Calder, Alexander (kôl`dər), 1898–1976, American sculptor, b. Philadelphia; son of a prominent sculptor, Alexander Stirling Calder. Among the most innovative modern sculptors, Calder was trained as a mechanical engineer. In 1930 he went to Paris and was influenced by the art of Mondrian and Miró. In 1932 he exhibited his first brightly colored constellations, called mobiles mobile (mō`bēl), a type of moving sculptural artwork developed by Alexander Calder in 1932 and named by Marcel Duchamp .
..... Click the link for more information. , consisting of painted cut-out shapes connected by wires and set in motion by wind currents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, has several examples. These buoyant inventions and his witty wire portraits, his colorful and complex miniature zoo (1925; Whitney Mus., New York City), and his immobile sculptures known as stabiles stabile (stā`bēl), an abstract construction that is completely stationary.
..... Click the link for more information. , have brought Calder world renown. Many of his later works are huge, heavy, and delicately balanced mobiles produced for public buildings throughout the world. Calder is also noted for his book illustrations and stage sets. He had studios in Roxbury, Conn., and Paris.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1966) and Mobiles and Stabiles (1968); biography by J. M. Marter (1991); J. Lipman, ed., Calder's Circus (1972); studies by J. J. Sweeney (1951), M. Gibson (1988), D. Marchesseau (1989), G.-G. Lemaire (1998), M. Prather et al. (1998), and S. C. Rower (1998).

Calder, Alexander (Stirling)

Calder, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1966.

(born July 22, 1898, Lawnton, Pa., U.S.—died Nov. 11, 1976, New York, N.Y.) U.S. sculptor. He was the son and grandson of sculptors, and his mother was a painter. He studied mechanical engineering, and in 1923 attended the Art Students League, where he was influenced by artists of the Ash Can school. In 1924 he contributed illustrations to the National Police Gazette. In 1926 he moved to Paris and began making toylike animals and circus figures of wood and wire; from these he developed his famous miniature circus. In the 1930s he became well known in Paris and the U.S. for his wire sculptures, as well as for portraits, continuous-line drawings, and abstract, motor-driven constructions. He is best known as the inventor of the mobile, a forerunner of kinetic sculpture. He also constructed nonmovable sculptural works known as stabiles. Although Calder's early mobiles and stabiles were relatively small, he increasingly moved toward monumentality in his later works. His art was recognized with many large-scale exhibitions.

Calder, Alexander (“Sandy”) (1898–1976) sculptor, painter; born in Lawnton, Pa. (son of Alexander Stirling Calder). He studied at Stevens Institute of Technology (1915–19), the Art Students League, New York City (1923–26), and in Paris where he began his famous circus menagerie, Le Cirque Calder (1926–61), and the first of his wire sculptures, Josephine Baker (1926). By 1927 he was based in New York City, and Roxbury, Conn. (1933), and from 1953 he maintained a home in France. He was an abstract painter, but became most famous for his moving sculptures, named "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp, as seen in Big Red (1959). His stationary sculptures, named "stabiles" by Jean Arp, are often large public works, as in El Sol Rojo (1968).