Art
Alexander Calder
By HUGH GRAHAM Both Wright and Calder must be credited with bridging the gap between American living and American seeing. Wright, in spite of his lip-
service to functionalism, was essentially romantic and pictorial in his aims. He gave the American city and landscape, so different in spirit and appearance from the European, forms expressive of themselves. It is some measure of his prophetic gifts that works by artists far younger than himself, such as Rothko, Kline and Pollock, look perfectly in place in houses he designed forty years ago, whereas those of selfconsciously American painters of his own generation, like Grant Wood, look pathetically old-fashioned and provincial. Calder alone, in the years preceding the last war, was creating 'pure' works of art which not only satisfied the most advanced European standards but anticipated the poised, athletic and open-minded achievement of modern American painting. So whatever the final verdict on his sculpture may be, his place in the history of modern art is assured.
It would be wrong to judge him by the Tate Gallery exhibition. His sculptures and mobiles demand space and if possible a constantly changing light. Some of them should stand out of doors, though not in the twilight of an English summer. They are intended to play a part in everyday human activity, not to stand (or hang) reverently dated and docketed in a gallery. For artists of Calder's temperament, the museum is something of a killing-bottle. Also, one could have done with a few casefuls of drawings. Calder is an exquisitely subtle draughtsman, and probably the best illustrator of children's books alive. If his toys are worth displaying, then surely his drawings are too.
All the same, he comes through with flying colours. Few large one-man exhibitions reveal such a consistently elegant turn of mind ex- pressed with such economy and lucidity. Al- though Calder, the son of a painter and a sculptor, apparently decided as a very young man to turn his back on art, his career appears in retrospect to have been remarkably single- minded. In 1919 at the age of twenty-three he graduated as a mechanical engineer, and only in 1922 did he begin to draw at evening classes in New York. By 1924 he was working as free- lance draughtsman, and in 1926 he published a handbook on animal sketching. His youth thus displays a break with the traditional forms of art, rather than with art itself, as well as an innate interest in mechanical and organic move- ment.
Between 1926 and 1933 he travelled to and fro between America and Europe, supporting himself to begin with by constructing animated toys, and graduating from them, on the en- couragement of artists like Miro, Leger and Mondrian, to abstract or near-abstract sculpture. Occasionally he would experiment in solid forms (e.g., The Horse, which he carved from walnut in 1928), but usually he worked in tenu- ous linear material, such as wire, thread and sheet aluminium, which would move either through its own lightness or through the regula- tion of a small machine. By 1932 he had evolved his own personal art-form, which his friend Marcel Duchamp christened the mobile: deli- cately adjusted patterns of clean, Miroesque shapes trembling on wire stems and responding to the slightest breath of air like a spray of mimosa or a plume of feathers.
It is on these that his fame rests. That Calder
should become an international figure on the strength of such apparently simple decorative objects many will dispute. Admittedly his mobiles, as Sartre writes, 'suggest nothing. . • • They do not send one back to anything but to themselves: they are, that is all: they are absolutes. . . . For each one of them he estab- lishes a general career of movement and then be abandons it; it is the time of day, the sunshine, the heat, the wind which will determine each individual dance.' But they are nothing like so simple as they seem. Calder's choice of form and pattern is brilliantly subtle and personal, com- parable to Matisse's in his late paper cut-outs. But this is not all. Almost all Calder's work embodies or, if you like, etherealises some witty idea or observation. (For example, the stabile called The Monocle is really a logical develop- ment from the peering early wire figure called The Hostess.) He has the same sort of visual wit as Paul Klee, but without the metaphysical complexities. This, with his unerring sense of movement and interval, gives his art a serious- ness far beyond the decorative.
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