Art: Connecticut Yankee

Alexander Calder is a sculptor who puzzles people more than he pleases them, and he pleases a lot of them a lot. The point was proved anew last week by a big show of Calder “mobiles” and “stabiles” at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mobiles were painted tin and wire contraptions that jiggled and joggled. Some reared nervously from the floor; others hung jittering from the ceiling. One, near the door, featured a padded drumstick that bonged a brass gong in the occasional breeze. Another, The Blizzard of dangled a cloud of white discs from what looked like black coat hangers.

The stabiles, so called because they stand still, were sprawling things made of wire, wood and interlocking cast-iron sheets. One of them looked like a snow plow, bore the proud title Big Ear.

Trivial but Difficult. Some M.I.T. students disapproved of the show. “I think everything should be useful or instructive,” a physics major said impatiently. “This is neither. In mathematical terms, the stuff is trivial. Given certain conditions, theta as a function of T is completely determined. It can all be boiled down to elliptical integrals.”

A cosmic-ray researcher disagreed: “The mathematics is as complex as anything you’d want to find,” he said, pointing to the big Blizzard. “It would be extremely difficult to determine where any part is going to be ten seconds or ten minutes from now. It could be worked out, but I shouldn’t want to try.”

Pleased but Befuddled. One of the most frequent visitors to the exhibition was a social science professor who maintains that Calder “represents our culture —the lack of capacity of the universe to be modified by human beings.” A little boy, crawling round & round beneath a spinning mobile entitled Little Blue Under Red, had a simpler explanation for his enthusiasm:”I like it because it goes round!”

The last explanation is about the only one that “Sandy” Calder himself can accept wholeheartedly. “All I know,” he says, “is that they give pleasure to me.” Last week, in his 150-year-old Roxbury, Conn, farmhouse, Calder was recovering from an auto accident (he had slammed his car into an immobile traffic island).

A burly 52, he radiates good-natured befuddlement, looks rather like a beardless Santa Claus, with a full, ruddy face, frosty eyebrows, tousled white hair and a red flannel shirt to keep out the drafts that whip through his old house and set its mobiles whirling.

There is nothing “modern” about his house, at least in the stiff, sterile, museum sense. It look’s like the home of a traveling tinker, cluttered with gadgets, junk and such craft objects as an old cradle scythe, an Algerian blanket, a tom-tom, a coffee table made from a square sheet of aluminum, calabash rattles and rattles made of beer cans filled with pebbles. Somehow, Calder’s wife Louisa keeps the place livable, and their two children play happily among the mobiles.

Balanced but Unpredictable. Calder never works his mobiles out mathematically in advance. He calculates the delicate balances of each part by the cut-and-try method. “It’s like making a patchwork quilt,” he says. “You can’t predict.”

He is baffled both by admirers who think him a social commentator and by those who rave about his humor. “My strongest feeling about anything is disparity—in materials or shapes or sizes. I may think a thing is amusing but I’m likely to be absolutely serious about it.” With a self-conscious giggle he is apt to add, “I don’t giggle.”

The first mobiles Calder made were wood and wire animals that moved in lifelike fashion when pulled about on strings. He designed them for a toy firm when he was down & out in Paris a quarter of a century ago. Next came a circus, composed of wire figurines that rode bareback, swung from trapezes and burst through hoops when Calder, crouched intently on the floor, released the proper springs. He entertained his friends with it, found it furiously lampooned as “Piggy Logan’s Circus” in Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again.

Stripped but Appreciated. Considering that Calder’s Paris friends included the abstractionists Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian, it is not surprising that he soon stripped his circus of recognizable features, while constantly complicating and improving its visual qualities. In the end, he created one of the most amusing sideshows of modern art, lodged samples of it in half a dozen leading museums.

Calder’s first show in Paris struck the French as typically American, reflecting the nation’s vast distances and hurry-up psychology. His first U.S. show, in 1932, impressed Manhattan Critic Henry Mc-Bride as being the opposite: “It needed the dark, dull afternoons of a Paris winter for its inception, and needed them also … for its appreciation.” Today, Calder is sufficiently appreciated to make a good living from his art. His sculptures may have a machine-age look, but they are done by handcraft methods, the products of a Connecticut Yankee ingenuity and an untrammeled mind.