Word: calders
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When Mobilist Alexander Calder was only a tot 60 years ago, he would solemnly announce to those he had just met: "I am the third Alexander Calder living and the ninth dead...
...Earnest Hero. Grandfather Alexander Milne Calder was born in Scotland in 1846, worked for a while as a mason in Aberdeen before taking off for the U.S. at the age of 22. Calder vaguely remembers him as "a remote, awe-inspiring (because he worked on such huge things) figure for me." Indeed, Grandfather's works ran to the heroic. Among his most famous works, a model of which is in the show: an erect, earnest-looking young William Penn who stands to this day, every bronze ruffle and curl in p!ace, on top of Philadelphia's city...
Between them, Grandfather Calder and his son Alexander Stirling decorated a good deal of Philadelphia. "The public use of sculpture is its highest field and goal," said Stirling Calder, and he turned out everything from a battle-dressed Leif Ericson, which the U.S. gave to Iceland, to George Washington on the arch in Manhattan's Washington Square. But the warm talent of the man is best seen in a statue of a chubby little boy that he called Man Cub. The stark-naked cub: the future mobilist...
...Moving Mondrian. Having been brought up in the shadow of two traditional sculptors, the third Calder was a bit bored with the idea of becoming one himself. He started out to be an engineer. In the 1920s he began making statues (Josephine Baker, Helen Wills) in wire, produced a series of wire goldfish bowls in which the fish swam rhythmically back and forth at the turn of a crank. Out of his contact with Mondrian, he wanted to do "a Mondrian that moves." Thus the mobile...
...design in mind.One of their first purchases was made in the early 1800s to decorate the city waterworks, and it consisted of wooden figures by William Rush, the famous carver of ships' figureheads. From Sculptor Randolph Rogers in 1871 came a statue of Lincoln. In 1887 Alexander Milne Calder, grandfather of the mobilist, did an equestrian bronze of Philadelphia's Civil War hero, General George Meade. Frederic Remington produced a Cowboy; Daniel C. French did an idealized female Justice; Augustus Saint-Gaudens carved a bust of President Garfield. There was a mounted George Washington said...