05.05–06.10.2024

“… why not plastic forms in motion? Not a simple translatory or rotary motion but several motions of different types, speeds and amplitudes composing to make a resultant whole. Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”

Alexander Calder, 1933

Curated by
Carmen Giménez
Ana Mingot Comenge

Alexander Calder was a towering figure of twentieth-century art and will “forever be remembered as the man who made sculpture move”. By introducing motion into a static art form, his work implies the passage of time and extends beyond the visual and into the realm of the temporal.¹

Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania to a family of artists. His mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a painter, and his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, and grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, were well-established sculptors. Calder moved to New York City in his mid-twenties, where he studied at the Art Students League and worked at the National Police Gazette, illustrating sporting events and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He moved to Paris in 1926, where he created his Cirque Calder (1926–1931), a complex and unique body of performance art—a multiact series of mechanized sculptures in miniature scale—which captured the attention of the Parisian avant-garde. First performed by the artist in 1926, Calder’s circus changed the course of his artistic career by introducing him to avant-garde artists, providing a source of income, drawing attention to his massless wire portraits, and allowing him to experiment with kinetic objects to harness action and anticipation in art.

Calder. Sculpting Time focuses on the works executed in the 1930s and the 1940s, a time which marks the artist’s period of greatest creativity, developing a formal and plastic language characterised by unprecedented innovation. From 1930 onward, Calder unhesitatingly divested himself of the anecdotal and the focus of his work shifted from figurative wire portraiture and sculpture to nonobjective works made of sheet metal, wood and wire, and often accentuated with paint.

“It’s serious without seeming to be” wrote Fernand Léger about the work Calder presented at the Galerie Percier, Paris in the early 1930s.² Around that time, Calder was creating a series of abstract sculptures that he described as densités, sphériques, arcs, and mouvements arrêtés. Among these works is the famous sculpture Croisière from 1931, one of the first works to confirm his adherence to abstraction. Composed of two intersecting circles of wire with a curving length of thicker rod and two small spheres, painted in black and white, Croisière maps a complex and dynamic scheme. A text Calder wrote years later in 1951 (when he participated in the symposium “What Abstract Art Means to Me” held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in conjunction with the exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America) provides a concise explanation of his conceptual framework:

Calder around this time began to introduce movement into his nonobjective art; works that Marcel Duchamp coined as “mobiles”, during a studio visit in the fall of 1931. He further reduced the anecdotal figurative references and extended the use of shaped metal to the maximum, setting his fragile artefacts into flight, allowing for a dialogue with the air never before seen. By mid-1933 Calder had returned to the United States, and in September of that year he purchased an old farmhouse on eighteen acres in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he later built a large studio.

One of the most important, singular mobiles is Eucalyptus (1940); a plunging, majestic mobile with a large, surreal element that hangs in palpable tension with the floor. Eucalyptus premiered in Calder’s 1940 exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and went on to be included in nearly all of the major exhibitions staged during the artist’s life. The infinite variations and aleatory combinations proposed by Calder’s mobile summon the viewer’s personal circumstances and sculpt the present moment. Moving freely and interacting with its surroundings, Eucalyptus seems to give form to the very air; continually changing, playing with time itself. In contrast to the mobile, its stationary counterpart the stabile, a term coined by Jean Arp, “is back at the old painting idea of implied movement. You have to walk around a stabile or through it – a mobile dances in front of you”.⁴

With scrap metal scarce in the midst of World War II, he began work a new series of abstract sculptures made from carved wooden forms connected to a network of rigid metal wires. Many of them were mounted at unexpected heights on the wall. James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp, who curated Calder’s 1943 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, proposed the name “constellations” for these works and included seven of them in this major survey, which drew so much attention it was extended due to public demand. By the mid-1940s Calder had attained international recognition, and his creative output, which included paintings, drawings, costumes, set designs, and jewellery, continued to expand. In 1953 he acquired a large house in Saché, a tiny village in France’s Indre-et-Loire Valley, and devoted much of his later working years to public commissions.

Calder’s legacy endures not only in the physical presence of his artworks, but also in the profound impact his work has had on shaping the way we perceive and interact with sculpture. His contributions to sculpture extend well beyond his innovative use of materials and techniques by capturing the subtle essence of fleeting moments. Even the stabiles suggest motion, alternating their material volume with empty space in a dynamic encounter where one becomes part of an unfolding narrative. Going beyond the conventional confines of sculpture, Calder’s art becomes an immersive experience. He is the link between avant-garde abstraction and time-based performance and video art. His sculptures invite viewers to witness the evolution of forms and compositions, anticipating immersive qualities in art and foreshadowing the spatial and temporal dimensions often explored in time-based art. His work embodies a sequence, an unfolding narrative, where each encounter is unique. Confronting this temporal dimension is the aim of this exhibit, inviting the viewer to embrace the instances proposed.

¹ Thomas Messer in Alexander Calder. A Retrospective Exhibition, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1964.

² Fernand Léger, “Introduction”, in Alexandre Calder: Volumes–Vecteurs–Densités / Dessins–Portraits, Galerie Percier, Paris, 1931.

³ Alexander Calder, “What Abstract Art Means to Me”, in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3 (Spring 1951).

⁴ Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York and Evanston, Illinois: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 42.