Taking Calder Seriously

American sculptor Alexander Calder, inventor of the delightful, softly moving work of art known as the mobile, possessed both an impish sense of humor and a profound grasp of beauty. The fun could lull viewers into ignoring his seriousness, and Calder, who died in 1976, was sometimes discounted by critics.

There has never been any doubt about his popularity. “Despite ups and downs in the art market, his pieces have always sold well,” said Marla Prather, curator of 20th century art for the National Gallery of Art, as she stood amid his work a few days ago in the museum’s immense Calder retrospective. “If you talk to his family, you will find that there’s an exhibit of Calder going on somewhere in the world all the time.

“But,” she went on, “he never engaged himself with critics. They tended to see him as someone who was not very serious.”

That changed, according to Prather, when his work was included in a 1993 sculpture show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York called “Picasso and the Age of Iron.” Many critics suddenly realized that he could hold his own with Picasso, David Smith and other modern sculptors.

“It was time for a reassessment,” Prather said.

That reassessment has come with the retrospective Prather has organized for the National Gallery on the 100th anniversary of Calder’s birth. The show, which includes 267 mobiles, stabiles, wire sculptures, jewelry, paintings and monumental pieces as well as videos of works too fragile or enormous to exhibit, opened at the museum on March 29. It continues there until July 12 and then moves on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, its only other site, from Sept. 4 to December 1.

The first reviews have been enthusiastic. Roberta Smith of the New York Times fretted that the show was packed with so much that it became “slow going” at times. Nevertheless, she said, the best works “coalesce into magical environments, veritable gardens of elegant lines, free-floating leaf shapes and dancing shadows.” Noting that several pieces have never been shown before, she said, “It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that this show may make it possible to know Calder as only Calder knew Calder.”

Although Washington Post critic Paul Richard found the mobiles a little stale and dated in an age where almost every infant has a derivative hanging over the crib, he called the exhibition as “ceaseless as a circus, a show whose beauty keeps dissolving like cotton candy, or delight, into sweetness and air.” The retrospective, according to Richard, helps us understand Dada painter Marcel Duchamp’s assertion that “Calder’s art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.”

Underscoring Calder’s immense popularity, the U.S. Postal Service, which has tended in recent years to put celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Bugs Bunny on its stamps, honored Calder on the eve of the exhibition by issuing five stamps, each with a different one of his sculptures.

As a young man, Calder never seemed destined to become part of the mainstream of modern art. At first, in fact, he turned his back on the art world and then, when he changed his mind, became no more than a jester, albeit a popular one, on the periphery.

Calder was born on July 22, 1898, in a Philadelphia suburb to a family of artists. His mother was a portrait painter, his father and grandfather sculptors. As a child, he would earn a quarter whenever he posed for his parents for two interminable hours at a stretch. That may have turned him against art as a career.

Instead, he chose a more practical profession and graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey with a degree in mechanical engineering. “Sandy is always happy, or perhaps up to some joke,” said his college yearbook, “for his face is always wrapped up in that same mischievous, juvenile grin.” His mechanical skills and his smiling spirit would later prove a boon to his art career.

Engineering jobs bored him, and Calder finally decided to follow the family footsteps, enrolling in the Art Students League in New York in 1923. In less than a year, he found a job as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette, the most sensational tabloid of its day.

In 1926, Calder joined the legion of young American expatriates who flocked to Paris because it was both cheap and receptive to all new artistic and literary ideas. He would spend half the rest of his life in France.

Calder earned his keep by making toys. Then, delving into his memory of a Police Gazette assignment that brought him to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for two weeks, he delighted Paris with his “Cirque Calder,” an intricate, mechanical circus that he put together with wire, string, wooden figures and pulleys.

All the luminaries of the Paris avant-garde including Jean Cocteau, Joan Miro, Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian and Le Corbusier showed up for performances, They marveled at the tiny trapeze artists who could zip through the air and clamp on to a moving swing. They applauded sword swallowers, chariot races and performing animals as well.

The pieces, which Calder carted around in five suitcases and are now in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, are too fragile to travel any more. The famous circus is represented at the exhibition only by a film on video of a performance by Calder.

Calder also attracted attention in Paris with a series of wire sculptures of celebrities like President Calvin Coolidge and Jimmy Durante and friends like Miro and the Parisian model Kiki de Montparnasse. He crafted a wire sculpture of the African-American entertainer Josephine Baker that would shimmy and shake whenever he dangled it like a marionette. These pieces were so popular that he was called “the king of wire.” But this failed to satisfy him. Wire sculptures, he said, were “merely a very amusing stunt cleverly executed.”

A visit to the Paris studio of the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian in 1930 pushed Calder in two directions--abstraction and motion--that would ensure him a place in the history of Modern art. The studio was decorated like a Mondrian painting--brilliant white walls adorned with rectangular placards of red, blue, yellow, black and white.

The impact of the abstract colors astounded Calder. “The visit to Mondrian gave me the shock that converted me,” he recalled later. “It was like the baby being slapped to make his lungs start working.”

But Calder felt the impact would even be greater if the rectangles were somehow placed in motion. “It would be fine if they could be made to oscillate in different directions and at different amplitudes,” he told Mondrian.

The Dutch painter did not agree. “No, it is not necessary,” he replied. “My painting is already very fast.”

Calder started to experiment with abstract sculpture that moved. Before relying solely on wind and air currents, he used little motors and cranks to move the pieces. Duchamp dubbed them mobiles. A year later, the French sculptor Jean Arp called the Calder pieces that did not move stabiles. The two names stuck.

After a successful display of the new works in a Paris gallery in 1932, Calder wrote a friend that the show was made up of “abstract sculptures which moved.” “It was really quite a show,” Calder went on, “not so much like Mr. Rodin.”

It would take another five years, however, before the mobiles would evolve into the form that became his trademark: pieces of sheet metal cut into biomorphic forms that dangle by wire from bars and twist slowly in countless and haphazard directions under the power of air currents.

The French novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre would later describe the mobile as “a little swing tune, as unique, as ephemeral as the sky or the morning.” “If you have missed it,” he warned, “you have missed it forever.”

Although Calder continued making mobiles for the rest of his life--crafting such delicate work as “Dozen and Short Dozen” in 1952, he experimented with many other forms from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. He crafted jewelry, gouache paintings, sheet metal sculpture, wood and wire constructions that looked like mobiles but did not move, and a new kind of mobile that dropped from a standing sculpture rather than the ceiling.

The National Gallery show brims with stunning examples of the sheet-metal sculptures or stabiles. There is a Miro-esque quality to them--many painted a luminous black or red and all fashioned with wit and great pleasure. Although they may seem abstract at first glance, they usually depict surreal animals that are warm and playful like “Black Beast’ (1940) or “Big Bird” (1937). Sometimes the sculptures are human caricatures like “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1947).

During the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert commissioned Calder to design a fountain for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The fountain pumped mercury that came from a mining town where Republican forces had turned back an assault by the fascist General Francisco Franco. Calder’s fountain was placed at the pavilion in front of an enormous canvas, also commissioned for the fair, that would become one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century--Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.”

A special distinction came during World War II. The Museum of Modern Art in New York--a persistent champion of Calder--presented a retrospective of his work in 1943 when he was only 45 years old. No artist had ever been honored by the museum so early.

Calder resumed his trips to France after the war and, on one ocean voyage, bumped into Ernest Hemingway. Calder’s recent celebrity evidently failed to impress the best-selling novelist. “He appeared suddenly and I presented myself,” Calder wrote later, “but it was not much use. For I had nothing to say to him, and he had nothing to say to me.”

In the last two decades of his life, Calder devoted himself to monumental sculpture, large pieces put together at an ironworks and designed mainly for the outdoors. He was tired of small mobiles. “I regard them as sort of fiddling,” he said.

Designers of new airports, corporate headquarters, museums and plazas throughout the world were demanding large pieces, and Calder became a popular choice to supply them.

Calder was not apolitical. He sponsored a newspaper ad in 1972 calling for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. He refused the Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford in 1976 because he had not declared an amnesty for the conscientious objectors and others who refused to fight in Vietnam.

But he did not want his monumental sculpture to carry a message. “I want to make things that are fun to look at,” he said, “that have no propaganda value whatsoever.”

Some of the pieces like the 59-foot-tall “Teodelapio” that hovers over the town of Spoleto in Italy are so colossal that the exhibition shows them only on videotape. But three large but less colossal sculptures, including the imposing 25-foot-high “Tom’s,” have been erected outdoors in front of the gallery.

In 1973, Calder was commissioned by the National Gallery to create a massive mobile for the interior of the new East Wing of the gallery designed by architect I. M. Pei. The sculptor wanted his black-and-red mobile to be made of steel, but this proved too heavy for the glass roof.

With Calder’s approval, Paul Matisse, the grandson of the French master Henri Matisse, restructured the mobile in aluminum. Calder died at the age of 78 on Nov. 11, 1976, a year before his last mobile was installed. The mobile has since become the icon of the National Gallery of Art. Even when there is no Calder retrospective, it is hard to walk into the National Gallery of Art without looking upward, smiling and feeling your spirits soar.

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“Alexander Calder: 1898-1976,” National Gallery of Art, 4th Street at Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington. Through July 12. Free. (202) 737-4215. TDD: (202) 842-6176. https://www.nga.gov.