Born: Lawton, Pa., July 22, 1898
Died: New York November 11, 1976

Studied: Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken
Art Students League of New York with John Sloan
Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris

Calder was born into a family of artists and his first art position consisted of sketching sporting events and circus performances for the National Police Gazette. Arriving in Paris in 1926, he was introduced to Miro and influenced by Klee. He now began to make whimsical wood and wire animals with moveable parts. After visiting Mondrian's studio in 1930, he joined the Abstract-Creation Group, exhibiting his first non-objective construction in 1931. A leading exponent of Kinetic Art he soon invented the "Mobile," a sculpture with moving parts. Both his painted constructions and his brightly colored mobiles synthesized constructivist methods and materials and Surrealist imagery. In 1950 he was awarded the Grand Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. During the 1960s and 1970s Calder's colossal "stabiles" -- large-scale, immovable constructions from cut and painted metal sheeting -- were commissioned for public sites around the world. Calder created many monumental tapestries such as Green Ball and Femme Arabe between 1962 and 1976. These are not based upon other works but are uniquely conceived to be crafted as tapestries. In accord with French law each design is limited to an edition of six plus two artist's proofs. Both the artist's signature (Calder) and the weavers trademark (Pinton S.A.) are woven into the fabric and also appear on the flap folded on the verso of each piece. Calder's deliberately restrictive color palette and his bold, simplified forms were perfectly suited to the tapestry revival florishing in France since the 1950s when artists discovered that tapestries could enrich the austere spaces of modernist arcitecture just as they had once given warmth and life to the walls of medieval castles. H.H. Arnason. Calder, New York, 1966. H.H. Arnason and U. Mulas. Calder, New York, 1971 J. Lipman. Calder's Universe, New York, 1976. Joan Marter. Alexander Calder. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 1991.

 

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