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Alexander Calder
(1898-1976)
Born to a family of successful classically trained artists, Alexander "Sandy" Calder found his own way of creating through bending wire to "draw" in three dimensional space. Art, however, was Sandy's second choice. His first was engineering, and he graduated in 1919 from the Stevens Institute of Technology with the intention to dedicate his entire career to this pursuit.
By 1923, however, he had moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students' League. By late 1931 his wire sculptures had evolved into one of the biggest breakthroughs in twentieth century art: kinetic sculpture. The mobile, as the innovation was dubbed by Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, was Alexander Calder's invention. In 1939, the artist was celebrated by the first retrospective of his prodigious career at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts.
World War 2 was a difficult time for artists working in metal, due to rationing for the war efforts. Calder's work continued, however pieces were often fabricated from scraps left over from previous projects. This type of material recycling was something Calder often did, creating toys from tin cans and scraps laying around his studio for his children to play with, or beautiful jewelry for friends and loved ones made from from bits of copper wire left over in his studio.
Calder's later career was dedicated to colossal scale public sculpture found in city centers across the globe. Three weeks after the 1976 retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York titled Calder's Universe, Alexander died at the age of 78 leaving an unequaled legacy to the American art world.
To learn more about Alexander Calder:
• American Masters: Alexander Calder
• The Calder Foundation
• Wikipedia: Alexander Calder
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