Mobiles and stabiles of Alexander Calder

In 1931 Calder married Louisa James, a grandniece of author Henry James; the couple eventually had two children, Sandra and Mary. By mid-1933 Calder had returned to New York City. He set up studios both in the city and in an old icehouse on a Roxbury, Connecticut, farm that became his main residence for the rest of his life. With seemingly inexhaustible energy, Calder expanded the repertoire of forms in his mobiles from spheres to discs to organic shapes adapted from plants and animals. The World War II years saw shortages of sheet metal, and Calder turned toward bits of wood, shards of glass and ceramics, tin cans, and other refuse he found on his Roxbury property, creating a series dubbed Constellations and some of his most-beloved works, including Finny Fish, 1948.

Always tinkering, with his simple hand tools—including pliers for bending wire and shears for cutting sheet metal—in addition to numerous hanging mobiles, he created works that cantilevered off bases that allowed the mobile element to rotate 360°, including Laocoön (1947), and works that balanced on a single point, such as Pomegranate (1949). He also produced large-scale bolted stabiles (the name given by artist Jean Arp to his stationary works), most of which exist as public art, including La Grande Vitesse (1969) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Flamingo (1973) in Chicago.

Critical reception and legacy

In the 1950s and ’60s, Calder continued to be the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective staged in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1964, and his position as a well-known, even greatly beloved, artist was solidified. In large part that was because his colorful works—he generally used red, blue, and yellow, along with black and white—are directly experiential, requiring no particular artistic expertise to appreciate. His mobiles are commonly described as evoking a childlike joy in the viewer. As the Modern art era waned and the contemporary art era took form in the 1970s, however, his reputation within the art world suffered as critics and tastemakers deemed his work too playful or popular to be taken seriously. His painting of an airliner in 1973 (for Braniff Airways) and a race car in 1975 (for BMW) added to the critical distaste, activities that, ironically, in the 21st century are no longer perceived as being detrimental to a serious art career. Calder died in 1976 at age 78, weeks after the opening of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the 21st century the Calder Foundation documented his output at more than 22,000 works.

For many years after his death, Calder’s popularity obscured his genius as one of the early Modern era’s truly innovative artists, who not only pioneered kinetic art but invented works that are precursors to forms highly valued in the 21st century such as sound and multimedia art and installation, a medium for which the viewer’s aesthetic experience is dependent on the situation in which the art is displayed. The reevaluations by 21st-century artists and art historians place his achievements in the highest echelons of art. His popularity continues even as the 1938 estimation of his early supporter, art critic and later museum director James Johnson Sweeney, has proved accurate: “Calder is an original artist whose contribution is so unique that it may possibly only be appraised of its true value by the future.”