FREE ESSAY ON ALEXANDER SANDY CALDER

ALEXANDER SANDY CALDER

Alexander Sandy Calder was born into a family of renowned artists who encouraged him to
create from a very young age. As a boy, he had his own workshop where he made toys for
himself and his sister. He received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919 but soon
after decided to pursue a career as an artist. Calder attended classes at the Art
Students League in New York from 1923 to 1926, supporting himself by working as an
illustrator.
In 1926 Calder arrived in Paris where he developed his Cirque Calder,a work of
performance art employing small-scale circus figures he sculpted from wire, wood, cloth,
and other materials. Through these elaborate performances, Calder met members of the
Parisian avant-garde. At the same time, Calder sculpted three- dimensional figurative
works using continuous lengths of wire, which critics described as drawings in space. He
explored ways to sculpt volume without mass and to captured the essence of his subject
through an economy of line and articulated movement. Calder's wire works then became
increasingly gestural, implying motion. By the end of 1930, this direction yielded his
first purely abstract sculptures.
After translating drawing into three dimensions, Calder envisioned putting paintings into
motion. He developed constructions of abstract shapes that can shift and change the
composition as the elements respond to air currents. These sculptures of wire and sheet
metal (or other materials) are called mobiles. A mobile laid flat exists only as a
skeleton, a reminder of its possibilities, but when suspended it seems to come alive.
Calder also developed stabiles, static sculptures that suggest volume in multiple flat
planes, as well as standing mobiles, in which a mobile is balanced on top of a stabile.
Calder furthered his work by developing a monumental scale. His later objects were huge
sculptures of arching lines and graceful abstract shapes that now inhabit public plazas
worldwide.
Calder was an artist of great originality who defined volume without mass and
incorporated movement and time in art. His inventions redefined certain basic principles
of sculpture and have established him as the most innovative sculptor of the twentieth
century.
Alexander Calder, America's first abstract artist of international renown, is forever
associated with his invention of the mobile. Born into a Philadelphia family of
sculptors, he studied first as a mechanical engineer and then as a painter in the style
of the Ashcan School. In 1926, Calder left for Paris, then Europe's cultural capital.
There he attracted the attention of the avant-garde with his amusing performances with a
partly-mechanized miniature circus of wire and cloth figures. By 1930 he had developed
freely moving sculptures of arcs and spheres. Calder's mobiles were squarely within the
spirit of the times, from their engagement with machine technology to their use of
abstraction as a universal language of creative truth. Linked to Dada and Surrealism by
playfulness and chance arrangement, his sculpture responded to Constructivism by
energizing art's elements in the viewer's space.