Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is the Aaron Copland of the art world. Like Copland’s, Calder’s work is a baffling combination of rousing all-Americanness and predictable pastiche, of genuine invention and self-indulgent repetition, of unarguable significance and mind-numbing triviality. At their best, both Copland and Calder can be exhilarating; at worst, relentlessly cheerful. There’s a reason why there are so many Calders in public places.

The mobile, that loose-limbed version of sculpture synonymous with the name Calder, is a real achievement, an authentically new addition to the language of sculpture made at a time when modernist construction was still inventing itself. (You can’t blame the artist for all those school projects and gift-shop rip-offs.) The mobile is a highly original solution to a problem that has challenged sculptors ever since the words “sculpture” and “statue” ceased to be interchangeable. As long as statues were figurative, the issue of how parts related to one another, visually and structurally, was more or less solved. For figurative sculptors, the logic of the human body dictates both where parts are placed and how they support one another. Abstract sculptors, especially those like Calder and his colleagues who make open, essentially linear constructions, are neither guided nor constrained by the familiar structure of human anatomy, so composition and support demand equal application of inventiveness. David Smith’s solution was to make the base part of the sculpture—that is, to integrate support and supported. Anthony Caro spread his early works at our feet, and then, as he moved his constructions away from the ground plane, deliberately confused supports with purely visual elements, so that what held up what simply became irrelevant. Calder hauled his sculptures into the air, hanging shapes in mid-air, more or less wherever he wanted them. In theory and to an extent in practice, this gave Calder unprecedented freedom of composition. What was more radical still, his method allowed him to attach elements loosely to one another, to rig them with twists and loops of wire, instead of bolting or welding them into a rigid structure; because of this, Calder permitted real movement to become a factor in what had been an art of fixed relationships. Whatever one thinks of the results, it was a hell of an idea. The chief reason that we pay any attention to Calder’s works on paper and his so-called “stabiles” is, I suspect, because of the sheer ingenuity of his mobiles.

There is something of the amateur inventor about Calder, something a little self-conscious and deliberately playful about his work, whether three-dimensional or two-dimensional. He treads a fine line between exuberant charm and kitsch in those oh-so-witty transformations of found objects into art or utensils. But whatever one’s reservations or ambivalences, Calder must be taken seriously. Like any deeply engaged artist, he deserves to be judged by his best work, and you would expect to be able to do just that at an exhibition called “Celebrating Calder.” You would expect the Whitney Museum’s current exhibition, described as an homage to “one of the most innovative sculptors of the twentieth century, as well as one of America’s best-loved artists,” to make the strongest possible case for its subject, but, curiously, it does not.¹ The show is a reasonably comprehensive retrospective that includes sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, and jewelry from Calder’s entire career, along with the celebrated Circus and the 1961 film of the artist performing with his wire-and-cloth troupe. Yet the selection, largely from the Whitney’s own holdings —extensive but not definitive—has remarkably few high points. There’s an unfortunate air of expediency about the show, as though it had been assembled from what was most readily available rather than what would represent the artist most powerfully. And while Calder admittedly often had more success with human-scale works than gigantic ones, the exhibition appears to have been chosen with portability in mind, which may or may not have been dictated by a planned tour to London and Valencia. Calder, whatever one thinks of him, deserves better.

The tone of the exhibition was set at the press preview.

The tone of the exhibition was set at the press preview. I signed in and asked for a catalogue. “There isn’t one,” said the young woman behind the desk, “but there’s lots of information on the text panels and it’s all in the press kit.” Then she handed me the usual folder of press releases and fact sheets and—apparently in lieu of a catalogue—a box of good old animal crackers. In case I missed the connection with Calder’s Circus, the wall panels told me that “animals were among Calder’s favorite subjects.” (Don’t get me wrong. I’ve liked animal crackers and their box since I was about six and I was happy to have them.) The exhibition was also used to inaugurate something called “Family Day”: free admission for kids under twelve, make-your-own-mobile workshops, clowns, balloons, a children’s book launch, and tours designed for “family viewing of the work of one of America’s most beloved artists, who retained his child-like, fun-loving spirit all his life.”

I should say at once that despite this insistence on Calder as a benevolent Santa Claus figure, the show does document his evolution as an artist rather well. An early painting, Fireman’s Dinner for Brancusi (1926, Whitney Museum), establishes the artist’s “child-like, fun-loving spirit”; he depicts himself climbing on a table in a crowded room slightly reminiscent of the packed interiors of Florine Stettheimer. (It’s difficult to judge from only one canvas of the period, but it’s probably a good thing that Calder began to make sculpture.) A selection of some of his earliest efforts, the twisted-wire figures and sheet-metal animals made in the late Twenties, when the young artist began to travel between New York, Paris, and Berlin, are the first indications of what Calder would become. The less successful of these risk being terminally cute, but others are fascinating for the amount of telling anecdotal detail they pack into a single strand of wire or an intricately folded sheet of brass. Only a complete curmudgeon could resist the initial throw-away charm of these pieces, but the charm runs out fairly quickly. The wire and sheet-metal constructions seem to have little to do with sculptural notions—little, even, to do with ideas about drawing—other than making a single gesture do multiple duty. Instead, they have everything to do with clever depiction. The few early carved pieces in the show reinforce this impression, particularly an oddly un-plastic Double Cat (1930, Whitney Museum) that compresses two pre-Columbian-type felines on opposite sides of a slab of wood more than four feet long and five inches thick. It’s amusing at first viewing, especially for us unreconstructed cat lovers, but it fails to transcend ingeniousness and engage us as sculptural form.

Seeing these pieces made me remember one of Stuart Davis’s letters home, written during his year in Paris in the late Twenties. In January 1929 he wrote, “Tonight we are going to the opening of Sandy Calder’s exhibit on the rue de Boëtie (son of Sterling Calder). Nobody is much interested in his work but it is an excuse for a lot of people to bump into each other.” The reference to Calder’s academic-sculptor father must have been included for the benefit of Davis’s academic-sculptor mother. (Davis’s own circle in Paris—the “nobody much interested” in Calder’s work—included his old friend Elliot Paul, a founder of the avant-garde magazine transition and an intimate of Gertrude Stein’s.)

The performers and the beasts in Calder’s Circus are more straightforward than the wire sculptures. They are, quite simply, what they are—wonderful toys, some of which do delightful things in that film we’ve all seen in the Whitney’s lobby, next to the case where the Circus is housed. In the current installation, the Circus and the film are set in the context of Calder’s other works of the period, including a group of charming (there’s that word again) circus drawings of the early 1930s whose tense continuous contours echo the squiggles and loops of the wire constructions. The film of the Circus makes sense of the tatterdemalion objects in the case. In action, the bucking bronco, the racing chariots, the drivers who snap their whips, the flying aerialists, the dogs that run on three-legged wheels have a paradoxically elegant Rube Goldberg quality that is irresistible; the “outline” weight-lifter, with his leopard skin costume and uncannily life-like movements, a modernist version of an eighteenth-century automaton, is always a treat. It’s easy to see why Calder would experiment with works that moved, when he stopped adding to the Circus and began to make “serious” sculpture. Everything in the Circus depends on some sort of movement, whether the spring-loaded knife thrower, the string-operated trapeze artists, or the wind-up cooch dancer with the offset gear that pops her hip.

The performers and the beasts in Calder’s Circus are more straightforward than the wire sculptures.

Stuart Davis’s comments notwithstanding, Calder’s performances with his Circus amused his friends and brought him into contact with many of the avant-garde artists resident in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, including Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Frederick Kiesler, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. This constituted his real education as an artist, radically different from anything he had been exposed to by his family of traditional sculptors, or by his teachers during a few years of sporadic study in New York. As a result of his encounters with modernism, notably with Surrealism and Dada, Calder changed his focus. As he later recollected, a visit to Mondrian’s studio thrust the notion of geometric abstraction forcibly at him and opened up wholly new possibilities of structure and color. (According to the wall text: “In 1930, after several years of making humorous wire figures, Calder decided to become a serious artist rather than a performer or entertainer.”)

The exhibition is particularly rich in works made during the years when Calder was feeling his way as a “serious artist.” It’s simple to identify the artists whose work interested him at the time, since he unabashedly appropriated (the fashionable word is accurate, for once) the characteristic geometric and biomorphic forms he saw in the work of the vanguard artists he had gotten to know and began finding ways of setting them in motion. At first, he experimented with concealed motors, but, soon after, he devised his signature means of activating hanging forms through a combination of engineering, air currents, and chance. It was the way these works were assembled and how they functioned that was original, not their forms or imagery. Calder’s discs and comma shapes, his occasional floral improvisation, his frequent fish images all have antecedents in the European artists who surrounded him. (This remained true throughout Calder’s career.) We recognize immediately Arp-shapes, Miró-forms, Matisse-cutouts, and the like. A 1947 mobile of painted wood, string, and metal, Sea Scape (Whitney Museum), looks like an exploded Paul Klee still life.

Derivative or not, Calder’s mobiles must have been extraordinarily fresh when they were first seen. Modernist construction was still in its infancy in the early 1930s and these disembodied constellations of flattened shapes must have seemed very surprising. Picasso and González had been making drawing-like metal sculpture only since about 1927 and their abstracted heads and figures were still relatively self-contained objects that enclosed space. Calder’s constructions were open-handed scatterings of flat forms connected only by long, limber wires. But the most striking thing about these sculptures was their mutability. Chance relationships, random juxtapositions of form created by currents of air, had as much importance as the artist’s intention. Giacometti hinted at this in his seminal Woman with her Throat Cut (1932, Museum of Modern Art), when he attached a long, pointed form to a skeletal “body” in a way that allowed it to swivel, but Calder apparently allowed every element in his works to find its own position in space. I say “apparently” because it is clear that the mobiles are not randomly arranged but delicately and subtly engineered, according to the dictates of particular weights, shapes, and sequences. But though the primary composition is entirely a reflection of the artist’s will, that initial composition, that first sequence of forms, is, in ideal circumstances, subject to constant change.

In the airless Whitney, the mobiles were strangely inert. The smallest, most fragile, jewelry-like constructions were locked safely away in glass cases, while the larger pieces hung motionless. A few spectators furtively puffed at the closest discs and were rewarded by slight shifts, while two early motorized works performed valiantly. The stillness made even the most felicitous of the mobiles seem a little precious, but in the best, the ingeniousness, the cleverness that turns empty coffee cans into flying monsters, cuts starfish out of soup-can lids, and cantilevers them all off flexible rods, also subsumes them to a new whole. In Calder’s most convincing works, we don’t think about how he got a burst of discs and ovals to stay together, or how he figured out connections and sequences that would permit movement; we simply enjoy their slow progress through space. When connections and engineering concerns become overwhelming—as they frequently do in the larger pieces—the sculptures suffer. Such a large proportion of each sculpture is there for what can only be called practical reasons, as opposed to aesthetic ones—the rods, the loops, the reinforcing bars that thread through each disc—that large scale tends to make these elements dominant. This is not to deny that a sense of having been cobbled together is part of the appeal of Calder’s best works. There’s a ramshackle, vernacular feel to them, a sense of the structure’s having been improvised to do a particular job that can be quite engaging. It’s part of Calder’s persistent Americanness, despite his years in France.

In the airless Whitney, the mobiles were strangely inert.

The late John Kouwenhoven’s books about what makes American culture distinct deal indirectly with this aspect of Calder’s work. I think it is in The Beer Can by the Highway that Kouwenhoven writes about the difference between the locomotives exhibited by the British and the Americans at nineteenth-century expositions. British engines were meticulously crafted, tightly constructed, and beautifully finished, while their American counterparts were loose-jointed, rawboned machines that flexed and wriggled as they steamed along. It wasn’t due to poor craftsmanship on the Americans’ part. Tight British-style locomotives would have shaken themselves to pieces on the irregular, rapidly laid tracks that newly spanned the immense North American continent. They needed the level, carefully graded tracks that had tied Britain together for decades. American locomotives were more accommodating and adaptable, if less elegant. Calder’s best works have a similar rough-hewn quality, a sense of impermanence, of having been knocked together for the occasion. This may even account for his acceptance in Europe by sophisticated artists; they probably enjoyed the way Calder and his work fulfilled their notions of Americanness: the man’s execrable French accent, his woodsman’s shirts, his love of tinkering; the sculpture’s lack of traditional finish, its homespun look, its zaniness.

Interestingly, despite the reputation of the mobiles, some of the strongest of the early works in “Celebrating Calder” are pieces that don’t move. Little Ball with Counterweight (c. 1931, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard J. Horwich, promised gift to the Whitney Museum), suggests instability through the eccentric placement of a ball on a spindly table. An arc of wire diagrams a possible, if improbable, trajectory, should the ball roll off its perch. The evident fragility of the table, its narrowness and attenuated height, add to the impression of impending movement. Constellation with Quadrilateral (1943, Whitney Museum) is a wonderful procession of carved wooden forms, strung together with rigid wire. How things are attached or supported is not an issue; the connecting wire acts as crisp drawing, a counterpoint to the play of multicolored forms—a hollow square, an hourglass, a swelling oval, and the like—familiar to us from Arp and Miró’s work, but convincing as “Calder-shapes” in this context. Snake on a Post (1944, Whitney Museum), a sort of inverted bronze funnel supporting a movable swirl of bronze “snake,” seems remarkably current and, at the same time, reminds us of David Smith’s cranky constructions of the 1940s, similarly elevated, like monstrances, on funnel shapes that bear witness to where bronze was poured into a mold during casting.

A comparison between Smith and Calder is inevitable. Smith was younger, of course, and while he was deeply indebted to the European moderns, he had none of Calder’s first-hand experience of French vanguard art. Yet the two American sculptors shared a conception of the artist as artificer and artisan in one: someone who could transform the most ordinary materials and the most workaday techniques by placing them in new surroundings or divorcing them from normal function. They were on good enough terms in the 1940s for Calder to invite himself to Smith’s house at Bolton Landing, in upstate New York, for a ski weekend (there was a problem finding boots big enough) but Smith, at least, seems not to have been very interested in Calder’s work. It’s not surprising. The emotional ambition, the expressive range of the two sculptors’ work is totally dissimilar. The naked ferocity of Smith’s sculptures puts them at the opposite end of the psychological spectrum from Calder’s high jinks.

There are profound formal differences between the two artists, as well.

There are profound formal differences between the two artists, as well. Smith’s sculpture, for all its dependence on intuition and its avoidance of preconception, depends a great deal on nuances of placement, subtle nudges out of true, delicate articulations into space. (This quality is invisible in photographs, which generally make Smith’s pieces look silhouette-like and flat.) The idea of leaving complex spatial relationships even partly to chance, as in Calder’s mobiles, would be anathema to Smith. Yet Calder’s work depends no less than Smith’s on evidence of the presence of the hand, not so much in terms of placement as in facture. We have to be able to believe that the hanging discs and commas were snipped out of a sheet of metal, that the connecting loops and rods were bent by hand—whether this was the case or not. Again, scale is the crucial issue. When Calder’s mobiles get too large, they become anonymous and manufactured-looking, like any other large industrial object. They lose the wit that pervades the best of his mid-size pieces. Compare the scaleless, flavorless monster that hovers over the East Wing of the National Gallery with the sinuous lobstertrap fantasy that for years was the most conspicuous feature of the old Museum of Modern Art’s staircase.

Issues of scale, of the relationship of part to part and of edge to plane, are what ultimately make Calder’s late stabiles so problematic. No matter what their size, they are always made of uniform plates of steel, reinforced with uniform fins, so that no matter how enormous they are in fact, they seem papery, translated directly from a light-weight model, without any absolute scale of their own. Unlike the best of the mobiles, which celebrate their being handwrought, the stabiles seem to ignore the history of their own making, ignore the characteristics of their materials except in the most general way. Sometimes these streamlined, cutout behemoths can be effective. The enormous prehistoric beast Theodelapo, built for that legendary outdoor sculpture exhibition at the Spoleto Festival (1962), is a wonderful addition to an otherwise non-descript piazza in front of the railroad station in the lower town. Its relative thinness plays off of the surrounding wall of chunky buildings, seemingly not much higher than the sculpture. The old Fiat Cinquencentos could whiz under Theodelapo’s arches, making it seem like a real monument, a casual parody of the gates that pierce the protecting walls of Umbrian hill towns. The domestic-size stabiles in “Celebrating Calder” had the benefit of no such context and as a result, they simply looked like maquettes for larger works, with no perceptible reason for being the size they were. Their tripod stances seemed predictable, their structure determined long before, rather than having been discovered or invented in the course of making the piece.

Probably the best works in the show, the few that gave any inkling of how much fun a good Calder can be, were a pair of mobiles, one a froth of delicate white shapes, Roxbury Flurry (c. 1948), and the other a vivid, classic arc of blunt boomerangs on stalks, Big Red (1959), both in the collection of the Whitney. In these two pieces a great deal of what can make Calder appealing came across, despite both Roxbury Flurry and Big Red’s being virtually generic mobiles. For all their familiarity, they looked particularly lively and spontaneous in the context of the show.

The Whitney may have been right to hand out animal crackers (childhood nostalgia apart, that is) since some of the freshest works in “Celebrating Calder” were a set of illustrations for Aesop’s fables. Here Calder seemed particularly relaxed, concerned perhaps with amusing himself rather than with making “serious art.” The edition of Aesop and a portfolio of zingy color etchings, Fêtes (1971, Whitney Museum), with a text by the poet Jacques Prévert, criticized a group of Calder’s slap-dash gouaches. In comparison to the Aesop drawings’ quirky animals and the color etchings’ dazzling intensities, the familiar spirals, stars, and stripes, the relentless red, blue, and yellow primaries of the gouaches seemed like unavoidable givens, rather like the fixed colors and patterns of flags. It’s worth going uptown a little to the Stuart Davis retrospective at the Metropolitan to see what Davis did with a similarly limited palette, in the last decade or so of his life; red, green, orange-yellow, and black seem newly minted each time he used them.

A show like “Celebrating Calder” raises many questions, most of them not wholly aesthetic. Why, for example, is Calder so much better known and so much better served by the museums than David Smith, an immeasurably greater sculptor? The Whitney has fewer Smiths in its collection than it does Calders, but they include some of the artist’s most powerful works. Between its own holdings, the works on long-term loan, and some selective borrowing, the Whitney could easily mount a Smith show that would make clear his claim to the title of Best American Sculptor. There hasn’t been a Smith sculpture retrospective of any ambition in New York since the 1960s. Of course, Smith, unlike Calder, could never be described as “one of America’s best-loved artists” and his tough, confrontational sculptures—introspective, slightly threatening, sexy—are hardly the stuff that provokes a Family Day. Still, it makes you wonder.

Notes
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