Past Exhibition New Release: 1998
One of the Twentieth Century's Most Innovative Artists is Celebrated in Centenary Exhibtion,"Alexander Calder: 1898-1976," at National Gallery of Art, Washington, March 29 - July 12, 1998
Washington, DC -- The dynamic career of one of the twentieth century's most innovative artists and great public sculptors is presented in Alexander Calder: 1898-1976, the first major retrospective of the artist's work organized in the United States since his death in 1976. On view at the National Gallery of Art, March 29- July 12, 1998, the exhibition celebrates the centenary of Calder's birth with more than 260 works brought together to document Calder's development as a sculptor. Related works on paper, paintings, and jewelry provide additional context for the sculpture.
The exhibition is made possible by GTE Corporation. It is the tenth exhibition that GTE Corporation has supported at the National Gallery of Art since 1980.
"We are extremely grateful to GTE Corporation for their ongoing and generous support and to The Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation and the Calder family for their collaboration in organizing this important exhibition," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "The National Gallery has enjoyed a special relationship with the artist and is a major repository for his art, symbolized best by Untitled (1976), the grand mobile commissioned for the East Building." The exhibition is on view during the twentieth anniversary of the East Building, which opened to the public on June 1, 1978.
"We are delighted to help bring this major retrospective exhibition of Alexander Calder's works to the National Gallery of Art," said Charles R. Lee, chairman and chief executive officer, GTE Corporation. "This continues a tradition of collaboration between GTE and the National Gallery of Art that spans over fifteen years. Calder's work reflects imagination, innovation, and creative genius -- qualities that are essential to success in the business world and throughout society."
Organization
The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art. After its Washington showing, Alexander Calder: 1898-1976 will travel to its only other venue, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 4-December 1, 1998. The exhibition is installed on several levels of the Gallery's East Building, in interior galleries as well as public spaces, and includes three outdoor sculptures. Three short video programs are shown continuously within the installation: Calder's Mechanized Mobiles, illustrating in motion some of the motorized and hand-driven sculptures on view, and Calder's Monumental Sculpture, showing a variety of large-scale works in outdoor locations, both produced by the National Gallery of Art with Roger Sherman, Florentine Films (1998); and Calder's Circus, a performance of the artist's famous handcrafted miniature circus (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), directed by Carlos Vilardebo (1961).
The enormous breadth of Calder's career is explored through works ranging in size from small scale to monumental, in every medium he employed: wire constructions, mobiles, standing mobiles, stabiles, constellations, and towers, among others. Many of the important early works in this exhibition have never been shown, or have not been on public view since the 1943 Calder retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Some of the works have rarely been exhibited, such as the monumental outdoor sculpture, Southern Cross (1963). Made for Calder's home in Connecticut, it was last exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976.
Alexander Calder: 1898-1976 represents a unique and extensive collaboration between Marla Prather, the Gallery's curator of twentieth-century art, and Alexander S.C. Rower, director of The Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation. Unprecedented access to works in the family collections and to the foundation's archive and catalogue raisonné research has resulted in a selection of objects from a broad variety of sources.
United Airlines is the official carrier for the exhibition.
Works in the Exhibition
The exhibition explores Calder's stylistic development, beginning with some of his earliest works, such as Dog and Duck of 1909, which show the artist's sculptural facility at the age of eleven. Included are examples of Calder's first wire sculptures made in Paris, such as the ambitious and fluid Rearing Stallion (c. 1928); the innovative, crank-driven Goldfish Bowl (1929), in which the fish "swim"; and portraits of artists and entertainers such as Fernand Léger (1930) and Aztec Josephine Baker (c. 1929). The latter construction is suspended from a single wire thread, one of a series on the American-born singer who startled Paris audiences with her exuberant dancing in the 1920s.
Calder's movement into abstraction is apparent in Circus Scene (1929), in which he combines linear wire sculpture with a gestural abstract painting on the base, and in Crosière (1931), one of the most successful of his first abstract constructions. The artist's Object with Red Ball (1931) is an example of an open composition in which the position of elements can be altered, and Cône d'ébène (1933), one of his earliest hanging mobiles, combines the technique of carving with an interest in geometric abstraction.
Also on view is the striking ten-foot-high construction Steel Fish, one of several large-scale standing mobiles produced in 1934 and the first of a number of outdoor wind-driven works. In Snake and the Cross (1936), a culmination of two aspects of experimentation, the use of a frame is combined with that of mobile elements. In the theatrical Tightrope (1936), a construction of two large wooden bollards holds a tightrope in place on which abstract wire forms balance.
Fantastical animal forms began to appear in Calder's art in 1937 and can be seen in his first bolted sculpture, Whale (1937), a six-foot-high stabile assembled from curving sheets of metal, and in Black Beast (1940), his earliest industrially made object and largest scale work to date. Calder's Constellations of 1943 -- like his cosmic spheres of the 1930s -- are designed to evoke astral formations, connecting various elements with lengths of wire. Also from the same year, The Big Ear was made specifically for an extension of the 1943 exhibition at MoMA to take the place of Red Petals (1942), which had to be returned to the Arts Club of Chicago at the expiration of the loan. Other exhibition-specific works that are on view are Baby Flat Top and S-Shaped Vine, both made for the 1946 showing at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, organized by Marcel Duchamp, and both designed to collapse for shipping. Another is International Mobile (1949), made especially for the Third International Exhibition of Sculpture held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Works from 1947 include the complex and majestic 1 Red, 4 Black plus X White, one of Calder's earliest large mobiles in his mature style; Little Parasite, described by Calder as his "favorite mobile" on a photograph of the work; Bougainvillier, one of Calder's pierced disk standing mobiles; and The Lace On the Edge of Your Panties, a fine example of his cut-out works of 1945-1949. A final foray into wire constructions is Tower with Painting (1951), in which Calder combines a derrick-like construction of constellations with a painting of circa 1945.
Calder: The Sculptor
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1898, Calder was the son of a successful sculptor, Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945), and Nanette Lederer (1866-1960), a painter. Although Calder's father and grandfather were both well-known sculptors of public monuments, he initially decided on a career in mechanical engineering and received a bachelor's degree, with training in physics and kinetics. This knowledge provided a basis for the later experimentation with motorized devices and wind-driven mobiles that made Calder's art unique. After receiving an undergraduate degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, Calder worked at a variety of jobs. In 1923, he decided to enroll in the Art Students League to become a painter.
Calder worked brilliantly in both figurative and abstract modes. From his student beginnings as a rather conventional Ashcan school painter, he moved on to make sculpture in wood and then wire, and, later, to develop an abstract style; he subsequently worked simultaneously in both modes. Although Calder is primarily considered a sculptor, he was a marvelous draftsman as well, and much of his innovation first took place in two dimensions.
The very definition of sculpture was changed by Calder. Not only did he perpetually invent new shapes, he also created innovative forms of sculpture that necessitated coining the terms "mobile" and "stabile" to describe them. Although Calder was not the first sculptor to work kinetically, no other artist did so as extensively, exploring all the potential of motion.
Catalogue
A fully illustrated 368-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, including essays by Marla Prather and French scholar Arnauld Pierre and a comprehensive bibliography, exhibition history, and chronology provided by Alexander S.C. Rower, the author of the forthcoming Calder catalogue raisonné. The softcover catalogue, published by the National Gallery of Art, is available for $37, and the hardcover catalogue, published by the Gallery in association with Yale University Press, is available for $65.
Calder and the National Gallery of Art
Calder's work has been closely associated with the National Gallery since the 1977 installation in the East Building of the large mobile Untitled (1976), one of Calder's last works. Other recently donated works have strengthened the representation of Calder's work in the collection, including forty sculptures and drawings given in 1996 by Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, Calder's dealers in the United States for more than two decades, as well as the large stabile Obus (1972) and a group of ten "animobiles" (1970-1976) given by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. These examples of Calder's work, spanning six decades of his career, establish the Gallery as a major repository for Alexander Calder's art.
Support From GTE Corporation
GTE Corporation has sponsored more exhibitions at the National Gallery than any other corporation. In addition to Alexander Calder: 1898-1976, they include: Winslow Homer (1995-1996), Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation (1993), Art for the Nation: Gifts in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art (1991), Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection (1990), Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane (1988), Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930 (1986-1987), Art of Aztec Mexico: Treasures of Tenochtitlan (1983-1984), Mauritshuis: Dutch Painting of the Golden Age from the Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague (1982), and Post-Impressionism: Cross-Currents in European and American Painting, 1880-1906 (1980).
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