On 1 January 2020, I posted a report called “The ‘New’ MoMA, 2019.” It was my account of the last visit I made to an art museum, on 19 December 2019, before the pandemic shut-down. (New York City’s Museum of Modern Art had just reopened on 21 October after an extensive reconstruction of its West 53rd Street building. This had been my first chance to see the new facility.)
I hadn’t set foot in any sort of art show since then and, consequently, I hadn’t posted an art report of my own on Rick On Theater since that date. (I have, though, republished articles on art by other authors.) Then, on 31 December last year, the day of New Year’s Eve 2021, my usual theater partner, Diana, and I checked out Immersive Van Gogh, a virtual art experience, but not an actual exhibit of art, which was followed on 10 and 13 January by my report on the animated digital video show.
Now I have a true, in-person art exhibit, for the first time in almost 25 months, on which to report. On Wednesday, 12 January, Diana and I went back to MoMA to catch Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start before it closed on Saturday, 15 January. (Originally scheduled to close on 7 August 2021, it was extended in June.)
I’m going to try to reboot my art-appreciation eye and re-ink my pen (metaphorically speaking) and see what I can make of my first live art experience in over two years. So, first I hope I can make something cogent out of this different kind of art immersion (to appropriate the terminology of IVG and its sister programs; there are a dozen, give or take). Then I have to see if I can articulate that experience to try to communicate it to ROTters.
Wish me luck. Whatever skills I ever had for this task feel rusty—not to say atrophied.
Let’s do the prelims—the factual background of the exhibit—and see if that doesn’t limber up the ol’ joints. (I’m going to take this slow, so bear with me . . . .)
Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start opened on 14 March 2021 in MoMA’s Edward Steichen Galleries on Floor 3. (There were two pieces in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden outside the first floor; I’ll mention these later.) The show included approximately 70 artworks supplemented by films, historical photographs, printed matter, letter facsimiles, and other archival materials from MoMA’s own collection, augmented by loans from the Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation.
Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Zuna Maza and Makayla Bailey, Curatorial Fellows in that department, the exhibition delves deeply into the full breadth of Calder’s career and inventiveness. Modern from the Start brings together early wire sculptures and carved wood figures, works on paper, jewelry, mobiles in motion (some by way of ancient motors), and monumental abstract sculptures called “stabiles.”
(Mobile is a word invented by Dada and Surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp [French, 1887-1968] in 1931 to characterize Calder’s moving sculptures. Stabile was coined by Dada artist Jean (Hans) Arp [German-French, 1886-1966] in 1932 to describe Calder’s non-motile sculptures. Somehow, I find that neat.
(Outside the field of invention itself, I don’t know how many folks have had even one word made up just for them—and here’s an artist who not only got two, but the coiners were world-class artists themselves! That’s like a Nobel Prize in art.)
Diana and I met at the museum at 12:30 on Wednesday afternoon. As usual, I got there before she did, but I was early, so we were right on time for out timed tickets. The last time we were at MoMA, Diana was a member (she let her membership lapse over the shut-down) and we had attended a Member After Hours, so we used a different entrance than the main one. I hadn’t seen the new Entry Lobby since the remodeling.
The main lobby just inside the 53rd Street entrance, next to the Museum Store, used to be basically a wide-open area with large, square hassock-like seats. I expected to sit on one, facing the doors, and keep an eye out for Diana, as I had the tickets.
But the redesigned lobby has no seating at all, just rope lines, checkpoints, and counters; the only seats near the entrance were off the left (as you enter) in the West Lobby. (It’s the space that used to be the store, which is now on the floor below, beneath the West Lobby.) I wouldn’t be able to see Diana as she went through the vaccination and ID check outside and she’d never see me even after she got inside unless she knew to look there.
So I took the one seat, a hard, unupholstered bench, that was right at the corner of the wall that separates the entrance from the seating area. I soon lost all feeling in my tush. (Eventually, I got up to stretch the muscles and took the few steps to my left to where the security guards stand to monitor visitors—and Diana showed up just outside at that moment.)
So, even at this late date, I discovered a consequence of MoMA’s redesign that’s disadvantageous. I’ll add to that the signage—for where each exhibit is displayed—inadequate and confusing. The listings of the contents of each gallery are almost all next to the elevators, so first you have to find one.
Then, the directories are light boards—and they change every few seconds. That means if the exhibit you’re looking for has just been displayed before you find the directory, you have to wait while the sign goes through all its changes floor by floor before the exhibit you want comes up again.
(MoMA, like most art museums, used to have printed guides visitors could carry with them, but like all other printed matter, that courtesy has disappeared. The brief brochure for each exhibit that was so useful was dispensed with a long time ago. Everything has migrated over to the museums’ websites and smart-phone apps, it seems.)
Okay, enough bitchin’ and moanin’ for now. Let’s get to the art and the display thereof.
I should acknowledge here that Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976) is one of my favorite artists. (There’s a short bio of the artist in “Calder: Hypermobility at the Whitney,” posted on Rick On Theater on 21 August 2017; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/08/calder-hypermobility-at-whitney.html.) I love his whimsy, his sense of humor, his ingenuity, his inventiveness. His work makes me chuckle, wonder, imagine and dream, and delight.
One of my favorite Calder pieces, by far his largest mobile and the last major art work he created, the red-and-black Untitled (1976), hangs from the ceiling of the center court of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C.
I used to visit NGA’s East Building hundreds of times when I went to Washington, and Calder’s Untitled and the Joan Miró (Spanish Surrealist, 1893-1983) tapestry Woman (1977) in the same vast, open atrium just beyond the museum’s entry were always my first pleasures, no matter what show I was there to see.
Both pieces were removed for cleaning and maintenance, the Calder in 1988 and the Miró on 2003, and I missed them dearly. (The mobile was returned to its proper place, but the tapestry was replaced.)
For many years, I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. As much as anything else I accomplished there—mounds of research—I loved walking under Le Guichet (“The Box Office”), Calder’s monumental 1963 black stabile directly in front of the library’s entrance.
When it, too, was removed during a make-over of the Lincoln Center Plaza, I actually missed it. I suppose that’s partly because I often used to “open” the library and arrived a few minutes before its noon opening and sat looking at the sculpture or walking around it for the time I had to wait. (There was also a Henry Moore [English sculptor, 1898-1986] sculpture, Reclining Figure [1963-5], in a pool a few yards north of the Calder.)
I even own a Calder lithograph that’s of the same iconography as the sculptor’s mobiles—the same color palette and the same blobby shapes. It could, in fact, be seen as a study for a possible mobile (though I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was intended for). The title, Magie Eolin (1972)—the nearest translation for which I can come up with is “magic of the wind”—might suggest that it was inspired by the wind-driven sculptures so beloved by both the artist himself and his fans.
I have a faux-Calder mobile in my study, too. My mother bought it as a gift for my father at one of the Washington museum shops, the NGA or one of the Smithsonians, and they passed it on to me sometime after I moved into my present apartment—which has an extra room for my study/guest room. It’s not an actual Calder, but it was clearly modeled after his work (and could almost pass for one of Calder’s mobiles . . . if you don’t look too closely).
So you can judge why I was so ready to get to Modern from the Start before it closed.
Calder had a long and symbiotic association with MoMA. It started when the institution was in its infancy and the sculptor was just beginning his career. Each gave a boost in prominence and stature to the other.
In the words of Artbook, a distributor of art books and museum exhibition catalogues, “Through MoMA, Calder came to be known as a pioneer of modern sculpture, and through Calder, MoMA came to understand itself as an American museum of modern art.”
Calder’s work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans, just months after MoMA opened to the public. (The museum opened in November 1929 and led a peripatetic existence for 9½ years. Painting and Sculpture ran 3 December 1930-20 January 1931.)
The museum’s unofficial “house artist,” Calder created a number of pieces commissioned by MoMA for special events during its earliest years. In 1939, for example, when the Museum of Modern Art moved into its permanent home on West 53rd Street, the sculptor made Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a multicolored mobile that still hangs at the top of the lobby’s grand staircase for which it was made. The staircase, with the mobile, is just outside the exit from the last gallery of Modern from the Start.
Also in 1939, for the celebratory dinner on 8 May MoMA hosted for its tenth anniversary, Calder was commissioned to make huge free-form silver candelabra. Some of the candelabra, which when connected up looks like a model rollercoaster, were on view in Modern from the Start.
Calder also worked closely with the MoMA curator, in collaboration with artists Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Matter (Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer, 1907-84), on his major 1943 mid-career retrospective at MoMA, Alexander Calder, which introduced the artist, already known in Europe, to an American audience.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Calder’s sculptures were a mainstay of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where they have continued to reappear in the succeeding decades. For Modern from the Start, for example, Man-Eater with Pennants, a giant standing mobile of several different painted metal components affixed to rods that move around a central post by means of air currents, commissioned by MoMA in 1945 for the Sculpture Garden, has been remounted there after an absence of 50 years.
In 1966, ten years before his death, Calder made a gift to MoMA of 19 artworks in order to fill out the institution’s holdings. The donation included mobiles, stabiles, wood and wire sculptures, and jewelry dating from the 1920s to 1964, making the institution’s Calder holdings the largest and most complete collection by the artist in any museum at the time. The works were put on display in Calder: 19 Gifts From The Artist (1 February-5 April 1967).
Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start used the connection between the artist and the museum as the lens through which to look at Calder’s career and his art. It started in a large gallery devoted to the artist’s stabiles (plus one mobile, Snow Flurry, I, 1948) from the 1930s to the ’50s. The rest of the exhibit proceeded mostly chronologically. (I won’t, however.)
Cara Manes’s organization clearly revealed that Calder had what amounted to multiple careers. “One of Calder’s objects is like the sea,” wrote philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (French, 1905-80), “always beginning over again, always new.” In addition to his several forms of sculpture, he made lithographs, children’s books, jewelry, and theatrical set designs.
I wasn’t in the least disappointed with the exhibit. The last Calder show I saw, the Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility in 2017, was devoted to the artist’s mobiles, his wonderful kinetic sculptures. Modern from the Start covered the whole range of Calder’s creativity.
That’s a little like the menu item labeled a “mixed grill,” an assortment of several kinds of broiled or grilled meats and vegetables served together. My dad wouldn’t ever order such a meal, which he complained included too much of things he didn’t like and not enough of things he did like.
Well, Modern from the Start didn’t suffer from that failing. It was a wonderful sampler of Calder’s delightful, imaginative creations. For instance, I hadn’t seen a display of his wire sculptures, whimsical and often satirical little portraits or caricatures made from bent wire—like, maybe, three-dimensional doodles—since I saw Focus: Alexander Calder (14 September 2007-14 April 2008) at MoMA. Modern from the Start had a terrific selection of about half a dozen examples.
The wire sculptures, made mostly in Paris, were from the 1920s through the ’40s. The playful figures, both human and animal (Sow, 1928; Cow, 1929), generic (The Hostess, 1928; Portrait of a Man, c. 1928) and famous (Josephine Baker (III), c. 1927; Marion Greenwood, 1928), are delightfully rendered.
They’re almost childlike, except that they’re too sophisticated in execution, both in terms of ingenuity and visual sense, to be by a child. Calder’s ubiquitous whimsy is still evident: in Cow, which is otherwise in steel wire, the sculptor gives us several tiny cow pies made from brass!
The Hostess, subtitled Dowager, is a great example. The forward thrust of her body suggests what a snob she is; the lorgnette, extended almost at arm’s length, is a sort of illustration of looking down her nose; offering the limpest of handshakes shows her sense of her superiority. All this is communicated by the merest suggestion of corporeality—just like a satirical cartoonist, except Calder used steel wire instead of ink lines.
The wire sculptures were shown with some of Calder’s wood carvings because both artforms were his earliest efforts. The Horse and Cow were both carved in 1928, the same time Calder was making his wire pieces.
Cow (not to be confused with the wire sculpture of the same title) is particularly interesting because it looks as if the animal is emerging from the block of wood, possibly a found piece. The head is sweetly naturalistic, but as the body recedes toward the wood block, it becomes more impressionistic and ambiguous, until it melds into the wood. It reminded me vaguely of Michelangelo’s explanation of sculpting that his subject lives in the stone and all he has to do is get rid of everything else and the statue emerges.
Except, of course, nothing Michelangelo ever carved was as cute as Calder’s wooden cow. (I feel I should add at this point that if Vincent van Gogh [Franco-Dutch painter, 1853-90], on whom I blogged on 10 and 13 January, is my all-time favorite painter, Michelangelo [Italian sculptor and painter, 1475-1564] is my all-time favorite sculptor. My remark was not a put-down, just a differentiation.)
In the section displaying the mobiles, among the many engaging pieces, is one of special significance to this exhibit. I’m going to give the mobiles short shrift because I covered the topic so extensively in my 2017 Hypermobility report, but I will say some words on 1934’s A Universe, one of Calder’s first motorized mobiles.
First of all, how could I ignore a work of art that gripped Albert Einstein (1879-1955), according to the museum, so that he “reportedly stood transfixed in front of its slowly moving orbs for the entire forty-minute cycle.” MoMA curators allege that the scientific genius uttered, “I wish I’d thought of that.”
Second is the aspect that made A Universe important to Modern from the Start: it was the first piece of Calder’s art to become part of MoMA’s collection, purchased the year he made it.
First shown in MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art (2 March-19 April 1936), A Universe is an abstract vision of the cosmos. A small red sphere and a larger white one suggest planets and move along curved wire orbits at different speeds, completing a full cycle in forty minutes.
Note, particularly, that it isn’t the universe. Prompted, reportedly, by the discovery on 18 February 1930 of the (now demoted to dwarf) planet Pluto, the mechanized sculpture is an abstract representation of a conceptual collection of worlds.
Calder’s mobiles date from 1931, a year after he paid a visit to the studio of his friend Piet Mondrian (Dutch Abstract painter, 1872-1944), which marked a turning point in Calder’s career: it fully opened the American sculptor’s eyes to Abstract art. As Roberta Smith, the New York Times’ “co-chief art critic,” put it, Calder “suddenly got what modernism and abstraction were all about.” It is to this epiphany that the MoMA exhibit’s subtitle alludes.
The mobiles, however, clearly show Calder’s background in mechanical engineering (see his bio in my Hypermobility post or some other site), both the mechanized ones and the wind-driven ones (though for different aspects of physics). That’s one of the elements of his creativity that so fascinates me—the confluence of science and art. You can see it in the work, and it isn’t even incongruous in practice—only in people’s minds is there a conflict.
Physics informed Calder’s art-making in that the scientific laws shaped the pieces and made them work. Different forces act upon the sculptures—gravity, air currents, vibration at the hanging point—setting them in motion. Yet these forces aren’t evident in the experience of the artwork; that depends on the viewer’s perception of how the work’s many parts function together to achieve its full expression.
As obvious as this is in the mobiles, especially the wind-and-gravity-driven pieces, it’s also present, though less visibly, in the stabiles. Though they don’t move, the stabiles are still in balance, even if only to the viewer’s eye.
In the Brooklyn Rail, sculptor Brandt Junceau asserted that “the stabile is a special case of the mobile: same vocabulary, sans only wire, plus only stove bolts. Both planar, with the same touch-and-go relationship to support and gravity, but the stabiles bristle with a menace that is often vanishing but never entirely disappears from the fully airborne works.”
Optics is also a physical science, and Calder’s stationary constructions work on the eye in not dissimilar ways that the mobiles move and turn: they draw your attention from one element to another by its size and shape.
In the Wall Street Journal, art reviewer Lance Esplund, who’s the author of The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art (Basic Books, 2018), declared that the stabiles “feel alive” and remarked that they “appear to be in continual states of interplay and metamorphosis.”
The gallery displaying the stabiles contained both three large sculptures (Black Beast, 1940; Black Widow, 1959; Spiny, c. 1939)—not quite the monumental size of Lincoln Center’s Le Guichet and Flamingo (1973) in Chicago—and a pair of maquettes (Spiny, c. 1939; Black Beast, 1940). (A maquette is a small model or study in three dimensions for a sculpture. The two in Modern from the Start were, indeed, models of two of the full-sized stabiles on exhibit.)
Calder’s stabiles, monumentally scaled abstract works in steel and aluminum, quite the opposite of his delicate, kinetic mobiles, which they closely followed chronologically, were, like the moving sculptures, influenced by Calder’s momentous 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio.
Despite their often massive size—many of his later stabiles were created for outdoor public spaces or voluminous indoor atria—the great, soaring arches, the blocky triangles and trapezoids joined by thick metal plates and reinforced by ribs, all held together by large bolts come together to seem almost delicate and airy.
Earlier, I mentioned taking pleasure from walking under Le Guichet to get into the performing arts library. Calder intended the stabiles to be accessed that way; he wanted people to walk through them, touch them, lean against them. They invite interaction with people. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal’s Esplund asserted that the stabiles “demand that we not merely consider them as works of art, but that we interact with them.”
They also engage the viewer, like me when I sat in the Lincoln Center Plaza and spent some minutes watching Le Guichet while waiting for LPA to open. As big as they are, they please the eye. Consider Spiny, one of the full-sized stabiles in Modern from the Start. With a fat crescent near the floor at one end and large triangular panels in the middle and the other end, the piece still looks like a graceful, elegant dance in progress.
The bulbous crescent down at the bottom of one side is opposed to a tall, thin upside-down-L-shaped spike high up at the other. The crescent-shape anchors the sculpture, but the spike acts like an arrow pointing off to a distant destination. Almost all Calder’s stabiles work like that. It’s art and physics in tandem.
In the section where the silver candelabra was shown were also examples of Calder’s jewelry, something he made throughout his life. Most of the pieces are items he made for friends as gifts, such as the curled brass J and S cufflinks he made in the 1930s or 1940s for James Thrall Soby (1906-79), a longtime trustee of MoMA and an early supporter of Calder’s work. I found these objects little more than curiosities next to the wire pieces, the mobiles, and the stabiles.
I said at the beginning of this report that I’d say something about the Calder pieces on display in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, outside the north side of the museum’s first floor. The reason I didn’t make any comments in the body of the report is that, though Diana and I came to MoMA with the full expectation of seeing the exhibit in the garden, when we arrived and asked for directions to Modern from the Start, the staffer who checked us in said that the main exhibit was on the third floor, but that the garden was closed that day.
The upshot was that we didn’t see the two pieces out there. I don’t know the reason for the closure; it wasn’t on the website and there’s no indication that the garden is closed Wednesdays as a rule (there have been many events scheduled there on Wednesdays). Here’s what we missed (not counting a glance out the windows from the lobby):
I’ve already mentioned the return to the Sculpture Garden of Man-Eater with Pennants, the 1945 standing mobile Calder created for the garden on commission. It was on view there from 1945 to 1949, when it was removed, ostensibly because of reconstruction of the garden space. Reportedly, however, the story is that the sculpture was considered a failure.
Among the complaints was the concern that the mobile, limned by the Wall Street Journal’s reviewer as “an unapologetically intimidating conflation of tree, anchor, flagship and farm machinery—like standing under an alighted helicopter,” didn’t move enough due to the weight of the steel-rod-and-sheet-iron structure and the absence of ball bearings. The museum’s head of the Department of Architecture and Design had reservations about the ironwork, which he called “clumsy,” the “far from pleasing” colored forms, and faulty engineering.
Furthermore, fears about the public injuring themselves on the mobile began immediately, and, in the interest of public safety, a small fence was set around the mobile. Of course, there were also supporters, but the sculpture was nonetheless removed.
Man-Eater traveled to outdoor venues in London and Houston in the 1950s and then returned to MoMA. Its last showing at the museum was from 1969 to 1970, and then it was put away in storage, where it’s remained until reinstalled in the Sculpture Garden for Modern from the Start.
When the exhibit closed on 15 January, Man-Eater was once again removed from display.
The other Calder sculpture on view in the Sculpture Garden for Modern from the Start was Sandy’s Butterfly from 1964, another standing mobile that’s been a favorite of the garden curators and visitors since MoMA acquired it in 1966. The Journal’s Esplund described it as “a carnivalesque combination of windmill, flower and whirligig.” Roberta Smith called it “sturdy [and] bright” in the Times.
Esplund’s entirely laudatory assessment of the show overall, which he dubbed a “compact retrospective,” was that it was “a spirited, synergistic environment from start to finish” that “will surprise even diehard Calder fans.” The Journalist made separate comments about some of the component displays of the exhibit throughout his notice.
Of the opening gallery, where the stabiles were seen, Esplund declared it “absolutely stunning”—“[p]layful, muscular, fantastical and serene”—and pronounced it “among the most striking gatherings of Calder's art I have ever seen.”
The WSJ writer labeled the jewelry on display “endlessly inventive” and compared the wall-mounted “Constellations,” a name devised by Calder’s friends Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney (1900-86; curator of MoMA from 1935 to 1946) for the spidery sculptures from the World War II years (when there was a scarcity of metal) made from small pieces of carved wood linked by wires into a new, open form of sculpture, to “still-writhing animals, enormous bugs and trophy heads.”
Esplund’s sum-up of Modern from the Start was, “This exhibition, a roaring toast to Calder, should become a permanent installation. It’s a tribute to one of Modernism’s giants, and a living reminder of what made MoMA modern—from the start.”
On HypeArt, a website associated with the fashion site HypeBeast, Shawn Ghassemitari, the associate editor of HypeBeast, observed, “Few artists can take an existing medium and completely reinvent it. Alexander Calder is one such artist, who took the idle grounds of sculpture and brought a kinetic dynamism that continues to spin the minds of millions to this day.”
“The amorphous shapes of his sculpture invite deep reflection,” explained Ghassemitari, “but just as you think you’ve grasped the idea of one, they continually change to varying degrees of light and shadow.”
Fellow sculptor Junceau warned in the monthly Brooklyn Rail that Modern from the Start is “[n]ot a career retrospective, but it is a lot of stuff.” He characterized Calder’s motorized mobiles as “tottering between an age-appropriate quaintness (they’re nearly 100 years old) and their original, nervy DIY impudence.” Junceau added that “we know perfectly well every mobile, every stabile is alive.”
The pro tem review-writer asserted, “The exhibition may not answer some of its own questions, but . . . Clement Greenberg [very influential visual art critic, 1909-94; an editor at Partisan Review, art critic for The Nation, and associate editor of Commentary in the ’40s and ’50s] . . . acknowledged Calder’s multifarious talents and noted the light felicities of his work, but was that enough?”
Junceau summed up Calder’s imprint with the assertion, “Calder is justly beloved for his unpretentiousness, but there is an aethereal condescension somewhere high in that egalitarian voice.” (I confess that Junceau said many things in his article—I’m not sure it should be labeled a review—that I couldn’t unpack. It wasn’t the words he used, but the ideas he was expressing that confounded me.)
In the Times, Roberta Smith reported, starting with the stabile exhibit, “The first gallery’s austerity is startling. It . . . reminds us that while visual wit is rarely absent, Calder’s work has its dignified, somber side.” She explicated:
Constructed of several planes of cutout sheet-metal, the sculptures emphasize his control of nuanced shapes, both rounded and straight-edged, and his ability to angle them together so that your interpretations change restlessly among animal, human and abstract as you move around them.
“The contrast between the first two galleries—the big black sculptures and the delicate wire pieces—form a Calder primer,” the Times art reviewer continued. “The bent-wire pieces speak to his extreme sensitivity to line, including the linear shadows cast by the wire portraits, which provide alternate, moodier expressions.”
After the first two galleries, explained Smith, “The remainder of the exhibition is one large, loosely divided space that tracks Calder after 1930, examining the different ways he made modernism his own.” She remarked of the mechanized mobiles that “[t]hey are some of the most lovable abstractions in modernist art history, partly because they are too casually handmade to be purely abstract. They brim with personality, a condition of much of Calder’s art.”
(Smith made an additional comment that I found particularly droll, suggesting that the mobiles “bring out the previously unknown playfulness of Russian Constructivism.” Constructivism, a largely austere art movement, was founded in 1915 and flourished in the Soviet Union, in support of the Bolshevik Revolution until Socialist Realism was established as the official artistic style by Stalin in 1934.)
Smith ended her notice with what seems to me a somewhat romantic notion, characterizing Modern from the Start as “a beauty of a show that . . . will make the world a better place.” Let’s hope.
In the Upper East Side neighborhood paper Our Town, Val Castronovo explained that
the curators [of Modern from the Start] are less concerned with chronologies and timelines and more intent on letting viewers experience the works, taking their cue from the artist himself, who, in fact, wanted most of his sculptures to be lived with—touched and engaged with at home—not put on a pedestal in a museum, where touching is prohibited and viewers are cautioned to distance themselves from the art.
Castronovo concluded his comments on the MoMA show by advising, “With virus fears spiraling again, it seems like there’s no better time to enter Calder’s universe and be spirited away.”
For Reuters, the London-based international news service, Soren Larson reported that Modern from the Start “draws on the rich and varied holdings MOMA has by Calder” and that curator Manes asserted that “her aim was to show how varied and experimental the artist was.”
Larson felt, “From large, sheet metal sculptures bolted together, to tiny hanging wire caricatures called ‘stabiles,’ the MOMA exhibition offers new insight into the resourceful and creative artist.” (Note that Larson got his Calderian terms mixed up: the “large, sheet metal sculptures” are, of course, the stabiles, and the “wire caricatures” are . . . well, Calder’s wire sculptures.)
I can’t say how well I made out conveying this art experience to you all; you’d have to judge that. What I can tell you is that I enjoyed the attempt. After so long a lay-off, it was a pleasure to be writing about art again. It turned out to have been a fortunate turn of events that the subject was Alexander Calder, not just because his work is so familiar to me by now, but because I like it so much. It was actually fun to write this report. Calder does that to me!
[This
report is Rick
On Theater’s 1,000th post. I started
the blog on 16 March 2009, just under 13 years ago. I’m surprised ROT’s lasted that
long. I'm astonished I’ve lasted
that long!]
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