Alexander Calder

Last year the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag received the prestigious Turing Art Grant for its exhibition concept for Alexander Calder. The Great Discovery. The award has made it possible to go ahead with this huge project and next spring the Gemeentemuseum will present this first major Dutch Calder retrospective to be held since 1969. This relative neglect of Calder is surprising since he used to be regarded in the Netherlands as the most important American artist of the post-war period. In the early part of his career, Calder used ordinary steel wire to conjure up elegant and recognisable human or animal figures and portraits. Then, in 1930, he visited Mondrian’s studio in Paris. The two men shared a passion for rhythm and jazz and the visit was to be a turning point in his career. Calder suddenly saw how art could free itself from representation to float and dance in space. That realisation and the way it radically changed his work is the key focus of this exhibition.

Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) grew up in a family full of creative energy: his father was a sculptor and his mother painted. As a child, he made toys, model animals and jewellery from whatever materials came to hand. Even so, he trained initially as an engineer and did not attend art school until 1923. His technical education would enable him to translate his passion for movement into art; everything he made was kinetic. This was a major innovation: never again would sculpture be seen as necessarily a matter of chisels and blocks of wood or stone.

Between 1926 and 1933 Calder lived in Paris, then the heart of the modern art movement. At this stage, he was producing light, amusing wire sculptures that occupied virtually no space and he was famous for the regular performances he gave with a complete miniature circus he had concocted from everyday materials like wire, wood, leather, cork and scraps of cloth. All the circus figures could be made to move: acrobats swayed across the tightrope, dogs jumped through hoops and the elephant stood up on its back legs.

The central feature of the forthcoming exhibition is a complete reconstruction of Mondrian’s studio in the Rue du Départ. This exhibit marks Calder’s transition from figurative to abstract art: it was his visit to this studio in 1930 that triggered a radical change in his artistic practice. Abruptly abandoning his playful, witty figurative sculptures, he became a serious abstract artist. He began to add red, black or white discs to his wire and to produce mobiles of increasing size, in which he constantly sought to combine equilibrium and movement. The playful, optimistic new art form was described at the time as ‘a kind of ballet made of coloured metal’ radiating a highly positive energy.

The exhibition includes a film that was shown in the Netherlands in the early 1930s. Made by Hans Cürlis in 1929, it shows Alexander Calder creating two wire circus figures with no more than a pair of pliers and his own bare hands. Even then, Calder was regarded as an innovative sculptor because of his novel choice of methods and materials.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated Dutch-language catalogue (Ludion, € 24.95) containing essays by Wietse Coppes, Doede Hardeman, Hans Janssen and Caroline Roodenburg. In addition, Sieb Posthuma is writing and illustrating a related Dutch-language children’s picture book, De draad van Alexander (Leopold, € 13.95). The original illustrations for this will be on show concurrently in the children’s gallery.

Alexander Calder