Calder's Balancing Acts

Part of Counting on Art

Students will learn the vocabulary of contemporary sculpture and be able to distinguish between abstract and realistic sculpture, mobile and stabile, and biomorphic and geometric. Then they will build a Calder-style mobile online and/or offline with art supplies. Lastly, they will complete a worksheet to connect the Fibonacci sequence to a mobile by Alexander Calder.

Two disks, one black and one white, and ten smaller red disks hang from eleven red wire branches in this free-floating sculpture, called a mobile. The uppermost branch ends with the white disk jutting out to our right, and the next ends with the black disk, projecting out and slightly up to our left. The red disks cluster in a loose line below, some higher and some drooping down. The mobile is suspended with an unseen filament in a white room in this photograph.
Alexander Calder, Black, White, and Ten Red, 1957, sheet metal, wire, and paint, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1996.120.3

Grade Level

Subject

Language

Materials

Warm-Up Questions

How do you think Calder balanced this mobile? How do you imagine it moves in space?

Background

Alexander (called Sandy) Calder was born in 1898 into a very artistic family, his father and grandfather were sculptors, and his mother was a painter. As a child, he had a workshop and used tools to construct toys and gadgets with bits of wire, cloth, and string. "Mother and Father were all for my efforts to build things myself—they approved of the homemade," he explained. Calder loved to invent and play—he continued to do both throughout his life.

Calder received a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked as an engineer for a short time but then decided to study painting in New York City. He earned money by drawing illustrations for newspapers. He drew pictures of the circus for one paper and also made hundreds of animal drawings at the zoo.

During his lifetime, Calder created more than 16,000 works of art, including drawings, paintings, jewelry, tapestries, stage sets, and sculptures. However, he is most famous for his moving sculptures, called mobiles. Instead of anchoring these three-dimensional works to the ground, Calder usually suspended them from the ceiling to allow them to float freely in space. To make a mobile, he attached brightly painted metal shapes to wire, using trial and error to balance each one. He usually cut natural forms that looked like leaves and petals rather than hardedge geometric shapes. Calder's engineering background came in handy as he experimented with different materials to balance and build his mobiles. His use of industrial materials—steel, aluminum, and wire—was new. When Calder's mobiles move with the breeze, they change shape and cast interesting shadows. Some even "sing" as their movable parts rub against each other.

Guided Practice

As a class, view the slideshow below.

Slideshow: Depictions of Horses in Sculpture

Edgar Degas, Horse Walking, original wax possibly early 1870s, cast c. 1920/1921, copper alloy, Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald, 1989.28.2

Tell students that these works of art have much in common. Ask them to look carefully, to compare and contrast the images, and then list their comments on large chart paper. Prompt students to investigate each work of art with regard to the following characteristics:

  • Two-dimensional/three-dimensional
  • Material: metal, wood, bronze, paper, wire, canvas, paint
  • Color: natural for the subject or symbolic
  • Is the subject recognizable? abstract or realistic?
  • Year of creation
  • What conclusions can you draw? What is new and different about Calder's horses?

Now compare and contrast Calder's stabile Cheval Rouge to his mobile Untitled using the above criteria and have students clarify what is different about this work of art.

 

 

  • Discuss the term mobile. How does the innovation of movement change the work of art? (movement introduces a continually changing composition)
  • Has Calder created a whole new art form?
  • The mobile is called Untitled. Why do you suppose Calder gave the stabile a descriptive name (Red Horse) but left the mobile without a specific title? Ask students, "What does the mobile remind you of?" (possible responses: birds in flight, wings, feathers, leaves on branches, flower petals, fish scales, a skeleton, clouds, stars, and planets)
  • Tell students that Calder's sculpture is abstract but based on life forms. The term for this type of abstraction is biomorphic.

Activity

Students will build a Calder-style mobile online and/or offline with art supplies.

To make an mobile online, have students:

To make a mobile offline, with art supplies, have students:

  1. Read Calder's mobile-making method and philosophy:

    "I used to begin with fairly complete drawings, but now I start by cutting out a lot of shapes . . . Some I keep because they're pleasing or dynamic. Some are bits I just happen to find. Then I arrange them, like papier collé [paper collage], on a table, and ‘paint’ them—that is, arrange them, with wires between the pieces if it's to be a mobile, for the overall pattern. Finally I cut some more of them with my shears, calculating for balance this time."

    "I begin at the small ends, then balance in progression until I think I've found the point of support. This is crucial, as there is only one such point and it must be right if the object is to hang or pivot freely. I usually test out this point with strings to make sure before bending the wires. The size and angle of the shapes and how to use them is a matter of taste and what you have in mind."

    "I feel an artist should go about his work with great respect for his materials. Symmetry and order do not make a composition. It is the apparent accident to regularity which the artist actually controls, by which he makes or mars a work."

    "To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry."
     
  2. Think about what they want to express with their mobiles before they begin working with materials.
  3. Cut and paint shapes.
  4. Layout wire and shapes on a table or flat surface.
  5. Experiment with adding/subtracting materials to make the mobile balance.
  6. Write a title for their mobile.
  7. Use string to hang it from the classroom ceiling.
  8. Optional: write and exchange mathematical problems based on their mobiles.

Extension

Students will complete the “Spiral Patterns in Art” worksheet to apply the Fibonacci sequence to a mobile by Alexander Calder.

 

Abstract: style of art that does not represent its subject matter in a realistic way. It emphasizes the elements of art—line, color, shape, texture, and form—to express its subject.

Realistic: art that seeks to produce a true-to-life representation of its subject matters; its shapes and forms are recognizable as people, places, or things.

[back to Guided Practice]

National Core Arts Standards

VA:Cr2.1.8 Demonstrate willingness to experiment, innovate, and take risks to pursue ideas, forms, and meanings that emerge in the process of art-making or designing.

VA:Cr2.3.7 Apply visual organizational strategies to design and produce a work of art, design, or media that clearly communicates information or ideas.

VA:Re7.1.7 Explain how the method of display, the location, and the experience of an artwork influence how it is perceived and valued.

VA:Re8.1.7 Interpret art by analyzing art-making approaches, the characteristics of form and structure, relevant contextual information, subject matter, and use of media to identify ideas and mood conveyed.

Download

“Spiral Patterns in Art” worksheet

You may also like

Two disks, one black and one white, and ten smaller red disks hang from eleven red wire branches in this free-floating sculpture, called a mobile. The uppermost branch ends with the white disk jutting out to our right, and the next ends with the black disk, projecting out and slightly up to our left. The red disks cluster in a loose line below, some higher and some drooping down. The mobile is suspended with an unseen filament in a white room in this photograph.

Educational Resource:  Calder's Balancing Acts

Painted with small areas of mostly flat color, this horizontal painting shows three brown-skinned people in the room of a home with pale gray walls and wood floors. To our right, a woman wears slate-gray skirt, a white apron and shawl, and a red headscarf with black and white polka dots. She sits in a black wooden chair facing our right in profile, smoking a pipe. A steaming kettle and bright green coffee pot sit on a black wood stove behind and to the right of the woman, with firewood stacked to the right. A clock or timer and an oil lamp sit on a red shelf above the stove and the woman’s head. Beneath her feet is one of three rectangular area rugs with a pattern of green, black, white, and red stripes. A window at the center of the back wall of the room is mostly covered by a dark green curtain. The panes along the bottom are black and lined with white, suggesting snow or frost. A bucket and pewter-colored, shallow bowl sit on a bench on the second striped rug under the window. To our left, a small person standing on the third patterned rug wears short black pants, stockings, and suspenders over a white shirt. That person turns away from us and rests elbows near a lit candle on a table with a red and gray checkered tablecloth. The third person, possibly a young girl, sits on a blanket or a fourth rug patterned with yellow, red, black, and green triangles. That young girl wears a gray dress and black shoes. She cradles a baby doll, and a white dog, perhaps a stuffed animal, sits next to her. A few cracks in the wall near the window expose horizontal bands, perhaps narrow wooden boards under damaged plaster. The artist signed the work with black letters in the lower right corner: “H. PiPPiN.”

Educational Resource:  Horace Pippin's Story, Grade Level: 1–2

Students will learn about the life and painting style of African-American artist Horace Pippin. They will discover how to "read" the clues in his painting School Studies and write a story about the work. By solving counting and time problems, students will also create their own "secret number" painting.

We look across a wide, low clearing at a mountain rising beyond rocky hills, which are mostly covered in pines and blazing red and orange autumn trees, in this horizontal landscape painting. The green grass of the clearing is littered with dead trees and stumps. Beyond a narrow opening between the hills, almost at the center of the composition, a massive mountain towers against the powder-blue sky, nearly reaching the top edge of the painting. The mountain’s jagged face is mottled with warm tones of cinnamon, rust, and caramel brown. The scene is bathed in warm light coming from our right but pewter-gray storm clouds move in from the upper left to encircle the mountain peak. Closest to us, a line of broken tree trunks spans the width of the painting, mixed with scarlet-red, marigold-orange, and green vegetation and reeds. A silvery pond lies just beyond them to our left. Tiny in scale within the landscape, a horse and rider gallop along a wide dirt road emerging from the lower right toward a white house nestled at the foot of the hill to our left. The rider wears a knee-length, denim-blue tunic and red leggings. Upon closer inspection, two children and a white dog become visible, walking toward the rider. A straw-yellow structure sits against the hill to our right. A horse-drawn carriage moves away from the house in the far distance, where the road curves toward the notch. The artist signed and dated the painting as if he wrote directly onto a broken trunk in the lower left corner of the painting: “T. Cole 1839.”

Educational Resource:  Little House in the Valley