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Alexander Calder
Biography:
Born Lawton, PA (USA) 1898 died New
York City, NY (USA)
November 11, 1976
Alexander Calder
was born July 22, 1898, in Lawton,
Pennsylvania, into a
family of artists. In 1919, he received an engineering degree from
Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken.
Calder attended the Art Students League, New York, from 1923 to 1926,
studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton and John Sloan, among others.
As a freelance artist for the National Police Gazette in 1925, he spent
two weeks sketching at the circus.
His fascination with the
subject dates from this time. He also made his first sculpture in 1925;
the following year he made several constructions of animals and figures
with wire and wood. Calder's first exhibition of paintings took place
in 1926 at the Artist's Gallery, New
York. Later that year, he went to Paris and
attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. In Paris,
he met Stanley William Hayter, exhibited at
the 1926 Salon des Independants, and in 1927
began giving performances of his miniature circus.
The first show of his wire animals and
caricature portraits was held at the Weyhe
Gallery, New York, in 1928. That same year, he met Joan Miro, who became his lifelong friend. Subsequently,
Calder divided his time between France
and the United
States. In 1929, the Galerie Billiet gave him
his first solo show in Paris.
He met Frederick Kiesler, Fernand
Lager, and Theo van Doesburg and visited Piet
Mondrian's studio in 1930. Calder began to experiment with abstract
sculpture at this time and in 1931 and 1932 introduced moving parts
into his work. These moving sculptures were called "mobiles";
the stationary constructions were to be named "stabiles." He
exhibited with the Abstraction-Creation group in Paris in 1933. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art,
New York,
gave him a solo exhibition.
During the
1950s, Calder traveled widely and executed Towers (wall mobiles) and
Gongs (sound mobiles). He won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1952
Venice Biennale. Late in the decade, the artist worked extensively with
gouache; from this period, he executed numerous major public
commissions. In 1964–65, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York, presented a Calder retrospective. He began the Totems in 1966 and
the Animobiles in 1971; both are variations
on the standing mobile. A Calder exhibition was held at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, in 1976. Calder died November 11,
1976, in New York.
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