Alexander Calder was born in 1898 to a line of artists. He was the second son of Alexander Stirling Calder, a sculptor, and Nanette Lederer, a painter. Calder was introduced to artistic creation from an early age, making toys, doll jewelry and metal silhouettes.
After graduating in engineering studies in 1919, he enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1923, and worked simultaneously as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette. In 1926 he moved to Paris, where he discovered the French Avant-Garde and created the Cirque Calder. This traveling theater of animals, acrobats, and props made of wire and salvaged materials, was animated as a deus ex machina by Calder in performance shows open to the public. This miniature circus, transportable in a suitcase, was also replicated in New York.
In 1928 Calder held his first solo exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery in New York, soon followed by other major exhibitions in the United States, Paris and Berlin. In the early 1920s he met in Paris artists and intellectuals such as Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, James Johnson Sweeney, and Marcel Duchamp: it was the latter who used the French term “mobiles” to refer to the kinetic sculptures that would characterize Calder’s artistic production from 1931 onward. Visiting Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris in October 1930, Calder was significantly struck by the Dutch artist’s geometric abstractionism: this encounter marked his artistic path profoundly and let him toward sculptural abstraction. He subsequently joined the group of Abstraction-Création, which included, Mondrian, Jean Hélion Jean Arp. The latter coined the word “stabiles” for Calder’s static works, as opposed to self-propelled works.
In 1933, Calder settled back in the United States with his wife Louisa and began the following year a collaboration with the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. His first large sheet-metal sculptures intended to occupy outdoor spaces date from the 1930s: he created the Mercury Fountain for the Spanish pavilion of the World’s Fair in Paris and a large piece of furniture installed in the main staircase of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
As the United States entered World War II, the scarcity of metal prompted Alexander Calder to shift his sculptural focus towards woodworking. This transition led to the creation of a notable series of works referred to as Constellations, a term coined by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp. In 1943, Duchamp was entrusted with curating a significant retrospective of Calder’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In the fall of 1946 the major exhibition Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations was held at the Galerie Louise Carré in Paris, which was visited by Henri Matisse and whose catalog featured an essay edited by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1949 the 3rd Sculpture International organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Artfeatured the largest piece of furniture Calder had made until then, International mobile.
The final production of Calder’s career focused mainly on large-scale public works. In 1962 he presented the sculpture Teodelapio at the famous widespread international exhibition Sculptures in the City organized by Giovanni Caradente. Some of his monumental sculptures were installed at New York’s JKF airport, at the Paris headquarters of Unesco, at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. For the Mexico City Olympic Games in 1968, Calder created his largest work, El Sol Rojo, with a height of 20.5 meters.
In 1964 the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a major retrospective of Calder’s work; twelve years later, in 1976, another major retrospective on the artist opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. A few weeks later, Calder passed away at the age of seventy-eight.