Centre Pompidou reviews Alexander Calder's Paris Years in Exhibition

Written by Dan Fisher Monday, 18 July 2011 21:31

PARIS.- An uncommonly lively and engaging character, Calder made his art into a continuous party, a party attended by his many friends, among them Joan Miró, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian. Trained as an engineer, he was the inventor one of the most innovative and audacious forms of twentieth-century sculpture – the mobile, given its name by Marcel Duchamp. When he arrived in Paris in 1926, aged 27, Alexander Calder was a painter and illustrator. When he returned to the United States in 1933, he was the celebrated exponent of “drawing in space” and one of the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century.

“Calder, les années parisiennes, 1926-1933” looks Calder’s Paris years, when he discovered his personal artistic vocabulary. On view 18 March trough 20 July, 2008 at the Centre Pompidou.

The arrival in Paris of Calder’s Circus, the first time it has left the Whitney Museum in New York since the artist’s death, is an event in itself, and this exceptional piece stands at the heart of the exhibition.

A ‘transatlantic’ artist, who after 1953 divided his time between the United States, the land of his birth, and his adopted country, France, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is well known here for the large mobiles and stabiles of painted metal to be seen in French cities (La Spirale, at Unesco, Paris,1958) and sculpture parks (Reims Croix du Sud at Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 1969). Combining lightness and monumentality, playfulness and abstraction, these giant totems have become, for the general public, emblematic symbols of modern art.

As well as presenting outstanding pieces, the exhibition offers an opportunity to witness the original state of works conceived in terms of motion and equilibrium but now condemned to immobility by the exactions of time or by the death of their creator and animator, these being here accompanied by films such as Jean Painlevé’s and photographs such as Brassaï’s, in which they are shown being operated by Calder himself.

Little animals of bent metal, acute magazine illustrations, toys sparkling with colour and ingenuity: the young Calder’s earliest works offer a key to his art, the art of an inspired DIYer, of a magician who took base materials and primitive mechanisms and transformed them into true sculpture. These assemblies of recycled materials and objects, held together by wire, provided the models for his first masterpiece, the Circus, produced in Paris between 1926 and 1931.

At the same time, the Centre’s Galerie des Enfants offers an exhibition /workshop for children: “Quel Cirque!”

Alexander Calder’s fascination with the circus began in his mid-twenties, when he published illustrations in a New York journal of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, for which he held a year’s pass. It was in Paris in 1927 that he created the miniature circus celebrated in this film - tiny wire performers, ingeniously articulated to walk tightropes, dance, lift weights and engage in acrobatics in the ring. The Parisian avant-garde would gather in Calder’s studio to see the circus in operation. It was, as critic James Johnson Sweeney noted, `a laboratory in which some of the most original features of his later work were to be developed.’ This film exudes the great personal charm of Calder himself, moving and working the tiny players like a ringmaster, while his wife winds up the gramophone in the background. The Circus is now housed at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Visit the Centre Pompidou at : www.centrepompidou.fr/

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