Calder: The Mobile Stops

Alexander Calder's timing was never off. On the face of it, the best death an artist could have is to perish laden with age and honors yet still working, and at a time when he is thrust anew into the public eye through a large and deservedly popular exhibition of 50 years of his work. Such was the context of Calder's death last week, from a heart attack, at the age of 78. The flag on New York's Whitney Museum, where his show of more than 200 works had opened in October (TIME, Oct. 25), went to half-staff in deference to the man who had possibly been the greatest, and certainly the best loved, of his generation of American sculptors--the man who taught sculpture to move.

Calder's activity straddled two continents; he kept studios in France and the U.S., and was one of the first American-born artists to be accepted as a charter member by the European avantgarde. Still, as his good friend Fernand Leger once put it, Calder was "a hundred percent American." His heritage was also art. His Scottish-born grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, came to the U.S. at 22, later sculpted the famous 37-ft. statue of William Penn that stands atop Philadelphia's city hall. Father Alexander Stirling Calder sculpted the classic George Washington statue at the arch in Manhattan's Washington Square. However, the third Alexander Calder demonstrated from his childhood an adventuresomeness and ingenuity that clearly marked him as no mere follower, even of his talented forebears.

Growing up in Arizona, California and New York, young "Sandy" Calder tirelessly crafted playthings and other gadgets out of wire, wood and nails. In 1919 he graduated as an engineer from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., then set out on an eccentric progression of technical jobs. As a boilerman on a passenger liner, he devised a contraption to direct sea breezes into the stifling engine room. In the mid-1920s, while tasting formal training at New York City's Art Students League, he contributed drawings of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to the National Police Gazette. Moving to Paris ("Why do I live in Paris? Because in Paris it's a compliment to be called crazy."), he began the miniature circus of wire sculptures that he kept adding to for decades.

Warm, Witty. In 1933 Calder and his wife Louisa (a grandniece of William and Henry James) bought an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Conn., which became home for the artist's astonishing fecundity. His Roxbury studio resembled a tinker's shop more than some rive gauche atelier; wire and pliers and corrugated cartons filled with the flotsam of a lifetime lay about in splendid I-know-just-where-it-is disarray. There, and in the house near Tours, France, that he acquired in 1953, the sculptor would lumber about, creating a stage set for Martha Graham, fashioning coffee cups for his kitchen, filling a commission for the Brussels World's Fair or New York's International Airport.

Calder was in his early 60s before he began to feel financially secure. As late as 1958, he was still saying to Klaus Perls, his New York City dealer: "What! You think I could get a thousand dollars for a mobile?" The bearish Calder could never really play the lion. At interviews, Calder could be impishly obtuse ("I just do the best I can" was the typical answer to a highbrow aesthetic query). At formal gatherings (for which he would trade his baggy work pants and red flannel L.L. Bean shirt for an old gray suit and red L.L. Bean shirt), he was warm, witty and unaffected.

Calder's output embraced nearly every form of art activity, from indulgent triviality to high iconic seriousness: toys and tapestries, jewelry and ceramics, prints and graphics, and the sculptures that alone will preserve his name--those fluttering, circling mobiles, balanced to the weight of a hair, those majestic sheet-metal "stabiles" that, in the closing years of Calder's life, seemed to flaunt their exuberant red profiles from half the public spaces of the world. "My fan mail is enormous," he once observed. "Everybody is under six."

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