Refiner’s Fire: Alexander Calder: Casting Seeds into the Wind

When Alexander Calder died last November at the age of seventy-eight, he had reached the peak of his career: he was still productive as an artist, a major American museum was holding a large exhibition of his work, and he was one of the most respected and loved of American sculptors. New York’s Whitney Museum, where fifty years of his work was being shown, flew its flag at half mast to honor this most unique man. I remember my own first discovery of his uniqueness through his work while visiting New York City.

On a suffocatingly hot day in Manhattan from seven floors up, I watched a downy soft seed gracefully drift through the canyons of soot-blackened brick buildings.

Later in the cool of early evening on the banks of the East River, I watched another seed drop onto the water and move with wind and current. Unlike the first seed that one seemed determined to find fertile ground. It seemed to have destiny.

The next morning I saw my first Calder mobile. His sculpture had the same spirit as that seed. The same delicacy of a point in space, responding to the elevator effects of updrafts, moving continuously, even tenaciously, was in Calder’s mobile sculpture.

In a memorial tribute to Calder Time magazine called him “the man who taught sculpture to move.” To me, he freed the sculptor from earthbound weight and stasis, much as Jackson Pollock freed painters from the brush and easel. Calder gave sculptors the chance to find their subjects in movement and space, and he brought the world of bright primary colors to sculpture through line and shape. His forms lacked the mass of traditional sculpture, but they gained breadth and scope by his use of space.

A tinkerer by nature, the bear-like man disdained power tools. He preferred to snip metal with shears and twist wire with pliers. He scorned critics who found symbolism in his sculpture. Calder was more involved with whimsy than sociological comment or religious expression. Yet, I think there was a deep satisfaction in the man, a oneness with his creator, that permitted him to play in the garden and deny the finality of death. He had a childlike freshness tempered with a satiric view of life.

Calder was the third generation of sculptors, but he departed from the academic style of his father and grandfather. He studied engineering before he went to art school, and when he did study art, his interest was in movement, action, and energy rather than appearance. The zoo, where he sketched, became his laboratory. These early studies later became his miniature circus.

Selden Rodman in his book Conversations With Artists recalls Calder saying that a vision of the celestial universe had started him off. Calder also said that “The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.”

A commentator said that Calder’s “genius seems to be, in part at least, that everything he attempts starts fresh, with the happy anticipation of a stimulating experiment brought to a successful conclusion.” His wife said that his work was his religion, that he tried to express in his mobiles the joy of living.

Calder uses the space and wind to create the movement of his mobiles. The movement of the wind calls up age-old references to God: the relationship of the breath God gave to Adam, the movement of the wind across the waters, and the rushing sound of the Spirit of God. Once assembled and turned loose in space, Calder’s creation is embraced by the élan of God but it is possible he achieved something beyond his intention, which happens with all artists.

Recently I stood motionless in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and watched a large white Calder mobile move softly above my head against the white space of the ceiling of the room: white shapes against white space responding to only the invisible stir of the indoors air. Set in motion by voices, by the movement of people, or by air conditioning, the mobile responds to the environment. It never rests. It continually changes, hypnotically reminding us that all things change.

A mobile’s continual movement brings stillness. Out of Calder’s rejection of weight and the static tradition of sculpture, a paradoxical solidity is formed. Just as seeds scattered in the wind find root, so do Calder’s delicate creations. His sculpture reminds me of Jesus’ parable of the sower.

Calder insisted that in abstract art the spectator had to bring more than half of the emotion to the work. Unlike representational art you aren’t locked in to a single meaning. Some people would find a treasure, others would not. Some seed would fall on stony ground, some among the thorns, some on good ground. Although Sandy Calder is dead his works continue to oscillate in the wind of God.

Bill Bristow is a painter and associate professor of art at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

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