking a childlike joy in the viewer. As the Modern art era waned and the contemporary art era took form in the 1970s, however, his reputation within the art world suffered as critics and tastemakers deemed his work too playful or popular to be taken seriously. His painting of an airliner in 1973 and a race car in 1975 (for BMW) added to the critical distaste, activities that, ironically, in the 21st century are no longer perceived as being detrimental to a serious art career. Calder died in 1976 at age 78, weeks after the opening of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the 21st century the Alexander Calder Foundation documented his output at more than 22,000 works.

For many years after his death, Calder’s popularity obscured his genius as one of the early Modern era’s truly innovative artists, who not only pioneered kinetic art but invented works that are precursors to forms highly valued in the 21st century such as sound and multimedia art and installation, a medium for which the viewer’s aesthetic experience is dependent on the situation in which the art is displayed. The reevaluations by 21st-century artists and art historians place his achievements in the highest echelons of art. His popularity continues even as the 1938 estimation of his early supporter, art critic and later museum director James Johnson Sweeney, has proved accurate: “Calder is an original artist whose contribution is so unique that it may possibly only be appraised of its true value by the future.”