Word: wiring
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fine job of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, of which, truth to tell, there is a great deal. Calder never seems to have had the smallest inhibition about his chosen career. Both his parents were artists, and he made his own toys, "always a junkman of bits of wire and all the prettiest stuff in the garbage can." Growing up, he studied mechanical engineering, took painting classes at the Art Students League in New York City, and in 1926 moved to Paris, which, he laconically explained, "seemed the place to go, on all accounts of practically everyone...
...Paris he made more toys and, before long, a whole circus: lions and their tamers, an elephant, acrobats, trapeze artists, clowns, all made of 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...
...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...
...came up with the idea of sculpture as something for the lightest air currents to change: arrays of delicately balanced wire arms with colored leaves and fins and fans on the end, 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...
...finest work. This he shared with Miro, whose sense of nature never deserted him and who scarcely ever painted a pure abstraction. Miro's moons and planets and bean and caca shapes, his fine whiskery black lines, find their sculptural brethren in Calder's spheres and stalks of wire, his trembling disks...