'Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start' (MoMA, 2021-22)

 

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!]

'Calder: Hypermobility' at the Whitney

Among my favorite artists, largely because his work is just so entertaining and . . . well, fun, is Alexander Calder, principally a sculptor—though that title’s too limiting to do him justice—who also worked many other forms.  He’s probably best known for his mobiles, an art form he invented and of which he surely created hundreds over his lifetime, and perhaps the huge public sculptures he dubbed “stabiles,” seen in many public plazas in cities all over the United States—including New York.  (There’s a stabile in front of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, appropriately entitled Le Guichet (The Box Office), 1963, that I love.  I often deliberately walk under this 1965 gift to New York City when going to or from the library, just for the fun of it.) 

I 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 also have a faux-Calder mobile in my study.  My mother bought it as a gift for my father at one of the Washington museum shops, the National Gallery of Art 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).

Thus, when I read that the Whitney Museum of American Art, which two years ago opened a new building in the West Village in my cruising range, was planning an Alexander Calder exhibit, I knew I had to go over and see it.  I asked my friend Diana (who’s a Whitney member) if the artist was one in whom she’s interested, and when she said he is, I suggested we meet sometime during the exhibit’s run to view it.  It took us a while to coordinate a date and time, but we finally met on Saturday evening, 12 August, and went to the Whitney to see Calder: Hypermobility, an exhibit of the sculptor’s mobiles, including both the ones run by little motors, which the artist created first and are rarely seen (and even more rarely set in motion) today, and the more familiar wind-activated mobiles.  

The show’s very small—I didn’t realize that from the write-ups: there are only 36 sculptures, all in one gallery.  Nonetheless, it was wonderful.  We actually spent about two hours in the Whitney’s eighth-floor Hurst Family Galleries and twice saw an art handler “activate” some of the mobiles.  (There’s a schedule for the museum staff to come up and make selected pieces move, either by turning on the motors hidden in Calder’s mechanized mobiles—the motors have all been restored and even up-dated so that the handlers can operate them with a remote—or spinning others by gloved hands or with long, padded sticks so visitors who are there at the time can see them move.)   Jay Sanders, Hypermobility’s curator, insisted that “movements and changes are integral to the work,” but the handlers only activate four pieces at a time, though each time they do different mobiles.  On Saturdays, they come once an hour on the hour, so we caught two activations.

Hypermobility, organized by Jay Sanders, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance, with Greta Hartenstein, senior curatorial assistant, and Melinda Lang, curatorial assistant, opened at the Whitney Museum on 9 June 2017 and will continue until 23 October.  The exhibited works cover three decades of Calder’s career, from the 1930s to the 1960s, though the pieces aren’t arranged in any kind of chronological sequence.  The older, motorized mobiles are mixed in among the later, free-floating sculptures.  While there’s a contiguity among many of the sculptures, displaying Calder’s now-famous blobby-shaped elements, painted in his signature colors of black, yellow, red, blue, and white, quite a few stand out as atypical, such as Fish (1944), which not only is representative—it looks like a (stylized) fish—but it’s made of shards of glass rather than Calder’s more common wood, fabric, or metal.  This is a demonstration of what Calder called “disparity,” which the museum defines as “a term the artist used to describe the complex variation and disjuncture of forms, colors, densities, and movements within a single work and across multiple objects.”  

Many of the three dozen works—which include one large (though not monumental) stabile (The Arches, 1959) and at least one non-moving carved wooden figure (Double Cat, 1930)—come from the Calder Foundation and some are part of the permanent collection of the Whitney, which has a long and extensive relationship with Calder and his work.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was practically born to be a sculptor.  His father, Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945), was a sculptor who created public installations, many of them in Philadelphia (which is 100 miles west of Calder’s birthplace of Lawnton, Pennsylvania, ten miles east of Harrisburg), and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), was also a sculptor, responsible for the statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia City Hall.  (The former Nanette Lederer, 1866-1960, the youngest Calder’s mother, was a portrait painter.)  The Calders moved around the country frequently for Stirling’s health (he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1905) and his work, and in each home, as young Alexander grew up, his parents established a studio for their artistically precocious son, who began making art, in the form of jewelry for his sister’s dolls, when he was about 8. 

Despite his obvious talent, however, they didn’t want Alexander to live the precarious life of an artist and upon graduating from high school in 1915, Calder enrolled in the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey—almost directly across the Hudson River from the Whitney Museum, which has clear views of the New Jersey shore from the large windows and terraces on the upper floors—to study mechanical engineering.  Graduating from Stevens Tech in 1919, Calder worked in engineering-related jobs for several years.  His artistic proclivities caught up with him, however, and he enrolled in New York City’s  Art Students League and in 1926, moved to Paris, the mecca for all incipient artists.  Living in the bohemian Montparnasse quarter, Calder became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including surrealist and Dadaist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), surrealist  Joan Miró (1893-1983), Dada founder and sculptor Hans (Jean) Arp (1887-1966), and abstract painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). 

Now married, he returned to the New York area in 1933, settling in Connecticut, and, with respect to this career, he never looked back.  Most famous for the mobiles that are the subject of Hypermobility, Calder worked in many media and forms, some of them quite surprising.  He made mechanical toys, sculpted in wire, created monumental stabiles, made abstract paintings and lithographs (some of which, like my Magie Eolin, bear a striking resemblance to the mobiles), and fashioned jewelry.  In 1972, he contracted with Braniff International Airways to paint a Douglas DC-8-62 jet airliner and in 1975, he painted a BMW 3.0 CSL for the car manufacturer’s Art Car Project. 

Calder’s initial adult art works, starting in the 1920s, were his wire sculptures.  Following his juvenile experiments with doll jewelry, they came before (but overlapped with) the mobiles and the massive stabiles.  Just as Calder’s background in mechanical engineering must have guided his work with the motorized mobiles (which, counterintuitively, predate his floating mobiles by a few years), the wire sculptures led to the wind-activated mobiles.  I saw Focus: Alexander Calder, an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art many years ago (2007-08) of mostly those wire pieces (plus some of the early mobiles) from the ’20s through the ’40s.  The whimsical figures, both generic and famous, are delightfully rendered, almost childlike, except they’re too sophisticated in execution to be by a child.  In MoMA’s view, the wire sculptures show how Calder approached creating works of art with a combination of whimsy, ingenuity, and a sophisticated visual sense.  The mobiles display those qualities, too.  The stabiles are too massive to give that impression.  

It was reportedly a visit in 1930 to the studio of his friend Piet Mondrian, whose starkly geometric paintings were characterized by intersecting vertical and horizontal black lines and planes of bright, primary colors, that inspired the sculptor to commit wholly to abstract art.  In 1932, Calder invented a new form of sculpture that was kinetic, balancing its components to evince an idiosyncratic series of movements.  “Just as one can compose colors, or forms,” contended the artist, “so one can compose motions.”  He gave the innovation the name “mobile,” suggested by his friend Marcel Duchamp as a sort of pun because the French word means not only ‘moving,’ ‘capable of motion,’ or ‘in motion’ but ‘motive’ (as of a crime) or ‘the force behind movement.’  (New York Times art reviewer Jason Farago quipped, “Sly as ever, Duchamp cast Calder’s kinetic art as a kind of sneak attack.”  Calder’s friend Hans Arp coined the name ‘stabile’ off of ‘mobile’ as those sculptures don’t move—but give the impression of motion, as if depicting movement frozen in time.  “You have to walk around a stabile or through it,” said Calder, “—a mobile dances in front of you.”)  The mobiles work in intricate ways, some simply revolving and some making what the museum described as “uncanny gestures.”  From this perspective, Calder: Hypermobility is a display of, as Whitney curator Sanders puts it, “the diverse taxonomy of movements within Calder’s work.”

Some of the moving sculptures are designed so that the little pieces that comprise them collide or bump, so those works not only move, but also make unpredictable percussive sounds as well.  (One mobile hanging from the gallery’s ceiling, Red Disc and Gong, 1940, is an anomaly; one reviewer labeled it “a visceral study in toying with viewers’ anticipation.”  Calder’s intent was for a sort of drum stick, a long pole with a spherical fabric head, to strike a metal disc to make a gong-like clang . . . but as the kinetic sculpture spins slowly above our heads, the striker doesn’t touch the gong—at least not enough to make a sound!)

As I pointed out earlier, the Whitney Museum has had a long association with the work of Alexander Calder.  As a nascent artist, Calder became a member of the Whitney Studio Club and soon after, he participated in the Studio’s Eleventh Annual Exhibition in 1926 (five years before the Whitney Museum of American Art was even founded).  After figuring in a number of Whitney Annuals (the precursors to the Whitney Biennials) in the 1940s, the museum started acquiring large holdings of the artist’s work.  Today, the Whitney’s collection of Calder’s work is the largest of any museum in the world.  In the 1970s, Calder lent the Whitney Cirque Calder (1926-31), a miniature circus sculpted from wire, cloth, string, rubber, cork, and other found objects that’s one of his most popular pieces; it became the subject of Calder’s Circus at the museum in 1972; the Whitney purchased Cirque Calder in 1983 and committed further resources to restoring in the 2000s.  In addition to Calder’s Circus and Calder: Hypermobility, the sculptor’s been the subject of many other exhibitions at the Whitney, including Alexander Calder: Tapestries (1971), Three Sculptors: Calder, Nevelson and Smith (1974), Alexander Calder: Sculpture of the Nineteen Thirties (1987–88), Celebrating Calder (1991), I Think Best In Wire: Alexander Calder (2006), Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–33 (2008–09), and Collecting Calder (2014).  In 1976, the Whitney mounted Calder’s Universe, a major retrospective of the sculptor’s work, which opened just before the artist’s unexpected death on 11 November at 78.  (For a brief history of the Whitney Museum of American Art, see my report on the Whitney Biennial, posted on ROT on 22 June.)

One of my favorite Calder pieces, by far his largest mobile and the last major art work he created, hangs from the ceiling of the center court of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C.  The red-and-black Untitled (1976) is 76 feet long, weighs 920 pounds, and is composed of 12 arms bearing 13 aluminum panels which resemble a stegosaurus’s dorsal plates.  (Calder had planned the non-motorized mobile in steel, but that turned out to be too heavy to function the way the sculptor intended, so his close friend, Paul Matisse, the grandson of artist Henry Matisse, translated the design into aluminum.)  Calder approved the final construction plans a week before his death, while the I. M. Pei-designed East Building was still under construction, and was installed on 18 November 1977, just past the first anniversary of Calder’s death.  I have visited the NGA’s East Building, which opened in 1978, hundreds of times over the years, and Calder’s Untitled and the Joan Miró tapestry Woman (1977) in the same vast, open gallery just beyond the museum’s entry were always my first pleasures, no matter what show I was there to see.  It was like being greeted by old and dear friends; both were removed some years ago for cleaning and maintenance, and I missed them dearly.  (The mobile was returned to its  proper place, but the tapestry was replaced.)

It’s fun to see the pieces in motion.  It’s all very whimsical and delightful!  For some reason I no longer recall, Diana pronounced on the grimness of the world through history.  That prompted me to observe that I didn’t really know anything about Calder’s life outside his art (I’ve now read a little since seeing Hypermobility), but that if that’s any evidence, he wasn’t a melancholy or dour man.  Aside from his mobiles, which are certainly sophisticated playthings that are meant to do little more than provide pleasure to the viewer, his lithos and wire sculptures are also all up-beat and whimsical.  I’ve never seen a Calder piece that’s dark or brooding.  Calder apparently had his serious side—he was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that President Nixon put the artist on the White House “Enemies List”—but his art was for pleasure.  (Could anyone overlook the fact that Calder’s circus is just an art-inspired “set-up,” as my brother and I called such play assemblages when we were little?)  “My fan mail is enormous,” joked the sculptor. “Everyone is under 6.”  And Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder’s grandson, proclaimed that his grandfather’s art isn’t “about anything.  The subject is you—and your experience.”

Though the mobiles are fascinating even when they’re still (which the free-hanging ones really never are since the merest shift in the ambient airflow, even indoors—heating and air-conditioning move the air around in the gallery just as they do in your home—makes them spin a  little) because Calder’s work is often lacy and delicate (like Hanging Spider, c. 1940, and Big Red, 1959) or funny or evocative (such as Sea Scape, 1947, which seems to show some influence of Joan Miró, another artist-friend of Calder’s, in the marine objects the sculptor sets afloat in the air) on its own, seeing them in motion is to see them the way the creator meant them to be.  Calder was intrigued by performing arts, specially dance, and he designed several stage sets that incorporated his mobile techniques.  

Indeed, the mobiles themselves contain a strong element of performativity both in the movements they make, which are seldom simple or straightforward, and their appeal to the . . . well, audience.  The components of many of the mobiles bounce or dip, rise and fall, or rotate as they spin.  A wonderful example of this effect is Blizzard (Roxbury Flurry) (1946), a large hanging mobile of small, white metal discs that, when immobile, evokes a snowstorm in suspended animation—and when activated, is an impressionist’s vision of snow flakes blown about by eccentric atmospheric effects.  The “flakes” seem to dance in the air to Calder’s long-ago choreography, rising and dipping as they circle around the mobile’s axis.

Now, I knew this from having seen some of the mobiles before—not activated, which is a rare experience because of the ages of the pieces and, in some instances, their precarious condition (the art handlers at the Whitney charged with putting the sculptures into motion have been carefully trained by Calder’s grandson Rower, president of the Calder Foundation, for this gig)—but what was new to me were the sound effects some of the pieces are designed to make and the shadow plays.  At least two of the mobiles in Hypermobility, one motorized (Square, c. 1934) and one wind-driven (Red  Panel, c. 1936), are constructed on a background of a large, flat, painted square of wood onto which the moving forms cast shadows that themselves move in patterns and shapes that reflect, but don’t exactly match, the objects.  It depends on the perspective of the viewer and the location of the light source, so while the “live” objects might seem unchanging and fixed, the shadow show is unpredictable.  When I studied Asian theater, I learned about wayang kulit, Indonesian shadow puppetry.  Spectators have a choice to sit in front of the screen and watch the shadow play, or behind the screen and watch the puppeteers manipulate the puppets.  With these Calder mobiles, you get both perspectives at once.  It’s two, two, two shows in one! 

I’ve said many times (regular ROTters will have read it in any of my reports on an art show) that when my mother and I used to go to an exhibit, we’d always assess the overall pleasure level by deciding what we’d come back for on a “midnight shopping trip.”  I’ve seen a few shows where I wouldn’t want any of the art on exhibit (the recent Whitney Biennial was in that category) but most have one or two pieces—three if it’s a big show—I’d love to put in my apartment.  Every once in a while, I go to a show after which I’d have to say I’d need to back a big truck up to the gallery and load in the whole exhibit.  The Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility was like that!  I’d especially love to have some of his hanging mobiles (there are some that stand on the floor, such as my favorite piece, Aluminum Leaves, Red Post, 1941, or on a surface, like Myrtle Burl, 1941) because I have so many things on my walls, floors, and table tops that hanging from the ceiling is the only space I have where I could accommodate more art!  Besides, they’re such fun!!

The reviews for the Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility were almost universally laudatory.  David D’Arcy in the New York Observer called Calder “a revolutionary with mass appeal.”  Of the sculptor’s art, D’Arcy said:

He played the materiality of sculpture in three dimensions against the immateriality of weightless objects suspended in the air.  A favorite gambit of his was to take inanimate objects and place them in motion.  The sculptures on view remind us that he kept trying, and kept coming up with new ways of doing this.

Though small, the Whitney exhibit shows “how [Calder] departed from those shared elements [with his peers] toward a greater simplicity or mobility or just a greater leap of the imagination.”  D’Arcy pointed out the persistent reflections of Miró (mentioning specifically Sea Scape) and other contemporaries like Matisse (in his cut-outs) “when the oversized snowflakes in Blizzard (Roxbury Flurry)  spin in two directions on two axes.”  The Observer art reviewer also observed:

When the works in “Hypermobility” are motionless, we get a silent harmony that seems to defy engineering logic.  When the works move, it seems proper to steal the description ballets mecaniques, a title coined for an earlier work by Fernand Leger.

And when the sculptures are “motorized” . . . movement brings enchantment to constructions that seem awkward when they just stand there.

D’Arcy summed up the Hypermobility experience by asserting:

“Calder: Hypermobility” will be a popular show, if not for the sheer imagination on view, then for the activator who moves in a chimney-sweep’s coat to keep the motion going when there’s no motor to do it.

That’s a fun kid-friendly novelty, yet what’s enduring about these inanimate sculptures is the life that Calder placed inside them.  But don’t worry, they won’t follow you down the stairs.

The Economist review affirmed that “no sculptor has incorporated the fourth dimension with Calder’s intelligence, dedication and sly humour.”  Hypermobility “chronicles the artist’s long investigation of form in motion.”   The earlier, motorized pieces, observed the unnamed reviewer, are the “surprises” of the show: they’re “clunky, quirky, infused with a Dadaist irreverence and sense of play.”  The Economist writer explained that “there is a revolution and a revelation lurking in these childlike elements—a demonstration that the immaterial stuff of time can be evoked through the most material of forms.”  Perceiving a link between Calder’s mobiles “and today’s performance and video art,” the Economist review-writer deemed, “Even at their most static, his works are theatrical, transforming the act of seeing into an open-ended choreographed experience.”  In the end, the Economist art reviewer warned:

Over the decades, Calder’s reputation has suffered from over-familiarity.  His works can feel too ingratiating, too crowd-pleasing, too user-friendly—the ubiquitous décor of the corporate lobby and the child’s nursery.  “Calder: Hypermobility” reveals an artist no less delightful than the one of the popular imagination, but also a pioneering sculptor who engineered a profound shift in this ancient practice.

In the Brooklyn Rail, Jason Rosenfeld called Calder: Hypermobility “an exquisite display” of Calder’s mobiles.  He even added that the presentation itself, in a large, open room, “is terrific,” explaining, “The atmosphere is generous, and the sculptures can breathe.”  The Rail art reviewer affirmed, “With his mobiles, he was able to draw or paint in air through the use of lines and colored forms moving in space,” stressing, “In Hypermobility, motion became paramount.”  He warned, however, that “Calder’s is durational, subtle, experiential art, demanding sustained looking” and not to expect “an active, immersive spectacle.”  Rosenfeld began his review by noting that in 20th-century modern art, “Whimsy was not part of the equation.  Neither was pathos, sentiment, affection, nor figuration.  Attractiveness, also, was a kind of neutral zone for many modern artists, not required, nor necessarily encouraged.”  He observed that in contrast, however, “[t]he art of Alexander Calder . . . was so radical because it was all of these and more.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Susan Delson posited, “Thoughts of a Calder work in motion might conjure up a mobile rotating lazily in the breeze.  But the artist intended a far wider range of movements—from furious vibration to random, sometimes violent collisions—that emerge only when the works are activated.”  She added, “An appreciation of randomness and chance underpins much of Calder’s sculpture,” as exemplified by many of the mobiles on display which, even when not activated by a handler, can start to move or produce sounds.  (Earlier I observed that the elements of Red Disc and Gong didn’t come together properly to strike the gong as intended, but several journalists, including Delson, reported that “air currents would occasionally stir it to break the silence with a clang that made visitors ‘jump out of [their] boots.’”)  Delson wondered, “Standing before a Calder mobile, who hasn’t been tempted to nudge it into motion?”  Calder: Hypermobility provides an opportunity to indulge that impulse.  The WSJ writer declared “that, after all, is why he designed them as mobiles.”

Jason Farago labeled the Whitney’s Hypermobility “a high-spirited showcase” in the New York Times.  The show “goes a long way to recapturing the guile and peculiarity of [Calder’s] spinning wires and discs.”  Describing the show as “bewitching and somewhat unexpected,” Farago found Hypermobility “wittier and wilier” than other Whitney exhibits of Calder works.  The Times reviewer reported that “where the suspended mobiles undulate with preternatural elegance, the motorized works can look winningly wobbly.”  He explained that “by treating dynamics itself as a means of expression . . ., Calder negated the possibility of perceiving these sculptures in a single fashion.  Where sculpture had once aspired to monumentality, Calder proposed an art in three dimensions that took infinite forms.”  Farago summed up the exhibit as “a display in perpetual flux.” 

Barbara Hoffman of the New York Post declared, “After years of staying still, Alexander Calder’s mobiles are fluttering back to life.”  She had a caveat, though: “But be warned: They move verrry slowwwly: It takes five minutes for one tiny rotation.”  Furthermore, “Listen closely, and you might even hear some works emit a faint ping.”  And despite Calder’s personal gravitas, the mobiles are “playful,” in Hoffman’s estimation.  Her conclusion?  “Happily, this summer, you’ll have more time to experience it.”

On the Theatre Times, John Tilley proclaimed that the “essence” of the Calder works on exhibit at the Whitney is “the tantalizing sense of anticipation.”  Faced with the “temptation to reach out and touch the sculptures, or perhaps simply blow on them to get them going,” Tilley watched as the spectators awaited the activation of the mobiles “with anticipation, even impatience.”  “In a skeptical, secular world,” the Theatre Times reviewer pronounced, “art objects celebrating temptation are our religious icons.”  He was disappointed that the handlers only activate four pieces each time, but decided that “was a part of the experience.”  The kinetic sculptures “dangle in a purgatorial space between endless anticipation and disappointment, of satisfaction and dissatisfaction—much like life, really.”  Then Tilley concluded: “It’s a testament to Calder’s craft that one cannot help but picture the entire room in motion as an immersive, joyful ballet of bobbing and twirling sculpture—but I suppose for that there’s always the theatre.” 

Artnet’s Julia Halperin called the results of the Whitney’s “ambitious, yearlong effort” to bring together Calder’s mobiles a “surprise,” principally for the display of the motorized pieces.  There are only 44 in existence and when they’re shown, “they are usually shown static.”  Halperin pointed out that “these pioneering works have historically taken a backseat to Calder’s more recognizable mobiles and wire sculptures” and quoted curator Sanders as saying, “You can’t anticipate the movement until” they’re reanimated.  Halperin reported that Rower, Calder’s grandson, observed that kinetic pieces he “thought would twirl at a zippy pace, ‘Josephine Baker-style,’ instead rotate so slowly as to be almost imperceptible.” 

On WNYC radio, a New York City outlet for National Public Radio, Deborah Solomon proclaimed in her very first sentence, “Alexander Calder is, to my mind, America’s greatest-ever sculptor”; but she had a caveat: “he suffers from overfamiliarity.”  “Everyone knows his light-as-air mobile, and his red-painted behemoths in public plazas across the country,” she asserted.  But, Calder: Hypermobility “manages to make the artist new again,” Solomon affirms.  “It is a show about motion that stops you in your tracks.”  The WNYC art reviewer, dubbing the exhibit “a dazzling installation,” observed that it “resembles theater” and that the sculptor is “a legitimate forefather of our current generation of performance artists.”  In the works on display, Solomon found, “Curving lines dominate, and the overall feeling of dreaminess can put you in mind of” Miró.  “You can say that Calder combined Surrealist poetry with American ingenuity.”  But the radio reviewer had a complaint: “My only qualm with the Whitney show is that it spills over into the adjacent café.”

A giant hole has been cut in the wall of the Calder gallery to allow viewers to see into the restaurant and beyond it, to the cityscape rising in the distance.  It’s scenic, yes, but brings unwanted noise and light.  We don’t need the view.  Calder is view enough.

In his New York Times review, Jason Farago quoted part of a passage by French playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describing Calder’s kinetic sculptures.  To me, it rings true, especially of Calder: Hypermobility.  Here’s the whole impression from “Calder’s Mobiles,” a chapter in the writer’s We Have Only this Life to Live:

One of Calder’s objects is like the sea and equally spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new.  A passing glance is not enough; you must live with it, be fascinated by it.  Then the imagination revels in these pure, interchanging forms, at once free and disciplined.

[It wasn’t all that long ago that I went to another art show where I said I’d need a van in which to haul off the whole collection on my midnight shopping trip.  It was MoMA’s Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, and in that report (4 March 2016), I also wrote about my trepidation about seeing a show that I knew my late mother would have loved and that I probably would have saved to see with her.  More than a year later, I was disturbed to find that I still had that unease—a Calder show was the kind of exhibit we’d have made a point of doing together, like the Pollock—but I was also pleased to see that the hesitation was shorter-lived and less profound.  Mother’d have loved Calder: Hypermobility—but I did, too, in her absence.  At the Pollock, I felt a little guilty having enjoyed the show without her.  I didn’t feel that after the Calder.]