Alexander Calder
The inventor of the mobile.
Alexander Calder made sculptures that move in the air – mobiles. He started out with a miniature circus made of wire.
Alexander Calder was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania into a family of artists. Both his father and his grandfather were sculptors and his mother was a painter. Even so, he first trained as an engineer and worked at various technical jobs, including on a ship, before beginning to study at the Art Students League in New York in 1923. His engineering knowledge became important for everything he did later.
In 1926 he moved to Paris. There he built an entire miniature circus of wire, fabric and cork, with acrobats, animals and clowns that he operated himself in performances for friends and artists. The circus is now in the Whitney Museum in New York. He also made portraits in bent wire, like three-dimensional drawings in the air.
In 1930 he visited Piet Mondrian's studio and had the idea that the areas of colour ought to be able to move. Shortly afterwards he began making abstract sculptures that moved, first with motors and then by wind and air currents. Marcel Duchamp gave them the name mobiles. The stationary sculptures were called stabiles, a word coined by Hans Arp. A mobile consists of thin metal plates in black, red, yellow and white hanging from wires in carefully calculated balance.
In 1931 he married Louisa James, and the couple lived in Connecticut and later in France. He made the Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. After the war came many large public commissions, such as the red stabile Flamingo in Chicago of 1974. Outside the Moderna Museet in Stockholm stands his mobile The Four Elements, which is driven by motors.
Calder died in 1976. He changed ideas of what a sculpture can be, from something heavy and static to something light that moves in time and space. His mobiles have also had an enormous impact on design and everyday life.