Calder: Sculpting Time

The introduction of movement into sculpture. That implausible leap from the static to the temporal. Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile, achieved what the great Hellenistic sculptors could only suggest in the windblown robe and fluttering wings of Nike of Samothrace. He broke the mold. Jean Paul Sartre described Calder’s mobiles as “mid-way between matter and life”. They are a composition of motions, a series of fleeting moments where balance, force and tension coexist in perfect harmony. Calder: Sculpting Time (published by Silvana Editorial, $50.00) covers MASILugano’s ambitious exhibition in 168 pages, highlighting his most prolific era, the 1930s to 1960s.

Calder was born with art in his blood. His mother was a painter, his father and grandfather were sculptors. Young Calder showed an aptitude with his hands at a very young age but was discouraged to pursue art by his parents. He became a mechanical engineer instead, a skill which would later serve him well. But he quickly grew weary of the rigid discipline and lack of play required of engineering and heeded the call of art. Moving to Paris, the birthplace of Modernism, in 1926, he immersed himself in the creative swirl of the artistic community. There he began to produce wire sculptures. They attracted the avant garde, bestowing him with popularity and gallery shows. Inspired by a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930, Calder was compelled to write, “I was very much moved by (it)… with the walls painted white and divided by black lines and rectangles of bright colors, just like his paintings… I thought, how fine would it be if everything there moved”. The biomorphic forms and pools of saturated color by artists Juan Miro and Jean Arp also did not escape his eye.

Calder recalled awakening at dawn on a boat in Guatemala years earlier where he saw both the fiery sunrise and the cool, silver-sheen of the moon simultaneously, making an indelible impression, the beauty of celestial bodies obedient to invisible commands. In 1931 he created Croisière, Sphérique, Densité 1, a miniature solar system of spheres and delicate wires. The world, charged with the exciting breakthroughs of science at that time, announced Pluto had just been discovered and Albert Einstein revealed his theory of relativity. Einstein attended one of Calder’s shows and stood transfixed for 40 minutes while his motorized sculpture, A Universe, completed its entire movement cycle. Calder, like all great artists, understood his epoch.

Calder found the motorized movements of his mobiles elegantly handsome but predictable, without the surprise of spontaneity. Drawing upon his engineering skills and the lyrical poetry of mathematics, he abandoned electricity, allowing air and gravity to guide his sculptures. They acquired a life of their own. They took flight. They became free. They became. “They must not be just a ‘fleeting’ moment”, he said, “but a physical bond between the varying events of life. Not extractions, but abstractions. Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting”. Calder redefined everything sculpture was, could possibly be, and now is. His stabiles, static sculptures in soaring, aerodynamic forms, reach for the sky, captured at that very moment before weightlessness. They are becoming…

Calder: Sculpting Time pictures his mobiles, stabiles and constellations against an infinite expanse of white, allowing his airy forms to exist without distraction. His innovative introduction of movement and the dimension of time into his sculptures are an immersive experience, a legacy present in time based performances, systems art, and video art witnessed today. His floating chromatic abstractions are the very embodiment of the Modern Era. An era when everything seemed possible. When the shock of the new became quotidian and there was a romantic yearning for tomorrow.

CALDER: SCULPTING TIME 

Published by Silvana Editoriale

Edited by Carmen Gimenez, Ana Mingot.

Clth, 7.75 x 11.5 in. / 168 pgs / 106 color.

ISBN 9788836657827

List Price: USD $50.00, CDN $71.00

All images courtesy of the publisher.