High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 | Art & Artists

Many of Calder’s first wire sculptures, made during the same years that he worked on his Circus, took the form of acrobats and other circus figures. Calder attempted to capture the essence of the figure—the tight, quivering line in The Brass Family, for instance, evokes the tension of a real human pyramid. Calder’s wire pieces challenged the traditional definition of sculpture as a solid mass on a base. Instead of carving out or modeling volumetric shapes as sculptors had done for centuries, he allowed the voids to imply volume.