Alexander Calder (Lawnton, Pennsylvania, 1898 – New York, New York, 1976) is best known for his delicate abstract sculptures, known as mobiles, which introduced motion into a formerly static medium and revolutionized twentieth-century sculpture.
Born into a family of artists, Calder first earned a degree in mechanical engineering before studying at the Art Students League in New York. Moving to Paris in 1926, he began "drawing" in wire three-dimensionally, producing portrait heads of celebrities and friends, and channeled his lifelong fascination with the circus into Cirque Calder, a miniature performance of wire and found materials he staged by hand for the Parisian avant-garde. "I think best in wire," he later said. After visiting Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, Calder was inspired by nonobjective and geometric art, and in 1931 he created his first mobile, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp as a French pun on words meaning both "motion" and "motive."
A mobile is not simply a sculpture that happens to move: suspended in near-equilibrium, its arms and discs answer the smallest current of air with a rearrangement of the whole, so that line, silhouette, shadow, and the empty space between elements are never fixed twice the same way. Calder came to prefer this open-ended unpredictability to the motors he first used to drive the works, and created what Jean Arp called "stabiles," their grounded, static counterpart, as a kind of controlled contrast. The tension between the two registers is legible across scale, from small tabletop mobiles that turn on a breath to Calder's monumental public commissions: La Grande Vitesse (1969) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a stabile whose sweeping steel planes hold still what his mobiles leave in motion, and one of the first great abstract sculptures installed in an American civic plaza.
Calder's achievements were recognized early: the Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1943, and he won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952. Never confined to a single medium, he also produced paintings, prints, theater set designs, tapestries, rugs, and political posters; his work is held today in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and Tate.
