On Art

...On hearing about the collector who had stripped the paint from a Smith, he asked jokingly if it had fallen apart...

...The art of the last Alexander Calder, made in a period of cultural disintegration, could confirm what stability there has been, but only with humorous diffidence...

...His forms may look like rebellion against the conservatism of his ancestors, yet they convey the same kind of optimism...

...Presented as a critical biography, this bright, good-looking volume is really more a celebration of the creative good life by a friend and admirer of the artist...

...Then, in 1923, the 25-year-old Calder faced up to his true metier and signed on at the Art Students' League in New York, remaining there for three years...

...After a period studying art...

...Well-laced with anecdotes, the text is reasonably informative, and there is a substantial bibliography...

...Inevitable as an upsurge of public interest is with the passing of the famous, the idea of Calder more popular in death than in life is almost unimaginable...

...The same might be said of Joan Miro as a painter, except that his work, which Calder's resembles, has its darker moments and a certain erotic flavor...

...Lipman indicates that the sculptor, for all his prankishness, took himself quite seriously...

...It seems important to comment on the less mythic aspects of this artist, since even before death he was engulfed by the meaningless, all-purpose adoration society lavishes on its heroes...

...Calder was also capable of Archie Bunkerisms?notably at the expense of Isamu Noguchi's work and Japanese ancestry...

...While Cal-der felt Mondrian's art would benefit from having the forms move, he was nonetheless impressed and began experimenting with abstract painting himself...

...Perhaps the most spectacular project came last year when Braniff airlines commissioned the artist to decorate its airplanes...

...Other histories, however, say the son—not the father—was a pupil of the famous Philadelphia artist...

...Moreover, his—and the country's?distaste for theory and concept," now seems more like impatience with the theories and concepts of others...

...After having had his first show of oil paintings in 1926, the artist took a job as a laborer on a freighter and sailed to France, where he produced some animal carvings in wood and began work on the miniature circus that later became famous...

...Calder was remarkable for, among other things, being the third in a line of successful sculptors...

...For the next four years he halfheartedly filled a number of jobs, most of them related to his professional training...

...It would require considerable research to find a country that has not installed a Calder in a public place or staged a display of his art...

...Various authorities have commented on how quintessentially American his constructions are...

...For many years now a display of his art, no matter how august its setting, has been a carnival event that few people have been able to resist...

...Calder invariably composed in a major key...

...How right he was, and how old-fashioned...

...He deserves better than Bionic immortality...

...One is made uneasy by the warmth it inspires...

...All three generations produced sculpture that was an accessory to architecture...

...It was in this period, while doing drawings part-time for the National Police Gazette...

...there is no gauging how seriously he took the project as a work of art...

...These peppy objects painted in prime nursery colors speak of progress, of the ma-chine-as-man's-best-friend...

...Perhaps because the national character—or one's perception of it—has changed, his art begins to look nostalgic...

...Like Picasso, who has been similarly victimized, Calder was a prodigious artist, a successful businessman and tough personality...

...Returning with her to Paris, he produced his first show of abstract sculptures, followed by one of constructions operated by motors and hand cranks...

...Nevertheless, all accounts suggest he tried to avoid his fate, if only unconsciously...

...Though he worked for several years on the circus, enlarging and perfecting it...

...Marcel Duchamp named these "mobiles," while Jean Arp suggested the stationary pieces be called "stabiles...

...It's interesting that this notion should have lasted so long in a nation founded on a theory...

...The first two lived in confident times and their art confirmed that spirit...

...But in a time when it must have been even more difficult than it is today to distinguish the merely far-out from the innovative, the amused and/or outraged reactions of the cognoscenti to his performing wire figures and animals must have been critical encouragement of a kind...

...For Calder, art itself seems to have been a form of play, an impression not dispelled by Jean Lipman's Calder's Universe (Viking, 351 pp., $28.50...

...It is noteworthy that he felt architects and planners were mistaken when they sited his pieces in natural landscape: "My mobiles and stabiles ought to be placed in free spaces, like public squares, or in front of modern buildings, and that is true of all contemporary sculpture...

...For instance, he "wasn't too enthusiastic about the occasional mention of David Smith as America's most important sculptor...

...Though Alexander Calder showed artistic talent as a child, he enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology, obtaining a mechanical engineering degree in 1919 and demonstrating considerable aptitude for mathematics...

...This should be enough reason to miss him...

...That Calder talked very little about art and then only in down-to-earth terms, may well have been because he had little to say...

...A singularly inappropriate crack this, considering that his own work—its technical skill notwithstanding—looks decidedly rinky-dink beside the heavy-duty oeuvre of Smith...

...On a visit to Massachusetts in 1931, Calder married Louisa James, a great-niece of Henry, whom he had met a few years before on an Atlantic crossing...

...Incidentally, according to Lipman the older Calder studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts...

...Whether or not he was America's foremost sculptor—or, as some would have it, the modern world's —Calder was the supreme master of modernism as wholesome fun...

...In a reversal of the usual procedure, the book formed the basis for the Whitney show, which will travel to Georgia early next year and thence to Minnesota and Texas...

...The stabiles may be intrinsically less humorous than the mobiles—sometimes even a little threatening—yet their effect is still upbeat and jolly, like that of Jeeps and Caterpillar tractors...

...There he produced several monuments, including the eagles and figure groups on the City Hall tower and its crowning glory, the 37-foot-high statue of William Penn, some 20 years in the making...

...Since then there has hardly been a year without a Calder exhibition somewhere in the world, or a major commission for sculpture, theater sets, book illustrations, tapestry designs, and so forth...

...It teems with pictures of mobiles, stabiles, gouaches, drawings, jewelry, a miscellany of designs, domestic objects and gags, as well as photographs of the man and his family at home in Connecticut and France...

...and this, I think, accounts as much for his prestige abroad as at home...

...He himself noted that most of his fan letters came from the under-six generation...

...The more one ponders his jokes and offhand observations, the more he seems to resemble the other Calders as they appeared in their monuments...

...he emigrated to the United States in 1868 at age 22, and settled in Philadelphia...

...Come to think of it, the most revered 20th-century artists are those whose achievements are leavened with playfulness...

...Despite the obvious engineering skill involved, it all looks easy to do...

...The first, Alexander Milne Calder, began his career carving tombstones with his father in Aberdeen, Scotland...

...As reported in the New York Times, the news of his death at the age of 78 drew crowds to the museum who had come "to mourn and stayed to smile...

...His son, Alexander Stirling, an even more competent sculptor, was responsible for the Swann Fountain in Philadelphia, the figure of Washington on the arch of New York's Washington Square and Reykjavik's large statue of Leif Ericson...

...American Calder certainly was, but, in a way that now seems dated...

...Modernist though he was, Calder projected a faith in the illusions of the past—all those vague feelings of hope that comprised the American Dream in its purest, 18th-century sense...

...It is no longer possible to regard as peculiarly American those qualities Sel-den Rodman attributes to Calder: "canniness, geniality energy, inventiveness, pragmatism...

...In any case, the circus helped the young American eccentric meet artists such as Jules Pascin, Miro, Theo van Doesburg, and most important, Piet Mondrian...

...The third Calder's background?his mother was a portrait painter?seemed to make it inevitable he would be an artist...

...that he developed an interest in what was to be a major inspiration—the circus...