Alexander Calder and the Mobiles - Essay Example

Alexander Calder and the Mobiles Born in 1898 to a family of artists, Alexander Calder demonstrated that the serious world of art did not necessarily need to leave out the element of fun. In his highly diversified life, he became known as an engineer, a maker of toys and a serious artist working with a variety of new and strange media to produce his trademark art form, the mobile. To understand how Calder came to be known as the father of the mobile, it is necessary to know his biography as well as some information regarding the art movements through which he moved and the artists who had influence in the development of his eventual style. Growing up, Calder experienced art from a very young age as his mother was a portrait artist and his father was a sculptor in the Beaux-Arts tradition. This tradition literally translates to mean ‘fine arts’ and was imported from France through the instruction of American artists at the famous Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris (Bhaskaran, 2005). This style typically combined the ideals of the ancient Greeks and Romans, complete with their concentration on formalism, with the ideas that had come out of the Renaissance. In addition, Calder’s paternal grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder was a well-known sculptor in his own right. Fostering his interests, Calder’s parents gave him a basement workshop area and a selection of tools when he was only eight years old, which he promptly turned into a toy shop (Prather, Rower & Pierre, 1998: 15). Despite this, Calder opted to study engineering following his graduation from high school and graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1919. For the next three years, he would restlessly search for a career that appealed to him, finally deciding to become an artist in 1923 and enrolling in the Art Student’s League in New York as a painting student. “Calder’s early manner is clearly indebted to [John] Sloan, one of the most distinguished painters of the so-called Ashcan school, the group of American painters whose brand of realism, with its depiction of common street subjects, had been formed in conscious opposition to the dominant academic strains in American art” (Prather, Rower & Pierre, 1998: 16). By 1924, Calder was studying with Boardman Robinson, who taught Calder how to draw without lifting his pen, a skill that would later figure prominently in his wire art, and Guy Pene du Bois, whose figures reminded Calder of wooden carvings or toys and encouraged him to keep his playful spirit involved in his art. In 1925, Calder was working as an illustrator, confident enough to publish a series of sketches on animal drawings he had made at New York zoos which would also figure prominently in his later work (Prather, Rower & Pierre, 1998: 17). Finally, in the spring of 1925, Calder’s work for the National Police Gazette had him making sketches within the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. It is from this experience that he went on to his next great career shift. While Calder decided to go to Paris to further study his painting, there has been little evidence that he actually did so. In 1926, he was supporting himself with a small stipend from his parents and a few illustrations he made of tourists visiting the city, but had begun to once again build his articulated toys at the suggestion of a Serbian merchant. The merchant disappeared before Calder was able to make any sales and he ended up returning to the United States in 1927 making a whole new set of toys for the Gould Manufacturing Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “Calder’s toys are miniature monuments to his love of play. The shorthand rhythms of his little toys are not basically different from those of the major mobiles” (Lipman, 1976: 47). At the same time, he was creating the piece that would transform his life and launch him into the world of respected art, the Cirque Calder. “Undoubtedly Calder’s best-known creation, the Cirque Calder is a work of performance art that … developed gradually between 1926 and 1930 as Calder added new acts of jugglers, trapeze artists, sword swallowers, clowns or performing animals” (Prather, Rower & Pierre, 1998: 18-19). From this creation, fellow American artist Clay Spohn suggested Calder explore making sculptures exclusively from wire. In 1929, “the New Yorker had praised Calder as a serious sculptor, and Vanity Fair subsequently nominated him for their Hall of Fame. He was thus honored because he had, among his other accomplishments, ‘invented a new medium for sculpture.’ Even before the creation of the first mobile … Calder was internationally recognized as the author of a new medium, that is, wire sculpture” (Prather, Rower & Pierre, : 15). Now recognized as an artist and eager to explore new methods of expression, Calder once again began looking into the works of others. Artists that particularly attracted his attention were the surrealist painter Joan Miro and the modernist painter Piet Mondrian. “Both men had gone beyond abstraction and were making paintings of colors and shapes with no direct reference to the outside world. Enthusiastic about this embrace of form and color, Calder began to make moving sculptures in a similar vane” (“Alexander Calder”, n.d.-a). When Calder visited Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930, a white wall decorated with colored rectangles inspired him to experiment with moving abstractions of his own. “The witty wire caricatures of animals and acrobats were abandoned for spheres, arcs, and constellations accompanied by analytical descriptions that confirmed the scientific orientation of his vision. Calder combined his interest in cosmic imagery with the technical mastery of physical principles that resulted from his training as a mechanical engineer” (“Alexander Calder”, n.d.-b). Working to combine movement with abstraction, it has been argued that Spanish artist Joan Miro had the greatest influence on Calder, particularly as is seen in the shapes that he used. “Miro’s biomorphic motif survived in Calder’s art until the end of his life” (“Alexander Calder”, n.d.-b). However, much of the work of Duchamp had influence over Calder as well and it was Duchamp who gave the name to the objects created. Again working with whatever materials came to hand, Calder began fashioning hanging sculptures that could only be described as art in motion. Struggling to determine what to call them, Marcel Duchamp christened them mobiles, a pun using the French words for “to move” and “motive”. Much of the movement and mechanics evident in Duchamp’s earlier works, such as Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) in which successive stages of a figures descent is pictured, suggest the actual movement of Calder’s later work. In addition, Duchamp “had created a forerunner to Alexander Calder’s mobiles by fastening a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. Duchamp called it a ‘distraction.’ With these works Duchamp provoked a debate about the definition of art and originality” (Liukkonen, 2004) and opened the floodgates to new expression and invention in the art world that Calder explored so well. “These new sculptures, arranged by the chance operations of the wind, went against everything that sculpture had been. They were not monumental, nor were they sober. They were simply about form and color and the joy in creating both” (“Alexander Calder”, n.d.-a). On this success, Calder moved, with his wife, to Roxbury, Connecticut in 1933. From here, he continued to build mobiles and launched his final art form on the world in the shape of what he called ‘stabiles’, giant metal structures of various shapes and colors that were intended to bring brightness and fun into both urban and rural settings. Thus, from his youngest days, Calder demonstrated a need to keep fun and play as a main ingredient within his art. His rejection of the formalized ornate nature of his father’s and grandfather’s craft only compelled him to gain an education in just that area of interest, engineering, that would enable him to achieve the artistic effects he would later desire. Being exposed to the avant-garde artists in New York and taking part in the Ashcan movement enabled Calder to open his mind to new possibilities for art forms, eventually even beginning to see his own toys as potentially artistic creations. As he became more involved with other artists of the new movements, such as Duchamp, Mondrian and Miro and their concept of surrealism, he was able to cross into new spheres of exploration, incorporating not only shape and color, but also movement within his art forms. At the same time, he was able to explore his mechanical visions regarding the nature of the universe as well as Duchamp’s concepts of external forces in the full realization of the final object produced. It is for his creative genius in bringing all these elements together in a small form that nevertheless conveys a sense of fun and pleasure in simply existing that has earned him the title of ‘father of mobiles’. Works Cited “Alexander Calder.” American Masters. (n.d.-a). PBS. March 17, 2007 “Alexander Calder.” Art Icons. (n.d.-b). Art Industri. March 17, 2007 Bhaskaran, Lakshmi. Designs of the Times: Using Key Movements and Styles for Contemporary Design. Switzerland: Rotovision, 2005. Lipman, Jean. Calder’s Universe. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press Book Publishers, 1976. Liukkonen, Petri. “Marcel Duchamp.” (2004). Books and Writers. March 17, 2007 Prather, Marla; Rower, Alexander S.C. & Pierre, Arnauld. Alexander Calder: 1898-1976. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Read More