Calder at the Whitney
An installation view of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years” at the Whitney Museum.
Is art basically glorified child’s play, extending into adulthood, through a lifetime, picking up ideas and gaining finesse as it goes? That’s one way to think of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Half-Circle, Quarter-Circle and Sphere,” 1932
It’s a large show yet it feels intimate and light, not to say lightweight. Gallery by gallery, it’s as suspenseful and insubstantial as a magic act: what will the artist pull from his sleeve next?
“Hinged Horse,” 1927
Calder didn’t start out with ambitions to be an artist. He watched his father, a professional sculptor, struggle with money. So when it came time for college the young Calder chose to study engineering.
“Le Lanceur de Poids,” 1929
But of course he was an artist, a natural. Even as a child he was astonishingly inventive. He was one of those people with nonstop eyes and hands: every scrap of stray matter was a candidate for transformation.
“Croisiere,” 1931
While working at engineering jobs after college, he was also drawing and making toys. In 1923 he enrolled at the Art Students League to study painting. He also did freelance illustrating, and began to experiment with openwork sculptures of bent and twisted wire.
Then in 1926, he suddenly moved to Paris and fell in love with it instantly. Among other things, his wire sculpture took off there. For his purposes, industrial steel wire was an ideal medium. It was cheap and malleable, and like three-dimensional ink; it was a means of combining drawing and sculpture in space.
In the Paris years he used it for portraiture. His subjects included Josephine Baker, John D. Rockefeller and Jimmy Durante, at left. The portraits were an attention-getting novelty; they advertised his skill; they gave him a pretext to network. They have the wit and refinement that will show up again in Calder’s first abstract sculptures.
“Seal with Ball Toy,” 1927
Refinement is not a quality associated with the famously funky tabletop assemblage known as Calder’s Circus. A prime draw of the Whitney’s permanent collection, it has rarely been off view since the museum acquired it 25 years ago. But it is given a rethinking here.
Up to now it has been exhibited as a one-ring affair with its handmade figures doing all the varied things they do at once. The show’s curators have separated the components into individual acts meant to be seen as taking place sequentially, a format that corresponds to the way Calder himself presented the work in live performances.
You can see him giving one in a 1955 film by Jean Painlevé, which is in the show and on view in New York for the first time. Calder introduces the figures silently one by one, manipulating them and activating the low-tech mechanisms that animate their activities. If, like me, you’ve always found Calder’s Circus a little too cute for comfort, the film may change your mind. N.Y. Times
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