Alexander Calder

Untitled, 1944

gouache on paper

37 x 28 in.

Mary B. Milliken Fund

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Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia, the son of Alexander Stirling Calder and grandson of Alexander Milne Calder, both famed sculptures.  He received a mechanical engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology and worked at odd jobs before enrolling at the Art Students League in New York. His first art job was making line drawings for the National Police Gazette.  He published and illustrated his first book, Animal Sketches in 1925.  During this time Calder was producing oil paintings with city scenes. His early sculpture included carved primitive figures in wood.  He moved to Paris in 1936 and took classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere and made his first wire sculptures and created a miniature circus in his studio made of wire.  Calder exhibited his first kinetic or mobile sculpture in 1932.  His early mobiles were motor-drive, but later he used wind-driven mobiles which allowed the sculptural parts to move independently.  Mobiles were not Calder’s only art form.  He also produced drawings, oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, gouache and serigraphy.  In addition he designed jewelry, tapestry, theater settings and architectural interiors.

Though Calder is best known for his mobiles and stabiles, his playful attitude, wit and bold use of color are readily apparent in his vibrant gouaches.  This gouache represents a period when Calder pursued geometric abstraction.  The two heavily outlined white forms with their spiral-shaped eyes give a ghost-like appearance that has surrealist undertones.  These dream-like images are placed against a vividly striped background that makes their presence even more disconcerting.  Whimsical yet frightening the two stark figures seem to emerge from a hallucinatory landscape, threatening to descend into the viewer’s space.

Reference

Howard Greenfield. The Essential Alexander Calder, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.  ISBN-13: 978-0810958340