Alexander Calder, “Calder: In Motion”

by Matthew Kangas

Seattle Art Museum (SAM), Seattle, Washington

Exhibition continuing through August 4, 2024

April 13, 2024

Alexander Calder, “Squarish,” 1970, sheet metal, wire and paint, 42 x 46 x 5”. This was the Shirley’s initial Calder acquisition.

All images courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum. Photos: Nicholas Shirley, Brightwood Photos.

It’s important to remember when walking through the blockbuster exhibit, “Calder: In Motion,” just how big Alexander Calder’s (1898-1976) reputation once was. He was anointed by Mondrian and Miró, hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre, and canonized by the leading American art critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, who placed him at the top, just behind David Smith. Today Calder’s star shines less brightly but is assured historical significance with numerous art museum acquisitions, a long string of retrospectives, and a raft of commercial and scholarly publications.

Film set by Jonathan Adler, “Auntie Mame,” 1958. Mobile by Alexander Calder appears in the upper left.

Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures.

In addition, visitors of a certain age may remember his recognition by Hollywood during the postwar period, sets and props closely resembling and even satirizing his vaunted “mobiles” and “stabiles.” These suspended and freestanding abstract sculptures were featured in films like “Auntie Mame” (1958) and “The Trouble with Angels” (1966). Calder’s art of all sizes, sorts, and shapes has been collected in depth by Jon and Mary Shirley (the ex-Microsoft executive’s late first wife), as seen at SAM 14 years ago in “Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act.” Since then Shirley and his second wife, Kim Richter, have substantially amplified their holdings in a direction that differs from other private collections and museum holdings by emphasizing the many small-scale maquettes and unique sculptures that took on figurative forms as well as tiny versions of mobiles and stabiles. The result is a world-class exhibit worthy of travel to Seattle, where too few top tier artists are seen.

Alexander Calder, “The Eagle,” 1971, sheet metal, bolts and paint, 465 x 390 x 390”.

Carefully designed and curated by Deputy Director for Art José Carlos Diaz with an annotated catalog that includes notes by both Shirley and Calder’s grandson, Alexander S. C. Rower, the entire undertaking is a magnificent example of connoisseurship, as opposed to hoarding or accumulating. Connoisseurship, that is, expert identification of key works is based on a thorough understanding of individual works and their context, with attention paid to recurrent stylistic hallmarks. This was especially welcome considering how widely forged Calder’s larger and smaller sculptures became in the 1970s and 1980s, including an example of the former suspended in the lobby of a prominent downtown Seattle office building. Rower’s guidance of the Shirleys was critical, therefore, and the results here show Calder at his best.

Alexander Calder, “Untitled (Métaboles),” 1969, sheet metal, wire and paint, 137 1/2 x 118”.

Ingeniously displayed, considering the widely differing sizes, ceiling and floor-space requirements, motion is the subtle thread tying it altogether. Occasionally, thanks to a silent air-conditioning system, certain sculptures do indeed wiggle or shift on their wires, which are barely noticeable. Such effects are among the rich pleasures of this subtle and unexpected powerhouse of a show. Restricted to primary colors after his epoch-making visit to Mondrian’s studio in Paris in 1930, Calder retained his chromatic austerity but made it work to great advantage. Less than a mile away, in the Shirley-funded, SAM-operated Olympic Sculpture Park, stands “The Eagle” (1971), a gigantic all-red steel work that is a good example. At the exhibit entry is a big companion, the all-black “Mountains” (1976), an inadvertent allusion to the Olympic Mountains visible from the Sculpture Park. Both works act as symbolic animal shapes, too, referring back to the artist’s earliest wire sculptures, such as “Fish” (1942), “Rat” (1948) and “Jonah and the Whale” (c. 1940).

Alexander Calder, “Bird,” 1968, sheet metal, wire and paint, 9 7/8 x 8 1/4 x 7 3/4”.

Seen in glass-fronted display cases, hung from the ceiling, or lined up on waist-high wall shelves, smaller works circle the exhibition area, embracing us as we stroll from the petite Paris-period stained-woodwork, “Femme assise,” (c. 1929), past the gouache paintings and illustrated books, and under seminal mobiles such as “Toile d’araignée” (1965), “Untitled” (c. 1948), and “Untitled (Métaboles)” (1969), the latter created with sets and costumes for the Théâtre Français de la Danse. Other collaborations with choreographers and composers enlisted, among others, Martha Graham, Virgil Thomson and John Butler. Considering how important motion was for Calder, the choreographic partnerships were a brilliant idea.

Alexander Calder, “Untitled (Men Persuading Elephant),” 1931/1964,”

from “Calder’s Circus” unbound portfolio, lithograph on toned rag paper, 12 1/2 x 16 7/8”.

His sporadic years in Paris between 1926 and 1960 not only exposed him to modern dance, music and art, they also made him a prime candidate for that eccentric brotherhood, the Surrealists, who determined to claim him for their clan. Despite his relocation to Connecticut in the mid-1930s, for some years Calder was given more recognition in France than America. André Breton, the “pope” of Surrealism, annexed him in his 1942 essay, “Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism,” written for a survey at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York. Calder, Breton argued, restored “the evolutions of the celestial bodies, the rustling of foliage, and the memory of caresses.” Calder, however, never signed a Surrealist Manifesto.

The artist’s final coronation by the French intelligentsia was engineered by no less than the premier Existentialist intellectual, Sartre, who wrote poetically about a mobile in 1946: “It is a little hot-jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning. If you missed it, it is lost forever.”

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.