Before inventing the mobile, Alexander Calder trained as a mechanical engineer
Alexander Calder's parents, both artists, did not want him to become one. So he studied mechanical engineering, a field he admitted he barely understood, chosen because he liked a man who practised it. The training showed: he went on to invent the mobile, a sculpture set moving by motors or drifting air.
Art ran three generations deep. His grandfather made the colossal William Penn statue atop Philadelphia City Hall, his father was a prolific public sculptor, and his mother a portrait painter trained in Paris. Born in Philadelphia in 1898, Calder even had a disputed birthday: his certificate said July 22, while his family insisted on August 22 and blamed city clerks. At three he posed for his father's sculpture Man Cub, and the same year he modelled a clay elephant. Every time the family moved, his parents set aside a cellar as his workshop, where he made jewellery for his sister's dolls from copper wire.
He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919 and drifted through engineering jobs. A turning point came in June 1922, working as a ship's mechanic off the coast of Guatemala, when he woke on deck to a fiery sunrise on one horizon and a silver full moon on the other. Soon after, mountain scenery at a logging camp in Washington state made him send home for paints, and he returned to New York to study at the Art Students League. Sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for the National Police Gazette in 1925 hooked him on circus motion.
In Paris from 1926 he built Cirque Calder, a miniature circus of wire, cloth, cork and scraps that eventually packed into five large suitcases and charmed the avant-garde. He also pioneered wire sculpture, which he called drawing in space, and befriended Joan Miró, Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp. A 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian's studio jolted him fully into abstraction.
Calder disliked explaining his work, arguing theories should stay with the artist. He married Louisa James, a grandniece of Henry and William James, in 1931, later worked from a studio in Saché in France, and often gave pieces French titles. His heart gave out in November 1976, shortly after a major retrospective opened at New York's Whitney Museum.
Source: Alexander Calder
