Alexander Calder (1898 -1976)
Alexander Calder, known to many as ‘Sandy’, was an American sculptor from Pennsylvania. He was the son of well-known sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, and his grandfather and mother were also successful artists. Alexander Calder is known for inventing wire sculptures and the mobile, a type of kinetic art which relied on careful weighting to achieve balance and suspension in the air. Initially Calder used motors to make his works move, but soon abandoned this method and began using air currents alone.
Alexander Calder earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology but switched focus and enrolled at the Art Students League in 1923. With the assistance of such teachers as Guy Pene du Bois, Boardman Robinson, and John Sloan, he was introduced to printmaking and mastered drawing techniques to the point that he could complete a picture without lifting his pen. ‘I seemed to have a knack,” he observed after sketching people on the subway, “for doing it with a single line.”
Throughout his long career, Calder created scores and scores of etchings and lithographic prints. In terms of style and subjects, many reflected links between his graphic art and his famous sculptural works. They demonstrate his long-term interest in making prints and his proficiency in several printing techniques.
Calder’s reductive linear approach, filled with wit, economical strokes, and an ability to capture the essence of his subjects, lent itself to the lighthearted, abbreviated caricatures that were in vogue at the time. Calder, a fervent colorist, enlivened his lithographs with wide swatches of intensely saturated colors in bold forms that often echoed his sculptural work. “Composition,” a 1957 lithograph with carefully placed and shaped blobs of yellow, blue, red, white, and black, seems to presage a mobile. Similarly, a red, black, yellow and tan lithograph, “The Giant Yellow Anteater (Tamonoir jaune),” 1963, clearly describes a monumental stabile. Overlapping areas of metal and marks for bolts to hold the piece together are carefully noted.
Calder’s stepped-up print production coincided with his increasing international fame, as his mobiles and stabiles were exhibited and won prizes worldwide. This popularity, along with his whimsical predilection for making small objects for friends, led him to create such non-sculptural items as jewelry, ceramics, tapestries, patterned fabric, wallpaper and kitchenware. Calder’s printmaking prowess as further proof that “he never stopped creating and making art throughout his lifetime.
