2025年11月13日 星期四

Calder’s Universe 1976 朋友共同圈 等 Miro, Prévert. The friendship of Joan Miro James Johnson Sweeney, Saul Steinberg, Robert Osborn, and Arthur Miller. “Though the dancer has gone, the dance remains,” Sweeney said. “Stubborn as a tree, but responsive as a tree to the wind’s motion.”

 







‘Calder: "Gallows and Lollipops" "Red Lily Pads"...The Complete Bronzes’ at L&M Arts
‘Performing Sculpture’ at Tate Modern
 Alexander Calder’s  "Sandy's Butterfly." 1964; 
 Calder, Miro, Prévert. The friendship of Joan Miro and Alexander Calder

1976年11月12日,考爾德在紐約市逝世。就在不到一個月前,他的大型回顧展「考爾德的宇宙」(Calder’s Universe)剛在紐約惠特尼美國藝術博物館開幕。 12月6日,博物館為考爾德舉行了追悼會,考爾德的朋友詹姆斯·約翰遜·斯威尼、索爾·斯坦伯格、羅伯特·奧斯本和阿瑟·米勒在追悼會上致辭。 “舞者雖已離去,但舞蹈永存,”斯威尼說道,“它像樹一樣堅韌,卻也像樹一樣對風的律動做出反應。”


更多資訊:https://bit.ly/3htK9uV


[圖:1976年,考爾德和路易莎·考爾德在紐約惠特尼美國藝術博物館“考爾德的宇宙”展覽期間的一張桌子旁。攝影:亨利·格羅斯曼。 © 2022 考爾德基金會,紐約 / 藝術家權利協會 (ARS),紐約;© 亨利‧格羅斯曼]

Calder passed away on this day in 1976 in New York City. The major retrospective Calder’s Universe had opened just under a month prior at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The museum held a memorial service for Calder on 6 December, which featured remarks by Calder’s friends James Johnson Sweeney, Saul Steinberg, Robert Osborn, and Arthur Miller. “Though the dancer has gone, the dance remains,” Sweeney said. “Stubborn as a tree, but responsive as a tree to the wind’s motion.”
For more information: https://bit.ly/3htK9uV
[Image: Calder and Louisa Calder seated at a table at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, during the exhibition Calder's Universe, 1976. Photograph by Henry Grossman. © 2022 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Henry Grossman]




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v8WsENY5hQ

YOUTUBE.COM


Calder, Miro, Prévert

Calder, Miro, Prévert




They are considered two of the great masters of 20th century art…and they were also the greatest of friends. Now two joint exhibitions in New York are exploring the bond between Joan Miro and Alexander Calder, who both created a series piece dubbed ‘Constellations’. Jade Barker reports.

YOUTUBE.COM


Showcase: The friendship of Joan Miro and Alexander Calder… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbVQ4Q6UfVY








Yale Alumni Magazine 在 The Daily Snap 相簿中新增了 1 張相片。

Alexander Calder’s sculpture "Gallows and Lollipops" on Hewitt Quadrangle is temporarily upstaged by the fall foliage.

亞歷山大 · 考爾德的雕塑"絞架和棒棒糖""Gallows and Lollipops" 上休伊特四邊形暫時搶的秋天的落葉。



MoMA The Museum of Modern Art



"The underlying form in my work has been the system of the universe." Alexander Calder, born today in 1898. http://bit.ly/1egS1tg
[Installation view of Alexander Calder's "Gibraltar." 1936. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Why did Peggy Guggenheim pick up the phone?
Because Alexander Calder.
Happy birthday to American sculptor Alexander Calder, born today in 1898. Known for his mobiles, Calder's "Red Lily Pads" were suspended in the Guggenheim rotunda for "Art of Another Kind" (2012)http://gu.gg/PWreh

National Gallery of Art


In 1972, when the Gallery’s East Building was under construction, Alexander Calder was commissioned by the Collectors Committee to create a large mobile that would complement the monumental atrium of the building.
Originally planned in steel, the sculpture would have been too heavy when enlarged to function as the artist intended. At Calder’s request, Paul Matisse (grandson of the French artist Henri Matisse) transformed the design into an aluminum construction that retained the look and dynamism of the steel construction with a more employable weight. In this photo, Alexander Calder and Paul Matisse examine one of the mobile’s red plates.

When asked to title the Gallery’s mobile, Calder replied “You don’t name a baby until it is born.” Calder died one year before the finished mobile was hoisted up to the space-frame roof on Friday, November 18, 1977. Thus, he never witnessed the “birth” of his last major commission.
The Collectors Committee was formed in 1975 to help select and finance commissions to fill the public spaces of the East Building. The Committee has continued to acquire major 20th- and 21st-century paintings and sculpture for the Gallery and has established a curatorial discretionary fund for acquiring prints, drawings, and photographs. For a full list of acquisitions made possible by the Collectors Committee, visit: http://1.usa.gov/1Lu0hna. And you can read about the Collectors Committee’s most recent gifts here:
http://1.usa.gov/1LKUojk
‪#‎ArtAtoZ‬ ‪#‎Modernism‬
Calder Mobile Inspection with Alexander Calder and Paul Matisse, November 3, 1976, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives


National Gallery of Art


The unofficial icon of the East Building, Alexander Calder's mobile consists of 13 panels and 12 arms. Rather than use welded steel--Calder's customary choice of material--for this mobile, Paul Matisse employed aluminum, strengthening its stress points with molybdenum.
The buoyant panels appear solid but are actually hollow honeycomb-type sculptures covered with paper-thin aluminum skins. Although the sculpture's wingspan is just over 85 feet across, it weighs only 920 pound s--two tons less than if it were made of ponderous steel. ‪#‎ArtAtoZ‬ ‪#‎ Modernism‬

Alexander Calder, "Untitled," 1976, aluminum and steel
http://1.usa.gov/1LKVsnm


Alexander Calder, Mobile, 1955, Sheet metal, National Museum of Modern Art - Georges Pompidou Center, Paris
http://bit.ly/1odnbVV






Relics of a Sculptor’s Bronze Age
‘Calder: The Complete Bronzes’ at L&M Arts


Librado Romero/The New York Times

Calder: The Complete Bronzes, at L&M Arts in Manhattan, includes the artist's bronze “Dancer” (1944). More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: November 8, 2012



The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was blessed with several kinds of genius. He was brilliant at the hands-on part, able to think incisively in several materials. He was innately cosmopolitan, a natural stylist and a bit of a sponge, swift to absorb and make his own the best of both the past and the present. He was an entertainer who aimed to please without pandering, to reconcile modernism and popular art, with assists from folk and what was then called primitive art.



Multimedia


 Slide Show
‘The Complete Bronzes’




Calder’s favored materials were wire, sheet metal and wood, which he bent, cut and carved into attenuated, levitating forms that banished sculpture’s ages-old weight and bulk. He used bright, flat colors in new ways and invented at least two genres: his hanging mobiles and his equally pared-down stabiles, as well as works that combined aspects of both.
He didn’t have much use for the dark, inert tradition-bound sculptural staple of bronze; he had just two brief encounters with it, in 1930 and in 1943-44. Still, it is quite amazing to see nearly all his forays into bronze brought together in one place, as they are by “Calder: The Complete Bronzes” at L&M Arts. A collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the show doesn’t quite live up to its title, since a loan or two fell through at the last minute, but it is the first exhibition to concentrate almost exclusively on these works. There were just six in the National Gallery of Art’s sprawling 1998 Calder retrospective and only one in the Whitney’s recent examination of his Paris years (1926-33). L&M is presenting 35 bronzes as well as plaster models for 13, and one cast-aluminum work.
While not quite as original as his mobiles or stabiles, Calder’s bronzes are shot through with his irrepressible spirit and talent for insouciant distillation. The ancient medium enabled him to move deeper into art history; to keep pace with and borrow from other more traditional strands of modernist sculpture and to use his hands and amazing tactile sense in a different way. The exhibition sheds new light on his complex sensibility while also showing him pursuing some of his characteristic interests — like levitation — in an unlikely material. In addition the play between the white plasters, which are so responsive to light, and their nearly identical twins in the dark, more matte bronze is fascinating.
In 1930, when he made his first bronzes, Calder was 32. He had a degree in engineering, had studied painting for three years at the Art Students League and was living in Paris. The son and grandson of sculptors, he had dabbled precociously in the medium in his youth but had returned to it only in 1926, when he started to make his famous miniaturized “Circus,” the teeming rendition of life under the big top executed in wire, wood, paint and bits of fabric that became a hit in avant-garde circles on both sides of the Atlantic.
The show opens with a dozen bronzes (and plasters for six of them) that Calder made, possibly in the summer of 1930, working with a foundry not far from his studio. Arranged on three shelves, they are toy size and to some extent toylike. A weight lifter and a pair of acrobats — one balanced above the other in a one-hand stand — recall figures from the “Circus.” A host of wonderfully lumpy animals includes a swaybacked cow, a slinky cat, a perky horse and a perturbed elephant. Calder challenged himself by modeling in fast-drying plaster rather than wax; the pieces are all so emphatically squeezed, prodded and gouged that they seem to be nothing but surface, to have no interior volumes. They combine the energy of small, ancient figurines with that of the modern cartoon.
At one end of the bottom shelf two female nudes strike a different note. One lies on her side, seeming to cleave to the earth; the other sits, leaning back on her hands. Their subtle distortions and quieter surfaces may indicate attention to Matisse’s bronzes from two decades earlier, but their everyday poses seem more typical of Degas. They are sentient beings.
Calder returned to bronze in 1943, partly to disrupt his facility with his more habitual materials and partly in response to a suggestion by the architect Wallace K. Harrison that he try to make some abstract works that could be greatly enlarged in concrete, since metal was in short supply during World War II.
The bronzes of this second stint are all over the place, in a good way. They reflect a restless urge to see what a given material can do, wobbling from figurative to abstract to Surrealistic combinations of the two. As with Calder’s stabiles and mobiles, several pieces borrow from the plant and insect worlds, which can become a bit macabre in bronze.
Tools are used as much a fingers and thumbs. Some forms and surfaces feel spiked and dangerous, others are quite smooth. Here you may find your mind swerving all over the place: archaic sculpture to 1950s biomorphism to Edward Gorey (as with a scrawny three-legged, three-pronged form called “Three Fingers” and its witchlike digits).
Sometimes several suggestions coalesce in a single piece. One of the best works in the show is “Still Life (The Chicken),” which suggests a modern chair, again three-legged, sprouting delicate mushrooms, with a perforated back that also implies the head of an alert, if not alarmed, chicken in profile.
There are more pairs of acrobats, but this time the two bodies are separate sculptures that actually balance one atop the other, sometimes in fairly suggestive ways. These combinations seem to lead to even odder, more inventive feats of engineering in which single figures are broken down into several separate pieces hinged together with hooks or little posts that fit into holes. Calder acknowledges this unusual structure with the title of a seated nude made from five separate pieces, “A Detached Person (Seated Woman).”
It is hard to know if the frequent figurative distortions or abbreviations are a matter of balance or aesthetics, but a precarious, lurching body language results, along with distinctive spatial effects. The standing leg and foot of “Dancer” — a four-part figure that seems more like a skater — is much larger than the one she lifts and points behind her. Her head and arms and the wishbone form that connote her breast are small again. She seems to loom over an immense space, starting out and ending up small, like one of the nudes in Bill Brandt’s photographs.
“Dancer,” “A Detached Person” and the subtly desperate cast-aluminum “On One Knee” — a figure that seems to be pleading — are all credible elaborations on Giacometti’s “Woman With Her Throat Cut” of 1932. Like the small nudes from 1930, only more extreme, they have an inner complexity and emotional delicacy that is uncommon to Calder’s figures.
Part of this may be the literal balancing acts performed by the sculptures’ combined parts. They are visibly precarious, structurally Existentialist you might say, which seems appropriate to the time in which they were made.
“Calder: The Complete Bronzes” is on view through Dec. 8 at L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan, (212) 861-0200, lmgallery.com.






































This 1944 children's book from the Guggenheim Library & Archives is filled with illustrations by Alexander Calder. Do you notice the wire-like similarity of these drawings with the artist's mobiles? http://gu.gg/G7hjI


MoMA The Museum of Modern Art
Alexander Calder was born on this day in 1898. His colorful "Sandy's Butterfly" is on view in our Sculpture Garden. On your next visit, spend some time in the garden watching it move in the breeze.
[Alexander Calder. "Sandy's Butterfly." 1964. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]
American, 1898–1976
MO.MA





In the late 1920s Calder began creating portraits of his friends in the artistic community. Often resembling caricatures, you can see the remarkable versatility of Calder's technique and his characteristic ingenuity very clearly in these portraits.
See Alexander Calder at Tate Modern: http://ow.ly/Xdk6N


Wire sculpture by Alexander Calder (1898-1976, USA). From the "Circus" series.

Red Panel’36 shows Calder’s fascination with the relationship between artworks and their surroundings. Would you call this a painting or sculpture?
'Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture' now on at Tate Modernhttp://ow.ly/VkTJb


"The first inspiration I ever had was the cosmos"
Works such as Constellations’43 show Calder's fascination with the Universe, mirroring it's intricacies with their delicate and open composition.
See them at Tate Modern in 'Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture'http://ow.ly/UItwE


November 13, 2015 4:12 pm

Alexander Calder’s ‘Performing Sculpture’ at Tate Modern

The artist’s hanging, hypnotic dramas of twisted wire and cut metal could be Britain’s ‘happiest exhibition’
'Black Widow' (c1948). Wire and painted metal
©Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil
There cannot be a happier exhibition in Britain than Tate Modern’s Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture. Its hanging, hypnotic dramas of twisted wire and cut metal soar and swoop, float and dazzle, with a joy and lightness of spirit magnificently compacted into simple forms and pristine colours.
The central gallery alone, at once energising and contemplative, contains more than a dozen flights of unpredictable, weightless movement. A cascade of white discs, “Snow Flurry”, was inspired by a blizzard. The revolving red, gold, black circles in “Gamma” evoke celestial bodies. “Bleriot” is a rudimentary plane buoyant in a breeze. Black-painted metal leaves looped from wire branches glide above us in “Vertical Foliage” and “Antennae with Red and Blue Dots”.
“Calder’s art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind,” said Marcel Duchamp, who also coined the term “mobile” to describe the suspended forms swayed by flows of air with which the American artist revolutionised sculpture between the late 1930s and the 1960s.
Direct and tough but also delicate and ethereal, Calder’s are the most immediately accessible inventions in all modernism: I have never met anybody who doesn’t like them. Their technical complexity — an exquisite system of weights and counterbalances — is masked by a straightforward expressiveness that delights and surprises. A tram is dreamily slowed to a flow of biomorphic shapes in “Streetcar”. Spheres move like planets along curved wires in “A Universe”, an abstract vision of the cosmos, which held Albert Einstein transfixed for the full 40 minutes of its cycle when it was first shown at MoMA in 1943.
Born in Pennsylvania to a family of sculptors and engineers, Calder began his career as a toy designer in Paris in the 1920s. It is an irony that the great large-scale works of his maturity spawned a booming postwar business in ubiquitous children’s mobile decorations. So to viewers today, it is hard to imagine how radical Calder seemed in the 1940s: the bold use of industrial materials, the veering between abstraction and forms referencing nature or urban life or adventures in space, the abandon with which formal control is relinquished for a work to “catch any stray wind”, as Calder put it.
“A general destiny of movement is sketched for them, and then they are left to work it out for themselves,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in 1946, co-opting Calder as an existentialist. “Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes.”
In 1948 Sartre went on to define Giacometti’s art, too, as “the search for the absolute”. The two giants of 20th century sculpture share key elements — wiry, fluid forms, a concern with movement and by implication the provisional and uncertain — but where Giacometti speaks of European postwar angst and desolation, Calder is the American voice of infinite, crazy possibilities.
In a multi-room preamble to the grand displays of the mobiles, Tate traces the steps by which the young American who in 1926 charmed avant-garde Paris with his miniature “Cirque Calder” — figures made from fabric, cork, buttons — became in the 1940s an innovator to rank with his friends Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. Early “drawings” in wire of acrobats, dancers, galloping horses, already show an interest in transparency and technical ingenuity, as well as Calder’s life-long fascination with the circus, not for “the daringness of the performers nor the tricks and gimmicks [but] the fantastic balance in motion that the performers exhibited”.
Wind-up wire pieces such as “Goldfish Bowl” (1929) — sadly, like many works here, too fragile to be activated for the fish to swim and dart — testify to the obsession with movement Calder brought with him on an initial visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930. Mondrian’s geometric abstraction was a revelation, but Calder reckoned the rectangular shapes might “constipate movement”.
They prompted him to ask “Why must art be static? How fine it would be if everything moved . . . The next step in sculpture in motion.” He began to experiment with abstract, painted motorised wood and wire constructions — “Machine Motorisee”, “Black Frame” — embodying the mechanical processes implied in cubist and futurist paintings.
Next, in 1936, came a group of works where plywood painted in Mondrian primary colours form the background to hanging curvilinear shapes cut in metal: abstract painting in kinetic, three-dimensional form.
The ones pictured here — “Red Panel”, “Form Against Yellow”, “Blue Panel” — have rarely been seen in public, and never together. They constitute a landmark in Calder’s development: although how heavy, laboured, they are in contrast to the free-floating forms of the mobiles that soon followed.
Indebted to Miró ’s biomorphic forms, these take their overall compositional structure from “the system of the universe”, Calder explained, for “the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities . . . some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.”
Several untitled early mobiles playing out arrangements of globes and suns, crescents and stars in bright/dark hues, as well as the stabile constructions “Morning Star”, “Constellation”, “Constellation with Two Pins”, have a lustre recalling what Calder remembered as his “cosmic epiphany”: a sea voyage where, off the Guatemalan coast, he saw “the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other”.
American confidence and freedom (both spatial and from shackles of tradition) now fused with Calder’s Ecole de Paris influences to create a new approach to sculpture based less on mass and volume than on light and open space, and chancy, performative elements. The painted aluminium and shiny brass “Red Gongs” installed here above a ventilation duct swings marvellously, casting ever-changing shadow pictures on white walls. A star loan, the 3.5-metre “Black Widow” from São Paulo’s Instituto de Arquitetos, leaving Brazil for the first time, has an upper body of deep black wings — it seems to me to resemble a flamboyant bird in flight rather than a spider — with circular perforations that channel light, and a swinging playful tail whose gentle motion eases its daunting impact.
“To most people who look at a mobile, it’s no more than a series of flat objects that move,” Calder commented. “To a few, though, it may be poetry.” Lyricism courses through this lovely show, as well as optimism, wit and visual seduction rooted in formal perfection: a modernist pioneer, light and fresh for our age of spectacle and entertainment.
‘Alexander Calder, Performing Sculpture’, Tate Modern, London, to April 3,tate.org.uk



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