SCULPTOR CALDER IN MOTION
MMFA retrospective showcases work
You may or may not know the artist. But if you’ve spent any time in Montreal, you’re almost sure to know the work.
Commissioned for Expo 67 and sponsored by the International Nickel Company of Canada, Alexander Calder’s monumental Trois Disques stood out even among the wildly unconventional architecture of the Expo site, an embodiment of the fair’s inclusive spirit.
In recent years it has taken on a new life in a new setting on Île Ste-Hélène, where a generation of summer weekend dancers at the Piknic Électronik parties have adopted it as an icon of their own.
Trois Disques isn’t technically part of Radical Inventor, the major new Calder retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. There’s the matter of it being 22 metres tall and very hard to move, for starters. But you can see its intermediate 1:6 scale-model maquette any time you want, outside the museum’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion at the corner of Sherbrooke St. and du Musée Ave. If you go to the exhibition — and you should — you can also see its smaller original version, in aluminum, and get an up-close sense of the artist’s working process.
Now is the first time all three versions have been in Montreal at the same time, and they represent just a hint at the scale of an inspiring show that backs up the claim of one of its curators for Calder’s standing as the greatest artist of the 20th century.
“He had an uncanny awareness of the moment, and could present his ideas and find an audience and make the most of an environment,” said Elizabeth Hutton Turner, co-curator along with Anne Grace. “He takes very, very simple and rudimentary elements and finds ways to look at the world, and the physics of the world, in a new way. He spoke to his time, but also to the future. I really don’t think there’s another artist with his scope.”
Born in 1898 into an artistic Pennsylvania family, Calder was creative from the very beginning: the exhibition includes childhood pieces where his art’s essence is already evident. In the 1920s, in common with countless artists, he went to Paris, where he embraced — and was embraced by — the leading lights of modernism, forming an alliance with Mondrian and, in a preview of his lifelong popular instincts, launching a mini-circus. As endorsers go, you could do a lot worse than one of Calder’s Paris acquaintances, Jean-Paul Sartre, who said of Calder’s work: “These motions, which are meant only to please, to enchant the eye, have nevertheless a profound meaning, almost a metaphysical one.”
The “motions” Sartre spoke of are the hanging sculptures for which Calder is probably best known. Along with the stationary pieces of which Trois Disques is an uncommonly large example, they were so original in form that they literally required the coining of new words: mobile (as a noun) and stabile. In Calder’s hands, these forms obliterate the traditional divide between high art and popular art, transforming and exalting public spaces.
The MMFA’s innovative mounting takes full advantage of Calder’s incorporation of space and time: the shadows the sculptures throw on the walls are as much a part of their essence as the sculptures themselves. The mobiles are designed to shift in a breeze: being indoors, the show meets that challenge by periodically having a museum staffer gently nudge the works with a
pole. Even the stabiles, fixed to one spot as they are, often give the impression they could at any moment become airborne.
Strolling around the airy rooms of Radical Inventor, seeing the childlike looks on the faces of fellow visitors, what strikes you most is the way Calder’s work stays new. After decades of highprofile international exposure, and despite widespread imitation, it retains its capacity for surprise and delight.
“All great art creates a new channel of perception, a new way of knowing the universe, and that is a form of liberation,” Hutton Turner said. “Calder’s is an alternative sense of time, and when you’re living in the midst of revolutionary and disorienting change, as we are now, it’s good to think about the fundamental aspects of being alive.”
A good place to do what Hutton Turner suggests is at the top of the pavilion’s main staircase, where visitors are encouraged to lie flat for a minute or two on a slowly rotating circular leather “turntable.” It’s very comfy, for one thing. But more importantly, as you gaze up at the mobile hanging overhead, it puts you in an ideal position to appreciate how Calder took his initial inspiration — the perpetual motion of the universe — and turned it into art that never looks the same twice. Radical indeed.
He had an uncanny awareness of the moment, and could present his ideas and find an audience and make the most of an environment.