Sculpture: Toys for All Ages

The sculpture seems like the pastime of a thousand elves. Perhaps the tiny fellows actually exist in the mischievous mind of Alexander Calder, who, at 66, has all the mien of a beardless Santa Claus, right down to his habitual red flannel shirt. He has given so much to the world for so long that he is the U.S.’s best-known artist abroad. His fancies in metal strike many people as toys, but also remind them that toys are made to stimulate the imagination.

Calder began rebuilding toys for himself when he was eight. He would embellish them with a snippet of wire here and there, sometimes to give them more motion. From then on, a pair of pliers became his tool to remake the world.

His toys are for all ages, and can be as ominous in their ease as fellow New Englander Robert Frost’s poetry. Last week his bobbing mobile The Ghost and his sprawling stabile Guillotine for Eight met like stalactite and stalagmite in the great rotunda of Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum (see opposite page). Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture never had better tenants: a 361-piece retrospective that could equally well establish Calder as a wizard of the wind, a Wright Brothers’ Rodin, or the greatest tinker of all time.

Ringmaster. Calder is a third-generation sculptor; his grandfather is still remembered in Philadelphia for his statue of William Penn atop the city hall. But Calder early abandoned the thousand-year tradition that insisted upon sculpture as a form-in-the-round whose contours were its boundaries. He embraced space with his mobiles, sometimes in a bear hug, sometimes in a fencer’s riposte. He became known as the man who made sculpture move. Actually, the Russian constructivists and Dadaist Marcel Duchamp did it years before him, but no one has ever made cubic feet dance and gambol as has Calder. His work is the apotheosis of open form: space is his circus, all three rings, all three dimensions.

The circus itself, in its seamy, gaudy splendor, was Calder’s first fascination. He tried many trades, from lumberjack to able seaman; he was graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919 as a mechanical engineer. Drawing came naturally, and five years out of college he signed on as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette. To his delight, one day he was assigned to sketch the circus. Barnum & Bailey was so pleased that it gave him a free entrance pass. He followed the American artists’ trail to Paris, where he made his own toy circus in which he sat performing like some child Gargantua for such luminaries as Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, and Jean Cocteau.

Mondrian in Motion. Calder made his restless, looping pencil line draw in wire, caricaturing his audience, sometimes with barbs. The toast of Paris, Josephine Baker, was his first metal portrait in 1926; her belly button turned into a shimmying, shaking brass spiral. All that was delightful, a gadgeteer’s daydream, until one day Calder visited Mondrian’s studio.

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.