On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art PLASTIC SPACEMAN BY JAMES R. MELLOW INTERVIEWER: So it's not the obvious mechanized world you're concerned with? CALDER: Oh, you mean cellophane and all that crap. Alexander Calder, 73,...
...I reverted to plastic work which was still abstract...
...In 1915, he enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey...
...Throughout his life, Calder has been particularly fortunate in his choice of friends: Fernand Leger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Breton have all written laudatory prefaces for his various exhibitions...
...These hesitations, resumptions, gropings, clumsinesses, the sudden decisions and above all that swan-like grace make of certain 'mobiles' very strange creatures indeed, something midway between matter and life...
...From the welter of movements, trends and ideas that have been operative in the avant-garde during his lifetime, he has simply taken what was useful to his purposes and discarded the ideology and the dogma...
...His most important innovations, he notes, were begun in Paris...
...That freewheeling attitude, stripped of philosophical pretensions, characterizes much of his career...
...In 1937, he created a mercury fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, but Picasso's "Guernica," exhibited for the first time, stole the show...
...The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once observed that Calder's work represents "the mechanization of poetry," and that only an American could have attempted this with such success...
...An ardent admirer of the circus, he began to create a miniature circus of his own...
...thinking to be out of its reach...
...Suddenly they appear distinctively Calderesque—pierced discs, fluted suns—and one realizes that when the great artist imposes his vision upon the world, projecting his unique set of images, the process begins in his kitchen and ends in public places...
...My mobiles are objects in space," he once informed a French critic, "I say I'm a sculptor to avoid a fuss...
...contributing sketches of sporting events to the Police Gazette...
...But then, when the agitation had ceased and it appeared to have relapsed into quiescence, its long, majestic tail, which until then had not budged, began mournfully to wave and, sweeping through the air, brushed across my face...
...That is to say, unlike the late David Smith, he is not a sculptor whom younger practitioners can follow profitably...
...He now maintains two establishments—both impressively photographed by Mulas —one in Roxbury, Connecticut, the other in Sache, south of Tours...
...I like to work in any medium where I am free to do what I choose," he declares...
...Aside from introducing movement to sculpture—a significant contribution, to be sure— he has not opened up the formal possibilities of modern sculpture in any extensive way...
...One picture shows the hulking, white-haired artist holding up a delicate mobile while a flurry of snowflakes swirls around his head...
...It is probably fitting that the inventor of the mobile should have had a highly mobile career: movement, change, diversity seem to be the essence of Calder's artistic temperament and lifestyle...
...At the end of this...
...His first important encounter with abstraction, for example, occurred when he visited Mondrian's Paris studio in the early '30s...
...And for two weeks or so, I painted very modest abstractions...
...my painting is already very fast...
...A superb and faultless designer, he has a talent for combining playful and disparate shapes, a flair for the comic that he shares with his colleague and friend, the Spanish painter Joan Miro...
...another catches him clowning behind a large standing mobile...
...He later designed a water ballet for the General Motors Technical Center in Detroit, which he calls "the most expensive fountain in captivity...
...Among the snippets of reviews, comments, criticisms and autobiographical passages that Arnason has included in his introductory text, there is a pertinent observation by Sartre: "I was talking with Calder one day in his studio, when suddenly a 'mobile' beside me, which until then had been quiet, became violently agitated...
...Above the marvelous clutter of household objects, mobiles hang from the beamed ceiling like pendant vines...
...Despite his fame as one of the inventors of kinetic sculpture, Calder remains peculiarly immune to theorizing...
...In time it grew so large that five suitcases were required to transport it from one country to another...
...As shown by his blunt answer to interviewer Katherine Kuh—reprinted in the handsome photographic study, Calder (photographs and design by Ugo Mulas...
...Critical attempts to appraise his work inevitably end up as passages of pure description, as if one were finally reduced to explaining some natural phenomenon...
...I stepped quickly back...
...introduction by H. Harvard Arnason...
...Although trained as an engineer, he is diffident about the mechanical aspects of his famous mobiles: "I haven't really touched machinery except for a few elementary mechanisms like levers and balances...
...The two most memorable photos, however, are of Calder puttering around his kitchen at Sache...
...The utensils, hanging on their trapeze-like rack, also reveal what Calder's sculptures signify: They are acrobats of form suspended above the disorder of daily life...
...Much of Calder's time in recent years has been taken up with large-scale architectural commissions: huge mobiles and stabiles for Carlos Villanueva's auditorium at the University of Caracas, for the unesco building in Paris, and for the JFK International Airport...
...Since his circus days, Calder has shown a predilection for sculptures that perform or engage the public in some way...
...Calder was born in 1898 in Law-ton, Pennsylvania...
...Calder regularly gave performances for friends, and his circus became one of the memorable artistic events of the '20s...
...Drawn to the theater, he devised a mechanized setting for an early performance of Eric Satie's Socrate and did sets for Martha Graham's ballets...
...Each is an old building outfitted with a large modern studio...
...According to Arnason, Calder was obliged to move around the country in his youth, often because of his father's ailing health...
...Alexander Calder, 73, one of the great 20th-century masters, is a difficult artist to classify...
...The only artistic celebrity Calder seems to have miffed is Salvatore Dali, who once tartly observed, "The least one can ask of a sculpture is that it stay still...
...In fact, Calder implies that his work is not, properly speaking, sculpture...
...Although Calder's art is not slavishly realistic, it lies very close to the natural world—to the shapes of birds and animals, to the movements of spinning suns and orbiting moons...
...If he is an art-and-tech-nology man, it is purely on the pragmatic level, avoiding highfalutin ideologies and aspirations...
...Among his largest sculptures to date is the 70-foot-tall "Man" he made for Montreal's Expo '67...
...With some pride Calder notes that he has occasionally kept three metal shops working simultaneously on his various projects...
...After graduating, he took a series of odd jobs: fireman on a boat bound for the Pacific, timekeeper and then draftsman in logging camps on the West Coast...
...IT IS PERHAPS indicative of Calder's sculptures that one can find so little to say about their purely formal characteristics...
...Viking Press, 216 pp., $18.95)—he does not see himself as a technological artist, irresistibly responding to the Zeitgeist...
...The current mystique of art-and-technology that is gaining ground with his younger contemporaries ("Better Living Through Chemistry" carried into the realm of esthetics) is of little importance to Calder...
...He goes on to explain: "Though I had heard the word 'modern' before, I did not consciously know or feel the term 'abstract.' So now, at 32, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract...
...As Calder has remarked, "I'm so old-fashioned...
...He made his first trip to Paris in 1926, sailing as a deck hand on a British freighter...
...Impressed by the brightly colored rectangles decorating the Dutch painter's studio, Calder says he experienced "a shock that started things...
...Quite typically, Calder remembers suggesting to Mondrian that it might be fun to make the colored rectangles oscillate...
...Calder says he did not know what he wanted to become and went into mechanical engineering because it had been recommended by a friend...
...Mulas provides many vivid photographs of Calder and his work in a variety of settings...
...Both his parents were artists, his father a reputable academic sculptor...
...gave him the opposite term...
...But Calder, who is an inveterate international traveler, seems disinclined to view his work as particularly American...
...There he eked out a living designing toys for a manufacturer and working as a commercial illustrator...
...If I design a house to live in, it turns out to look like a Roman aqueduct...
...Marcel Duchamp supplied him with the name, "mobiles," for the motorized sculptures he began executing in 1931: Jean Arp, questioning him about his nonmoving works ("Well, what were those things you did last year—stabiles...
...the animals and acrobats, constructed of wire, cloth and paper, moved by a system of pulleys...
...During this period he tried his hand at commercial art...
...He returned East in 1923 and enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied with John Sloan and George Luks, leaders of the Ash Can School...
...He was delighted when the artist replied in dead-earnestness, "No...
...Thus Calder began his lifelong habit of shuttling between France and the United States...
...Against the far wall, there is a rack of ordinary kitchen utensils: colanders, funnels, strainers, copper molds...
Vol. 54 • June 1971 • No. 13
