Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder – The son of a family of sculptors, first artistic attempts as a painter

Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania on 22 July 1898. As the offspring of an important family of sculptors, his artistic path seemed predetermined - his father Alexander Stirling Calder and his grandfather Alexander Milne Calder had produced a 250-figure sculptural group for the Philadelphia City Hall. Despite this family predisposition, Alexander Calder began his artistic career mainly as an autodidact. While performing various casual and unskilled jobs, including among others as a ship’s stoker, he painted landscapes in his spare time. He studied engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey from 1915 to 1919 before moving to New York to attend painting and drawing courses at the Art Students League and whilst still studying, worked as a draughtsman on the popular magazine The National Police Gazette. In 1926, Alexander Calder travelled to Paris where he tried his hand as a sculptor and created an early wood sculpture.

A circus full of wire acrobats and the birth of the mobile

Alexander Calder shared a studio for a time with Arno Breker and it was here that he designed his first moving toy, his first moving structures out of wire and cork, and finally his famous circus. The latter took the form of a whole ring of wire acrobats and animals, with which the artist staged sophisticated performances for his circle of friends. The circus represented the most important subject of Alexander Calder’s career, which he frequently addressed in countless variations. The dazzling world of performers and showmen fascinated the artist, who had already created numerous drawings on this theme before his famous wire sculptures. During his time in Paris, he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and made acquaintance with important contemporary artists such as Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian; it was Mondrian who inspired Calder to construct his first mobiles with which he seemed to overcome the laws of gravity. In 1932 he became a member of the artist group Abstraction-Création which strengthened his tendency to abstraction. 

An internationally celebrated master of kinetic art

Alexander Calder returned to the USA in 1933 where he conceived further mobiles for outdoor use and also appeared with his first abstract large sculptures. The work of Marcel Duchamp inspired Calder’s intensive efforts to link abstraction and movement; he also owed the name Mobiles for his moveable, free-swinging wire sculptures to the French American object artist, whilst his immoveable objects were christened Stabiles by Hans Arp. This playful lightness became characteristic for Alexander Calder’s multi-award-winning work which he presented three times at documenta in Kassel, among other events. Alongside his kinetic and sculptural works, Calder created stage designs and book illustrations and was a lifelong friend of the Spanish-Catalan painter Jan Miró. Calder designed the first BMW Art Car in 1975, an individually painted racing car based on a suggestion from the French racing driver and art lover Hervé Poulain.

Alexander Calder died in New York on 11 November 1976.