Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor

Calder in his studio

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was one of the most influential and innovative sculptors of the twentieth century. Before his time, the practice of sculpture contended with gravity and massive materials, but over the course of five decades, this American artist forged an unprecedented type of approach to art in dialogue with the world in motion and the motion in things.

Said Fernand Léger in 1931,

"Looking at these new works – transparent, objective, exact – I think of Satie, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Arp – these unchallenged masters of unexpressed and silent beauty. Calder is in the same family."

Calder, trained as an engineer, came of age during a time of unprecedented technological and scientific growth. His mobiles have been said to reflect our understanding of the cosmos. Wrote Rachel Campbell-Johnson in The Sunday Times,

" Alexander Calder is the artist who entranced Albert Einstein. Story has it that when his sculpture A Universe – a mechanized construction that sets two red and white spheres moving around each other like planets, following their curved wire paths at different speeds – was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934, the great physicist stood before it transfixed for the full 40 minutes that it took to complete its cycle."

One hundred and fifty works and archival documents are included in the MMFA show. Walking into one of the rooms (shown below) the visitor is struck by the sheer joy and whimsy expressed by the "mobiles" and "stabiles" on display.

Also included in the show are a few of Calder's drawings and paintings, his maquettes, and sculptures that date back to his childhood. Much documentation is posted on the walls, and an audioguide is available.

Acrobats, 1927 (with shadow)

Visitors to the current Alexander Calder exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts should be alert to the shadows cast by the wire sculptures, the mobiles and stabiles: effective lighting makes the most of the works on display.

Trois disques

Calder has a particular place in the hearts of Montrealers. He was a French-speaking francophile of Scottish ancestry, enamoured of the circus. His sculpture Trois disques (better known to Montrealers as Man) was an iconic feature of our Expo 67. It was his largest work to date: 20 meters tall, requiring more than 36,000 kilograms of stainless steel sheets and over 1000 kilograms of bolts. The current exhibition shows both the 75.6 centimetre maquette, and the first enlargement to 385 centimetres (on display on Sherbrooke Street, in front of the museum).


The show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts continues until February 24, 2019.