When Alexander Calder landed in Paris, in 1926, Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists were holding court in cafés across the capital, cigars and champagne in hand. Piet Mondrian was painting rectilinear grids filled with meticulous color, and Picasso was swinging between neoclassicism, a loosened-up Cubism, and sheer strangeness. The city, as Ernest Hemingway would later describe it, was “a moveable feast.”
Calder would take five years to mark out his own terrain, and it involved thermodynamics. In 1930, while visiting Mondrian’s studio at 26 Rue de Départ, he saw light coming into the room from the left and the right, absorbed by colored rectangles the painter had tacked to the wall. “I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate,” Calder recounted in his 1969 autobiography. Mondrian said, “No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.”
That encounter—along with a fiery Guatemalan sunset—inspired Calder to create sculptures that moved. Marcel Duchamp, when shown those sculptures, suggested that Calder call them “mobiles,” a French word combining “motives” and “motion.”
In February 1932, Calder presented 15 mobiles with motors and 15 without motors at Galerie Vignon. It was a momentous opening; as the sculptor later remarked, every modern artist in town was there. And it marked the beginning of an equally momentous decade. Calder would leave motors behind and make sculptures out of light metals in biomorphic forms.
In the book Calder: Sculpting Time, published in tandem with a show at the MASI Lugano, those fertile years are the focus but surveyed through the prism of time. By introducing motion into a work of art, Calder introduced another dimension of expression, a different form of duration, a dialogue between matter and eternity.
“It is when they are in repose that the quintessence of Calder is most truly sensed,” wrote the art historian Peter Bellew. “In those instants when movement is threatened rather than present—his full magic is revealed.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail
