Alexander Calder’s name is synonymous with air-borne, witty constructions of crisp planes and lines, pared down to essentials and delicately balanced. The same cannot be said of Calder: The Conquest of Time, a biography by Jed Perl.1 It’s a hefty six hundred, intensely serious pages (not counting notes and back-matter) and packed with detail. Ample biographies are common enough, but Perl’s bulky book, subtitled “The Early Years: 1898–1940,” accounts for only the first forty-two years of Calder’s life—he died aged seventy-eight in 1976. It’s worth noting that Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan dealt brilliantly with the whole of Willem de Kooning’s ninety-three-year-long life and career in a book the same size as the Calder tome, while Hilary Spurling’s exemplary two volumes on Henri Matisse—who died at eighty-four and, it can be argued, was a far more significant figure than Calder—are together only half again as long as Perl’s behemoth. Yes, there are John Richardson’s multiple volumes on Pablo Picasso. But even the most dedicated Calder fan would have to admit that there is an enormous difference in the importance and influence of the two artists.

The Conquest of Time traces Calder’s history essentially from conception to the years when both his reputation and what we consider to be his mature style were largely established. His connections to the vernacular, to Surrealism, and to purist abstraction, along with his innovative originality and his resistance to labels, are anatomized. We are also offered a substantial back-story: a