Mobile man
In “Calder: The Conquest of Time; The Early Years: 18981940,” the first biography of the artist, we see a picture of two brass animal figures that Alexander Calder crafted when he was 11. One is a dog, folded, shaped and cut with sleek contours and an expressively tilted head.
The other figure is a duck formed by three improbable geometric shapes. The bird seems designed to rock if prodded with a finger. Movement would be a crucial to Calder’s work. So would images of animals. From the young boy, we see skill, imagination, abstraction and humor.
Are these objects of destiny, between the toy and the totem? In child’s play, there’s the promise of a stirring epic.
And epic describes Jed Perl’s immersive and erudite biography of the man who transformed sculpture by making it move. In the first 42 years of a journey that went back and forth between America and France, Calder was shaped by everything from Arts and Crafts to astronomy, and so much that Calder touched found its way into his art.
Calder (1898-1976) is the rare artist whose work breaks down the hesitations people might have about looking at modern art. That’s led to a folksy image of a burly optimist, trained as an engineer, with pliers in hand, a contagious sense of fun and a can-do attitude.
There’s truth to that picture of the warmhearted maker of odd objects that spin. Saul Steinberg, a friend, would depict Calder and one of his daughters in a car strung together with pulleys and winches. Calder reminds you that art can give pleasure, and there was plenty of pleasure in Calder’s art and in his company.
There’s more. Perl sees crucial dualities in his art — “the gravitas that didn’t preclude lightness; the lucid geometry wedded to a taste for the fantastical and picturesque; the blunt American spirit who was at home with French grace.”
Alexander Calder was the son and grandson of sculptors, both named Alexander Calder. His grandfather made the statue of William Penn at Philadelphia City Hall. Among his father’s many projects was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Calder’s father, known as Stirling, also designed a statue of George Washington on the arch in Washington Square in New York (1917-18). Calder’s mother was a painter, mostly of portraits.
Calder got an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919. He would turn out to be more of an artist and artisan. Bouncing through jobs after college, he chafed at authority and boredom.
He turned to painting and drawing at the Art Students League, specializing in New York street scenes. Off to France in 1926, his calling cards were an odd orange suit and the handmade and improvised “Cirque Calder,” a miniature circus of wire marionettes made from scraps. The first critic to appreciate him was on the circus and music-hall beat.
Calder’s reputation in Paris grew with ingenious wire sculptures that looked like three-dimensional line drawings, and trembled when touched. His mobiles — named by Marcel Duchamp, a friend — were constructions designed to move. “The Conquest of Time” refers to Calder’s achievement of putting his sculptures in motion, which Duchamp had never done.
On Calder’s lifelong element of play, Perl cites the critic and curator James Johnson Sweeney, who suggested that “if one can enjoy certain qualities that predominate in a toy, such as unfamiliar rhythms and provocative surprise, why should these features not be embodied in more ambitious esthetic expressions?”
Perl adds to that insight: “Artists who grow up with a father or mother who is an artist may well find their earliest gifts somewhat magnified. Creative parents bring a seriousness to what others regard as childish fancies. They embolden the young artist, creating conditions that eventually transform fancies into masterworks.”
Transformation can also come, as it did for Calder, when an artist connects with the work of another, as Calder did in the studio of Piet Mondrian, a pioneer of essential forms and rhythms and primary colors. The experience, Calder wrote years later, “was like a baby being slapped to make his lungs start working.” If Calder couldn’t offer such an earthy metaphor, who could?
As Perl explains, “The slap doesn’t give the child its lungs or the capacity to use them; the slap sets in motion a process that’s inherent but not yet unleashed. Mondrian didn’t make Calder a great abstract artist, but he awakened the possibility — he unleashed it.”
And Calder hurtled into a new world of objects in the early 1930s — we see a sober side of the artist in austere mobiles and ensembles of shapes which are intimate and at the same time pushing toward infinity, mixing geometry and astronomy. The cerebral Calder of those works will be a revelation for many.
What we don’t get in “Calder” is the man’s dark side, if he ever had one. Married happily to the grand-niece of Henry James, he lacked vanity, and his peccadilloes seemed limited to eating too much and bumping into things.
Whether Calder had faults or not, there were those who thought they found them — usually related to whether the amiable man made toys or stopped making toys.
And there was Thomas Wolfe, whose novel “You Can’t Go Home Again” re-created a Manhattan performance of “Cirque Calder” conducted by a beefy living-room ringmaster called Piggy Logan and packed with a blithe bevy of gatecrashers. In Wolfe’s version of a real event (hosted by his thenlover), a silly Calder and company played parlor games as the Depression stunned the U.S. and fascism rose in Europe.
Calder, who read the novel when it was published in 1940, after Wolfe’s death, wasn’t about to abandon humor when so much else was being threatened. And Wolfe was an exception among artists and intellectuals drawn to the man.
One lesson of Calder’s appeal is that even in what seemed like the worst of times — the late 1930s — he brought Americans and Europeans together, whether it was at the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, for which he designed “Mercury Fountain,” a monument honoring the embattled Spanish Republic alongside Picasso’s “Guernica,” or at the U.S. premiere of Eric Satie’s solemn opera, “Socrate,” for which he designed the stage set.
By 1940, Americans had discovered him. And, as we await volume two of this ambitious biography, that’s only the half of it.
David D’Arcy is a correspondent for the Art Newspaper, a London monthly. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com