The Merry Modernist

By ROBERT HUGHES

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) may not have been the most profound sculptor of the 20th century, but he was certainly the most enjoyable of modernists--the man who delighted a public several generations long by making sculpture move. This year marks the centenary of his birth. Accordingly, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has put on a Calder retrospective. Admirably curated by Marla Prather, the show (199 sculptures plus other works) will move to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September.

The Philadelphia-born Calder was a fluent and effusively industrious artist who made thousands of works, and Prather has done a fine job of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, of which, truth to tell, there is a great deal. Calder never seems to have had the smallest inhibition about his chosen career. Both his parents were artists, and he made his own toys, "always a junkman of bits of wire and all the prettiest stuff in the garbage can." Growing up, he studied mechanical engineering, took painting classes at the Art Students League in New York City, and in 1926 moved to Paris, which, he laconically explained, "seemed the place to go, on all accounts of practically everyone who had been there."

In Paris he made more toys and, before long, a whole circus: lions and their tamers, an elephant, acrobats, trapeze artists, clowns, all made of wire and wood and cloth and cork, with himself as their enormous ringmaster manipulating them to music. To judge from the surviving film made of the circus in action, it was quite a show, and it appealed to the latent kid in every avant-gardist. It was le cirque Calder that got the young American full entry to the Parisian art world. This charming piece of performance art was one of the small sights of Paris between 1926 and 1930; it was seen and enjoyed by a whole roster of artists, designers and architects--Joan Miro and Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier and Isamu Noguchi and, most important for the eventual direction of Calder's own work, Piet Mondrian.

In 1927, Calder began making sculptures out of wire alone--just a line springing in air, curving back on itself, joining with others in a frazzle of twists, hanging from a string and responsive to the lightest touch of a finger or breath of air. Most of them were portraits--some of fellow artists (Miro, the composer Edgard Varese), others of show-biz celebrities like Josephine Baker or the great honky-tonk comedian Jimmy Durante, whose famed nose, translated into wire profile, becomes a fearsome proboscis. They were witty, vital (the faint quivering of the wire from room vibration gave them an odd subliminal life) and completely without pretension. They were also, clearly, sculpture and not toys. Yet they would hardly be more than footnotes in the modernist story but for what happened later.

Calder's jump into originality as a sculptor is one of those flash-bang conversion tales in which the legends of early modern art abound. It seems that in 1930 he went to visit Mondrian, the great Dutch abstractionist, in his Paris studio. He already admired Mondrian's work, but he had never seen its environment before--that fanatically judged, ordered workplace of white and primary colors where even the Victrola was painted red. Rectangles of painted cardboard were pinned around the walls, and Calder was seized with the desire to see them move. They should oscillate at different speeds, he told Mondrian, who replied, "No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast."

But from then on the idea of literal movement in art kept growing on Calder. He experimented from time to time with sculpture whose abstract elements were driven by motors, acting on them through more-or-less hidden bands and pulleys. These were the works that Marcel Duchamp, when he saw them in 1931, christened "mobiles"--the word by which Calder is known. But these motorized pieces were too predictable. Calder's genius was for the unprogrammed--natural, as distinct from mechanical and repetitious motion. What he did best was present metaphors of natural movement in the simplest technical terms. He worked intuitively, balancing things on his finger, manually and without calculation, and above all without power tools.

He came up with the idea of sculpture as something for the lightest air currents to change: arrays of delicately balanced wire arms with colored leaves and fins and fans on the end, orbiting eccentrically and never coming back to exactly the same position. They respond to your presence. They are supremely friendly sculpture, even in the distance of abstraction. Their severity of line and form is always tempered by a certain rhythmic sweetness, as in one of the masterpieces of Calder's middle years, The Spider, 1940. Later, as he got famous and "monumental" commissions were pressed on him, he would defeat this quality of his own work by building huge sluggish mobiles--one of which, 76 ft. wide, hangs permanently over the atrium of the National Gallery--that would need a hurricane to budge them and are parodies of his original, lyrical insight. He was always best on the small-to-medium scale. And compared with his best mobiles, his "stabiles"--big-profile metal sculptures that didn't move and were a fixture of half the corporate plazas in America from the '60s until his death--are mostly boring; perhaps they were more interesting to make than to look at.

Bringing metaphors of nature back into abstraction (or rather, perhaps, using abstraction to distill natural processes) lay at the core of his finest work. This he shared with Miro, whose sense of nature never deserted him and who scarcely ever painted a pure abstraction. Miro's moons and planets and bean and caca shapes, his fine whiskery black lines, find their sculptural brethren in Calder's spheres and stalks of wire, his trembling disks.

And they have a common root in cosmic imagery. Calder never forgot a sight he had at dawn from the deck of a freighter going through the Panama Canal in 1921--the sun rising in the east, the still silver moon setting in the west. Cosmic clockwork displaying itself. No wonder many of his sculptures of the '30s resemble planetary models, abstract orreries. Another idea he seems to have got from Miro was that of the work halfway between painting and sculpture, hung on the wall, declaring itself to be pictorial but with three-dimensional elements. Calder's version of this was Cadre Rouge (Red Frame), 1932, whose ochre, blue and black disks, together with a small white ball, float out of their frame as though escaping from the bonds of picturehood.

He had a sense of the grotesque too, but he used it with more restraint than Miro and other surrealists--an exception being one of his finest sculptures, Apple Monster, 1938. This fierce apparition was made from a broken apple branch that Calder turned upside down and painted, its only moving element being its wooden genitals, which rise and fall languidly on the end of a long, weak spring.

One of Calder's most brilliantly surreal works, Wooden Bottle with Hairs, 1943, almost out-Miros Miro--a shmoo-like form that might be a bottle or a body, with black tadpole-like "hairs" of wood sprouting from it on wires; these wiggle frantically, as though in absurd erotic excitation, if you blow on them, which the National Gallery forbids you to do. One of the limitations of this show is that the viewer can't do anything to make the mobiles move, and there's no breeze in the galleries, so that things look more inert than they should. What would Calder have felt about that? Disappointed, no doubt. But probably he would have written it off to the fate of fragile, intimate objects in the face of a mass audience.