WASHINGTON, DC - The dynamic career and incomparable achievements of one of this century's most innovative and important sculptors, Alexander Calder, is celebrated in this stunning retrospective. Marking the centennial of the artist's birth, this huge display at the National Gallery of Art through July 12, has to be one of the most appealing exhibitions of all time.

The 260 works on view span the length of Calder's prolific career, during which he created some 16,000 objects, including 4,000 pieces of sculpture. Included are paintings and works on paper that reflect Calder's talents in whose disciplines, and wire constructions, standing mobiles, stabiles, constellations, towers, jewelry and mobiles - including the monumental "Untitled" of 1876 that graces the enormous atrium of the gallery's East Building. Many of the works are from private collections and rarely exhibited. Three video programs in continuous operation in the exhibition galleries illustrate Calder's miniature circus, mechanized mobiles and monumental sculptures.

"Alexander Calder: 1898-1976" was organized by Marla Prather, the gallery's curator of Twentieth Century art, in collaboration with Calder's grandson, Alexander S.C. Rower, director of The Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation and editor of the Calder catalogue raisonne. Prather, in particular, acknowledges how much she agonized over selecting a few hundred works for the show from the thousands the artist/sculptor created.

The retrospective travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on display from September 4-December 1.

Special mention needs to be made at the outset about the visually exciting installation. Organized by the gallery's superb design team, headed by Mark Leithauser, the exhibition is a masterpiece of sensitive lighting, astutely spaced works in spare settings, and eye-popping vistas of swaying objects and large stabiles.

Major pieces spill out into terraces adjacent to galleries, giving the show a pleasing, unfixed ending. Moreover, Leithauser placed several monumental Calder sculptures outside, near the museum's entrance.

Leithauser's installation is not only a triumph of taste and intelligence; it does full justice to the grand works displayed, and above all, conveys the joy of the sculptor who made them.

Alexander Calder was the third generation sculptor in his family. He belatedly followed the lead of his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), a Scottish-born artist who devoted much of his career to designing decorative sculptures for Philadelphia's City Hall, including the 37-foot statue of William Penn that surmounts it. Calder's father, A. Stirling Calder (1870-1945), was well known for graceful fountain and garden figures and commemorative statues, which ranged from Beaux Arts to Modernist in style. His huge "Fountain of Energy," the centerpiece of San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, combined daring balance and bold composition. It seems to pressage works with similar qualities by his son.

Born in Philadelphia in 1898, Alexander Calder developed an early interest in tools and craftsmanship and enjoyed making his own toys and presents. At the age of 11, he cut and molded a piece of brass sheet into a duck and a dog, each of which is at once sophisticated and engaging.

Calder initially set out to be a mechanical engineer, graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., in 1919. After a few years in the field, however, he decided to become a painter, enrolling in the Art Students League in New York in 1923. By 1925 he was turning out streetscape paintings reminiscent of realist John Sloan, one of his teachers. Calder especially enjoyed sketching animals, at the zoo and elsewhere, and became a magazine illustrator specializing in covering sports events.

He also began a lifelong fascination with the circus. He was fascinated with the balance and precision of tightrope and trapeze artists, qualities that he would later incorporate into his sculpture. In the mid-1920s he painted several animated circus scenes.

In 1926 Calder followed the well-traveled route of aspiring American artists to Paris. He produced mechanized toys and carved serious animal figures out of wood to support attendance at drawing classes. His simplified wooden "Elephant" (1928) puts one in mind of the work of William Zorach and Chaim Gross. Most important, he created a miniature circus of articulated figures fashioned out of wire, wood, paper and bits of cloth.

To earn money and attract attention, Calder staged "Le Cirque Calder" in his studio, drawing enthusiastic crowds of fellow artists and others from the city's Bohemian community. Calder acted as energetic ringmaster, accompanied by music from a Victrola.

"By 1930," sculptor historian Wayne Craven has written, Calder's "`Circus' had become one of the real successes of the art world of Montparnasse, as well as among the Paris intellectuals. Jean Cocteau, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp... and others were captivated by it, whereas none of them paid much attention to Calder's wood carvings. Such encouragement undoubtedly led him to try more serious experiments in wire sculptures."

"I think best in wire," Calder declared, and proceeded to challenge traditional notions of mass, solidity and surface in sculpture by making serious works in wire alone. "Rearing Stallion" (circa 1928) is an unforgettable example of the ambition and fluidity of his early wire pieces. Around 1930 he created a series of perceptive, minimalist portraits in wire of personalities ranging from artist Leger to comedian Jimmy Durante to President Calvin Coolidge.

Particularly popular were several full-figure wire representations of black American entertainer Josephine Baker - "the ultimate kinetic figure," in curator Prather's words - whose bold, jazz-age performances were the sensation of Paris in the 1920s. A number of these works on view suggest the flexibility of the dancer's movements. They anticipate Calder's new aesthetic of movement, which he carried a step further in his first formal kinetic sculpture, "Goldfish Bowl" (1929), in which a crank-driven mechanism caused the fish to "swim." Marcel Duchamp, the French avant-garde innovator who became a long-time friend and admirer, dubbed them "mobiles." Calder said a mobile was an "abstract sculpture that moves."

Calder switched to abstraction rather abruptly following a momentous visit to the Paris studio of Dutch painter Mondrian in 1930. Looking at the brilliantly colored rectangles arranged on the white walls of Mondrian's studio, Calder mused about how much more interesting they would be if they could be set in motion. "It was largely due to Mondrian that Calder made the step from representational art," says Craven.

Up to this point Calder's mobiles were mechanized and motorized to perform predictable repetitions of movement. Early in the 1930s he began to experiment with works that relied on chance motion, responding to wind and air currents and other atmospheric forces. To achieve natural movement through space, he experimented with delicate balances of weights and counterweights - in the form of balls, discs, free-form shapes and found objects - hung at the extremities of wire frames. By placing weights and balances sufficiently off center, gentle movements by currents of air were facilitated.

In another departure from sculptural convention, he hung works from the ceiling rather than fixing them to a base. In these early suspended mobiles, such as "Cone d'ebene (1933), ebony elements hanging from bars of unequal length were controlled in careful balance and moved together when set in motion by drafts. Similar biomorphic shapes, inspired by surrealists Arp and Miro, appeared in Calder drawings of the early 1930s and in a group of wooden sculptures in the mid-'30s. In his fantastical "Apple Monster" (1938), Calder turned a knotty branch of an apple tree into a base from which a piece of wood bobbed up and down at the end of a wire spring.

By the mid-1930s he was creating abstract works in which all parts were encompassed within a rectangular frame or placed before a panel, as in "The Orange Panel" (1936). Implementing his original idea of a painting in motion, each element performed a different type of movement - lateral, pendular, rotary - at a different speed. "Just as one can compose colors or forms," said Calder, "so one can compose motions."

Although sculpture was his major emphasis during most of his career, Calder painted throughout in various media. On view are colorful, busy oils of circus performers in action, bright watercolors of abstract forms and gouaches.

Calder also enjoyed fashioning jewelry, a dazzling array of which is displayed in the exhibition. Imaginatively composed and skillfully constructed like his sculptures, most jewelry was created as gifts for family and friends.

In 1931, Calder married Louisa James, who turned out to be a great helpmate and maintained conditions in homes in America and France that encouraged her buoyant, hard-working husband to work and play productively. A big, jolly man, called "Sandy" by his friends, Calder lived life to the fullest. According to family friend Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished literary critic, Calder "had his own fixed system of values. Wife, children, parents, friends - freedom, justice, invention, playfulness, naturalness - those persons and qualities were absolute goods to be achieved or defended; whereas moping, idleness, pretense, and cheating were absolute evils."

In 1933, Calder purchased an old farmhouse on 18 acres of land in Roxbury, Conn. In his cluttered studio there he was able to work on a larger scale. He also devised new challenges by creating outdoor mobiles that responded to wind currents "like a sailing vessel."

Calder began cutting shapes out of large sheets of metal and bolting them together to make his first "stabiles" - static, freestanding sculptures. Appearing different from all sides, they suggested the ides of movement because, as Calder pointed out, "You have to walk around a stabile or through it - a mobile dances in front of you."

His first stabile executed from a maquette (model) the first bolted sculpture was "Whale" (1937), a six-foot-high work assembled from curving sheets of metal. It preceded the famous monumental sculptures by two decades.

In 1935, Calder installed workbenches and a system of pulleys in his studio that facilitated development of the famous mobiles that characterized his later work. They featured a succession of bent wires of unequal length freely connected to each other and ending with curvilinear plates of painted metal. Calder utilized circular or triangular shapes for the plates because they moved more freely, as in "Little Spider," (circa 1940).

Animals animated some of his stabiles, such as the largest work to date, "Black Beast" of 1940, which according to Rower, "represents the dynamic fruition of his previous experiments and was his most ambitious project, foreshadowing the monumental public sculptures to come."

When "Red Petals" (1942) had to be removed from the Museum of Modern Art's 1943 Calder retrospective to return to its owner in Chicago, the sculptor swiftly designed "The Big Ear" as a replacement.

Calder's "constellations" of 1942-43 reflected experiments with different formats. Whether resting on a table top or hanging from a wall, these open, irregular structures were made of hand carved wood or other non-strategic materials - since metal was scarce during World War II - connected by networks of rigid steel wires.

Calder's organic and fantastic vocabulary of these "constellations" was expanded in the early 1950s in "towers" formats. In these works miscellaneous objects of varied forms and colors - frequently things the sculptor kept around his studio - were hung within a wire scaffolding and suspended from a wall.

In the 1940s and '50s Calder specialized increasingly in standing mobiles, in which he found innumerable opportunities to combine stabiles and mobiles, and to explore their interactions. In some cases, plates cut from one became hanging elements in the other.

In 1953 Calder acquired a Seventeenth Century stone house and wagon shed that he converted into a studio near the French town of Sache, not far from Tours. With the later addition of an immense new studio, this eventually became the sculptor's primary home and workplace. He did much of his most productive work here in the last quarter century of his life. Today, an artists-in-residence program keeps the Calder legacy alive on the Sache property.

With demand for public art running high after the war, Calder was commissioned for large-scale, mainly outdoor works all over the world. In many cases, the curvilinear shapes and open structure of his stabiles were seen as ideal complements to stark, geometric postmodern structures. Resting directly on the ground, with no pedestal or base, these stabiles invited people to walk around and through them. They became integral parts of environments in such demanding cities as Paris and Stockholm, as well as in the heartland of America.

One work, "Teodelapio" (1962), was so huge that it spanned the road leading to Italy's Spoleto Festival, with a bus route running right through the sculpture. "Le grand vitesse" (1969) is an undulating red work sited on an expansive plaza in Grand Rapids, Mont. Another enormous icon is "Flamingo" (1973). Installed in front of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Federal Building in Chicago, its red forms play off the black surface of the government structure.

It is fitting that when you emerge from the galleries housing the Calder retrospective, you are confronted with his immense, untitled mobile that permanently waves over the National Gallery's soaring, light-filled atrium. Gently and irregularly moving, as its creator intended, it is a smashing coda to an unforgettable exhibition.

By every measure, this grand, sprawling retrospective, superbly selected and displayed, measures up to the towering achievements of Alexander Calder. It manages to suggest not only how his remarkable ability to invent new artistic forms grew out of his skills as an engineer and his understanding of technology, but how his work was infused with his fun-loving, exuberant personality.

Overall, it conveys the clear message that in a lifetime of artistic innovation, bold experimentation and joyous expression, Alexander Calder produced a prodigious body of work, much of which both inspires and delights.

The exhibition is accompanied by a splendid, 368-page catalogue. There are essays by curator Prather and French scholar Arnauld Pierre, and a full bibliography, exhibition history and chronology by Rower. The softcover edition, published by the National Gallery, sells for $37, and the hardcover catalogue, published by the Gallery in association with Yale University Press, is priced at $65.

A small gem of a book that will be treasured by Calder fans is Rower's Calder Sculpture, which offers a brief but insightful review of the development of Calder's oeuvre. "It is my intention here to illustrate Calder's evolution as a sculptor by presenting some interrelationships within his work as it developed over the course of seven decades," the author accurately states at the outset. Eighty pages in length, with 64 illustrations, it is published by Universe Publishing and sells in hardcover for $19.95.

For anyone who really wants to know Calder - the man as well as the artist - Pedro Guerrero's Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; $40 hardcover) is a must. This 160-page, lavishly illustrated book is filled with intimate photographs of Calder with friends and family and amidst the organized chaos of his studios. Guerrero, who supplied both words and pictures, followed Calder's activities for the last 13 years of his life. The photographs capture the sculptor's idiosyncratic persona and surroundings, while the down-home text offers insights into Calder's playful yet disciplined lifestyle. This is a delightful volume, worthy of its fascinating subject.

The National Gallery of Art is at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W. Telephone 202/842-6353.