Art: DESIGN IN MOTION

• Share

HIS tousled white hair quivering rhythmically, his ruddy, jovial face radiating glee, Alexander Calder was beating a steady tempo on the African tom-tom. Swirling around him, clanging a Mexican calabash rattle, clattering a huge Swiss cowbell, tinkling a melody on dangling wires, were his friends -writers, painters, musicians. A gentle breeze delicately spun the forest of mobiles hanging from the ceiling of the Connecticut farmhouse. Suddenly "Sandy" Calder stood up, walked outside past sentrylike steel stabiles, shuffled to a nearby creek. Staring at the soft, easy ripples, Calder exclaimed: "Look at those tiny waves, circling, soothing, yet so much alive! People ask me the meaning of a mobile. My answer is 'what is the meaning of this water, of a sunset?' "

Mr. Mobile. At 59, Alexander Calder, America's top-ranking creator of a new art form, has given mobiles a meaning round the world, from toyland to architecture. Born in a world of traditional art,* Sandy turned first to engineering, drifted from job to job, began to find his medium in 1926 with wire sculptures. He created out of wire a whole circus, complete with leaping trapeze artists, jumping kangaroos and horse-hurdling bareback riders. Their mobility, controlled by springs and a master crank, charmed a Paris Left Bank audience that included Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Joan Miro. The mobile was being born.

In 1930 Calder took a good look at the paintings of another friend, Piet Mondrian, and concluded: "Your rectangles should vibrate and oscillate." Then he rushed to his cluttered studio and went to work. When Painter Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp saw the results -brightly colored compositions of sheet metal, wire, steel rods and wood, moving by use of motors, pulleys or wind -he dubbed them "mobiles." Sculptor Jean Arp reacted by calling the nonmoving sculptures "stabiles." Thus were created two of the best-known terms of modern sculpture.

Large & Small. Today Calder mobiles grace living rooms from Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro, hang in museums from Massachusetts to Moscow, enliven public and business buildings from Beirut to New York's International Airport (see color page). A water-ballet fountain performs at Detroit's General Motors Technical Center; a 21-ft. motorized, mobile-topped stabile called The Whirling Ear guards the outside pool of the U.S. Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair (Calder's commission: $10,000). Last week Mr. Mobile left his Roxbury studio and flew to Spoleto, Italy, to supervise the installation of his sculptures, used in a ballet set in Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds. Soon to be installed at the new Paris headquarters of UNESCO is the most ambitious of all Sculptor Calder's works -a 30-ft.-high mobile, The Clockwise Spiral.

Now that he is doing huge pieces for important buildings, Sandy Calder suggests that he has changed direction. "After the Idlewild mobile," he said last week, "I couldn't conceive of small things." Then he reached for a strand of copper wire, quickly twisted it into a graceful, elegant ring for a pretty admirer standing near by.