Word: calder
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...wire and wood and cloth and cork, with himself as their enormous ringmaster manipulating them to music. To judge from the surviving film made of the circus in action, it was quite a show, and it appealed to the latent kid in every avant-gardist. It was le cirque Calder that got the young American full entry to the Parisian art world. This charming piece of performance art was one of the small sights of Paris between 1926 and 1930; it was seen and enjoyed by a whole roster of artists, designers and architects--Joan Miro and Fernand Leger...
...Calder began making sculptures out of wire alone--just a line springing in air, curving back on itself, joining with others in a frazzle of twists, hanging from a string and responsive to the lightest touch of a finger or breath of air. Most of them were portraits--some of fellow artists (Miro, the composer Edgard Varese), others of show-biz celebrities like Josephine Baker or the great honky-tonk comedian Jimmy Durante, whose famed nose, translated into wire profile, becomes a fearsome proboscis. They were witty, vital (the faint quivering of the wire from room vibration gave them...
...Calder's jump into originality as a sculptor is one of those flash-bang conversion tales in which the legends of early modern art abound. It seems that in 1930 he went to visit Mondrian, the great Dutch abstractionist, in his Paris studio. He already admired Mondrian's work, but he had never seen its environment before--that fanatically judged, ordered workplace of white and primary colors where even the Victrola was painted red. Rectangles of painted cardboard were pinned around the walls, and Calder was seized with the desire to see them move. They should oscillate at different speeds...
...from then on the idea of literal movement in art kept growing on Calder. He experimented from time to time with sculpture whose abstract elements were driven by motors, acting on them through more-or-less hidden bands and pulleys. These were the works that Marcel Duchamp, when he saw them in 1931, christened "mobiles"--the word by which Calder is known. But these motorized pieces were too predictable. Calder's genius was for the unprogrammed--natural, as distinct from mechanical and repetitious motion. What he did best was present metaphors of natural movement in the simplest technical terms...
...orbiting eccentrically and never coming back to exactly the same position. They respond to your presence. They are supremely friendly sculpture, even in the distance of abstraction. Their severity of line and form is always tempered by a certain rhythmic sweetness, as in one of the masterpieces of Calder's middle years, The Spider, 1940. Later, as he got famous and "monumental" commissions were pressed on him, he would defeat this quality of his own work by building huge sluggish mobiles--one of which, 76 ft. wide, hangs permanently over the atrium of the National Gallery--that would need...