The Merry Modernist

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.