ART-PRESENTATION: Alexander Calder-Modern from the Start

Alexander Calder is widely regarded as the artist who made sculpture move, forging a practice in dialogue with the world in motion and the motion in things. His radical and pioneering methods of making art – understood both technically and conceptually – changed the course of modern art. Born into a family of celebrated, though more classically trained artists, Calder developed a new method of sculpting: by bending and twisting wire, he essentially “drew” three-dimensional figures in space.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive

The exhibition “Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start”  includes approximately 70 artworks paired with film, historical photographs, and other archival materials. The exhibition takes as a point of departure the idea that Alexander Calder assumed the unofficial role of the Museum’s “house artist” during its formative years. His work was first exhibited at MoMA in 1930, months after the institution opened its doors, and he was among only a handful of artists selected by the Museum’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., for inclusion in his two landmark 1936 exhibitions. To inaugurate the then-new Goodwin and Stone Building in 1939, Calder was commissioned to make a hanging mobile for its interior “Bauhaus Staircase”; the resulting “Lobster Trap” and “Fish Tail” still hangs there today. Calder also worked closely with curator James Johnson Sweeney, in collaboration with artists Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Matter, on the checklist, catalogue, and installation of his major 1943 midcareer retrospective at MoMA, which introduced the artist, by then already known in Europe, to a broad American audience, through a survey of work made since his foundational years in the late 1920s living and working in Paris. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Calder’s sculptures were a mainstay of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where they have continued to reappear in the intervening decades. Ten years before his death, in 1966, Calder made an impressive gift of 19 artworks to MoMA in order to round out the institution’s holdings. Following a loose chronology, the exhibition presents examples from the full scope of Calder’s work, from the earliest wire sculptures of the 1920s through the largescale mono- and polychrome stabiles and standing mobiles of his later years. Part of the exhibition will focus on the artist’s work up until his midcareer retrospective at MoMA in 1943, including the wire sculpture “Josephine Baker (III)” (c. 1927); “A Universe” (1934), painted sculptural reliefs, works on paper, and rarely seen motorized works, all from the 1930s; a group of “Constellation” sculptures from the 1940s; and a selection of jewelry made by Calder for his family and friends.

Photo: Installation view of: Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021-2022, © 2021 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Denis Doorly

Info: Curators: Cara Manes, Zuna Maza and Makayla Bailey, MoMA, 11 West 53rd St, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/3/2021-15/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:00-17:30, Sat 10:30-19:00, https://www.moma.org