Sculptors' Dynasty

When Mobilist Alexander Calder was only a tot 60 years ago, he would solemnly announce to those he had just met: "I am the third Alexander Calder living and the ninth dead."

To be the third living Alexander was something of a burden, for both his father and grandfather were sculptors famous in their day, and the implication was that he would have to carry on. He did. Last week, in a sentimental show, the Delaware Art Center in Wilmington put on a display of works by all three men. Alexander IX's mobiles were as engaging as ever, and the ancestral works were not without a certain stalwart charm of their own.

An Earnest Hero. Grandfather Alexander Milne Calder was born in Scotland in 1846, worked for a while as a mason in Aberdeen before taking off for the U.S. at the age of 22. Calder vaguely remembers him as "a remote, awe-inspiring (because he worked on such huge things) figure for me." Indeed, Grandfather's works ran to the heroic. Among his most famous works, a model of which is in the show: an erect, earnest-looking young William Penn who stands to this day, every bronze ruffle and curl in p!ace, on top of Philadelphia's city hall.

Between them, Grandfather Calder and his son Alexander Stirling decorated a good deal of Philadelphia. "The public use of sculpture is its highest field and goal," said Stirling Calder, and he turned out everything from a battle-dressed Leif Ericson, which the U.S. gave to Iceland, to George Washington on the arch in Manhattan's Washington Square. But the warm talent of the man is best seen in a statue of a chubby little boy that he called Man Cub. The stark-naked cub: the future mobilist.

A Moving Mondrian. Having been brought up in the shadow of two traditional sculptors, the third Calder was a bit bored with the idea of becoming one himself. He started out to be an engineer. In the 1920s he began making statues (Josephine Baker, Helen Wills) in wire, produced a series of wire goldfish bowls in which the fish swam rhythmically back and forth at the turn of a crank. Out of his contact with Mondrian, he wanted to do "a Mondrian that moves." Thus the mobile.

Father Calder never quite understood what his son was up to, but he raised no objection. He died in 1945, just two years after Calder had his first big one-man show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. The fame of the third Alexander Calder, the father of two daughters, was now the greatest of all, but his own mother, who died last year, could never quite believe it. "You should have seen his father." she once told a critic. "He was a real sculptor."

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