Sculpture: Toys for All Ages

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The 1930 visit, Calder recalls, was "the necessary shock." The de Stijlist's studio, with its neat plane geometry of primary colors (which Calder henceforth stuck to) stilled the errant Yankee. "But how fine it would be," Calder thought, "if everything moved." He gave Mondrian wings. He balanced metal cutouts on wire arms, and in 1932, Duchamp dubbed them "mobiles." Almost as much as Mondrian's forms, the stiff nature of metal forced Calder toward abstraction.

Patchwork Scrapper. So popular were Calder's mobiles that manufacturers have since imitated them in mass production. Calder himself has clung to few mechanical tools, prefers rivets instead of welding, paints his mobiles with brushes instead of spraying them. Sprung from the modern esthetic that sees wisdom in childhood, his work is a comment on, rather than patent approval of, the Machine Age. For the fun of it, Calder makes his own family kitchenware—ladles, forks, spoons—using leftover scrap metal; he snips out toys for his grandchildren and jewelry for his wife. He is, in effect, a sophisticated primitive who sees the root of art in craft and invention.

In his studios in Roxbury, Conn., and Saché, France, Calder builds up his balanced mobiles by trial and tumble. Says he: "It's like making a patchwork quilt. You can't predict." A mobile can be tiny as a hummingbird; others are so outsize that airports find them favorite lobby decor. One stabile, his Teodelapio in Spoleto, Italy, is the largest metal sculpture in modern times; it is 59 ft. high, weighs 30 tons, and trucks can pass underneath it. "If it's impeccable," he says, "it can be made into any scale."

Glittering Bird. The reason for Calder's unlimited scale is that he is a space prober. His mobiles stir through space like tree branches in a breeze. His stabiles (unmoving sculpture) are saurian girders that seem to slunk through the landscape, yet loom with a delicacy all their own. Yet their universality is shot through with humility. Visitors to the Guggenheim wandered beneath huge stabiles, paused to observe his The Only Only Bird (see opposite); it is a pop-like dodo made of beer and coffee cans whose title is drawn from a slogan on a can rather than being a claim to uniqueness. In its common materials, the tin bird outglitters a peacock.

Motion makes Calder's imagery. Line meanders, mobiles wobble, stabiles broad-jump. His art is open and practical, restless and even coarse. Blunt as his shears permit, it also is in love with innocence and in charge of material reality. It is "100% American," as Leger once stated, yet as international an expression as any man who ever made happiness with his hands.