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Alexander Calder, 'Tight Rope Artists' from 'Calder's Circus', 1926-31. Wire, cloth, graphite, leather, lead, paint, and string, dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 83.36.48 and 83.36.50. Photo © Whitney Museum of American Art. Alexander Calder © 2008 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins
"For decades [Calder's] Circus, lent by the artist in 1970 to the Whitney Museum of American Art, has set flight to the imaginations of visiting children and adults. Now the museum is celebrating its genesis in "Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933," an exhibition opening on Thursday that brings the young Calder and the giddy ferment of his artistic circle to life."
--The New York Times, October 12, 2008
When Alexander "Sandy" Calder (1898–1976), arrived in Paris in 1926, he aspired to be a painter; when he left in 1933, he had evolved into the artist we know today: an international figure and defining force in twentieth-century sculpture. In these seven years Calder's fluid, animating drawn line transformed from two dimensions to three, from ink and paint to wire, and his radical innovations included openform wire caricature portraits, a bestiary of wire animals, his beloved and critically important miniature Circus (1926–31), abstract and figurative sculptures, and his paradigm-shifting "mobiles."
The Whitney has the largest body of work by Alexander Calder in any museum and is proud to be the exclusive American venue for this landmark exhibition, co-organized with the Centre Pompidou.
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Strollers are not allowed in Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933.
A team of international scholars discusses Calder's many innovations during this period in Paris, chief among them his abstract, motorized, and mobile works. They analyze the extended cast of Calder's animated Circus, made in Paris between 1926 and 1931, and include previously unpublished photographs by Brassaï and Kertesz of Calder and this beloved performative sculpture. The essays critically explore the intellectual, cultural, and artistic milieu of Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the contexts of Calder's friendships with Miró, Mondrian, Duchamp, and Man Ray, among others. What emerges in this fascinating book is a nuanced and detailed understanding of how Calder's distinctive career first took flight.
"...beautifully produced...smartly designed..." — The New York Times Book Review
