Designer of the Month: Alexander Calder

Week 4: "stabiles" and monumental sculpture

Alexander Calder, Mercury Fountain, 1937. Painted iron, aluminum, mercury. Courtesy of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona.

As I mentioned last week, the 1930s was an especially productive time for Alexander Calder. Not only did he have a new studio to work in, but he was experimenting and gaining fame with his mobiles and collaborating on exciting projects as well. This was also a decade when Calder would gain his first public commission, Mercury Fountain, in 1937 for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris.[1] That Calder, who certainly wasn't from Spain, was able to obtain this commission at all was the result of his friendship with the artist Joan Miró, to whom Calder dedicated the foundation.[2] This fountain would prove to be the first of Calder's "stabiles," large, monumental sculptures, many of which were created for public spaces.[3]

Left: Alexander Calder, Big Bird [maquette], 1936. Sheet metal, wire, paint. Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and the Calder Foundation, New York. Right: Alexander Calder, Big Bird, 1937. Sheet metal, bolts, paint. Courtesy of the Calder Foundation, New York.

The term "stabile" was first suggested to Calder in 1932 by the artist Jean Arp.[4] Following Duchamp's naming of Calder's mobiles, Arp recalled a previous show of Calder's non-moving abstract works and asked, "Well, what were those things you did last year - stabiles?"[5] The name stuck. Calder's earliest attempts at large scale sculptures, works that implied movement, were much smaller and more delicate than the works that would come later, but that was because many of them served as models for much more ambitious projects.[6] An example of this are the two versions of Big Bird, above. These larger versions of smaller, maquette stabiles were not always perfect reproductions, but were instead meant to evoke a sense of the earlier work.[7]

Alexander Calder and La Spirale, 1958. Sheet metal, bolts, paint. UNESCO, Paris. Courtesy of the Calder Foundation, New York.

The 1940s and 50s proved to be just as productive, and even more successful, periods for Calder, especially in terms of monumental public commissions. In 1939, Calder was offered his first retrospective show, at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery (now art museum) in Springfield, MA, followed by an even more prestigious retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.[8] During World War II, Calder turned increasingly to wood as a sculptural medium because of steel shortages, in addition to creating many smaller works, but was soon back to monumental sculptures, which continued to be a focus for Calder through the end of his life.[9] These commissions included not only large-scale stable and mobile constructions, but combinations of both forms as well. One of Calder's personal favorite works and largest standing mobiles, La Spirale - standing 30-feet tall and consisting of a large stable base surmounted by a wind-driven series of cantilevered mobile elements - was built in 1958 for the UNESCO headquarters building in Paris.[10] Other important firsts for Calder included Teodelapio in Spoleto, Italy, in 1962, which was his first monumental stabile for an urban setting, and La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1976, which was the first sculpture to be funded by the public art program of the National Endowment for the Arts.[11] These commissions soon led to others throughout the world, and today, Calder's monumental works can be seen in public places throughout the world, including New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Albany, Houston, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, and Paris, to name just a few.[12]

Alexander Calder, La Grande Vitesse, 1969. Sheet metal, bolts, paint. The City of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Courtesy of the Calder Foundation, New York.

[1] Howard Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder, (New York: Harry N. Abram, Inc., 2003), 79.


[3] Ibid., 82.

[4] The Calder Foundation online, "Biography," http://calder.org/life/page/biography.html, (accessed September 22, 2010).

[5] Howard Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder, (New York: Harry N. Abram, Inc., 2003), 83.

[6] The Calder Foundation online, "Biography," http://calder.org/life/page/biography.html, (accessed September 22, 2010).

[7] Howard Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder, (New York: Harry N. Abram, Inc., 2003), 91.

[8] The Calder Foundation online, "Biography," http://calder.org/life/page/biography.html, (accessed September 22, 2010).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Howard Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder, (New York: Harry N. Abram, Inc., 2003), 92.

[11] Ibid., 97-100.

[12] Ibid., 101-2.[2] Ibid., 80-1.