KunstenaarAmerican
Alexander Calder
2 actieve items
Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898, in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, into a family of sculptors: his grandfather Alexander Milne Calder and father Alexander Stirling Calder both carved large public monuments. He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology before enrolling at the Art Students League in New York in 1923, where he studied under George Luks and John Sloan. In 1925, a two-week assignment sketching for the National Police Gazette at the Ringling Brothers circus planted a fixation that would shape his entire output.
After moving to Paris in 1926, Calder constructed his Cirque Calder, a hand-operated miniature circus built from wire, cork, wood, fabric, and string. He would perform it in front of Paris avant-garde audiences that included Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, and Isamu Noguchi. The performances were not art objects in any conventional sense; they were durational events that made sculpture something that moved, responded, and played. A visit to Mondrian's studio in 1930, where Calder suggested the coloured rectangles might oscillate, crystallised his direction. Mondrian refused the idea, but Calder took it and ran.
By 1931, Calder was making fully abstract, motorised kinetic sculptures. Marcel Duchamp named them mobiles. Jean Arp, wanting a contrasting term for Calder's non-moving pieces, called them stabiles. Calder quickly abandoned motors when he realised air currents alone could animate the hanging elements with greater unpredictability. Andre Breton included his work in the landmark Surrealist objects exhibition at Galerie Charles Ratton in 1936, though Calder never attached himself to any single movement. He moved fluidly between Abstraction-Creation, Surrealism, and a territory entirely his own.
From the 1950s onwards, Calder's monumental outdoor stabiles became defining presences in public space across the world. La Grande Vitesse (1969) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the first work funded by the US National Endowment for the Arts' public art programme. Spirale (1958) stands outside UNESCO headquarters in Paris. El Sol Rojo was installed outside the Estadio Azteca for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. He died on November 11, 1976, in New York, weeks after the opening of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Calder's print market is extensive, driven primarily by signed lithographs produced in quantity from the 1940s onwards. His prints echo the visual vocabulary of his mobiles: primary colours, biomorphic shapes, bold outlines. On Auctionist, his 28 indexed lots are drawn from Spanish auction houses (Arce Auctions, Balclis), Danish platforms (Palsgaard Kunstauktioner), and Stockholm venues including Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla and Magasin 5. Top recorded prices include 7,740 GBP for Cometes and 4,515 GBP for L'Etoile Rouge at UK-linked sales. A clown lithograph achieved 11,260 SEK at Arce Auctions, and a 1932 publication piece from Abstraction Creation reached 3,048 EUR, indicating that rare documentary material commands a separate premium.