Jed Perl in Conversation with Alexander S. C. Rower

Online, via Zoom

Art critic and writer Jed Perl discusses his new book, Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940–1976, with Alexander S. C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation. Perl's book is the second and final volume in the first-ever biography of Alexander Calder, the great twentieth-century sculptor. 

This second volume begins during World War II, when the artist and his wife, Louisa, opened their home in New York City to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. Continuing into the postwar decades when the couple divided their time between the United States and France, the book recounts how Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo ’67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Ultimately, Perl demonstrates how Calder’s radical sculptural imagination shaped the Minimalist and Kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. 

Purchase a copy of this book from the Whitney Shop.