Alexander Calder

Available Works

Biography

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was an American artist best known for inventing the mobile and for his large stationary sculptures known as stabiles. He was born in 1898 into a family of artists, with a sculptor father and a painter mother, and grew up moving frequently due to his father’s public commissions. Encouraged to create from a young age, Calder had his own workshop by age eight and was already making small kinetic sculptures as a child. After studying mechanical engineering and graduating in 1919, he turned toward art and enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, where he also worked as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette. An assignment to sketch the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus led to a lifelong interest in circus imagery. After moving to Paris in 1926, Calder created Cirque Calder, a portable miniature circus made of wire and found materials that he performed for audiences in Paris and New York and that helped establish his reputation. His wire sculptures gained further attention with his first solo gallery exhibition in 1928. A major turning point came in 1931 when he created his first kinetic sculptures, later named mobiles by Marcel Duchamp, while his stationary works became known as stabiles. During World War II, Calder developed wooden sculptures called Constellations, expanding his approach to form and materials. Over the following decades, he produced major public commissions and was the subject of significant museum retrospectives at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Calder died in 1976, shortly after the opening of Calder’s Universe at the Whitney, leaving behind one of the most innovative sculptural practices of the twentieth century.