Alexander Calder, one of America’s best-known and best-loved sculptors, famed for his kinetic abstract mobiles and huge grounded stabiles, was in many ways an artistic Renaissance man. In addition to his celebrated sculpture, he excelled at creating paintings, drawings, book illustrations, jewelry, tapestry, toys and stage sets. His effervescent personality infused all facets of his oeuvre with elegance, vigor †and fun.
Throughout his long career, Calder created scores and scores of etchings and lithographic prints. In terms of style and subjects, many reflected links between his graphic art and his famous sculptural works.
As its title suggests, “Alexander Calder: Printmaker,” an exhibition on view at the Bruce Museum through January 31, features nearly 30 of his fine arts prints, along with several watercolors and small pieces of sculpture. They demonstrate his long-term interest in making prints and his proficiency in a number of printing techniques.
The exhibition is co-curated by the Bruce’s director of education, Robin Garr, and guest curated by Jodi Roberts, a doctoral candidate at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Garr notes that this is the first exhibition ever devoted to Calder’s printmaking work.
In addition to showcasing the quality of Calder’s print work, Roberts observes that his “printed images shed light on his working process and provide insight into extra-aesthetic concerns difficult to glean from his sculpture alone.”
The third-generation sculptor in his family, Calder (1898‱976) was born near Philadelphia, the grandson of Scottish-born Alexander Milne Calder (1846‱923), whose classical sculpture groups festoon the city hall of the City of Brotherly Love and whose giant, stalwart William Penn stands atop the imposing building.
Young Alexander’s father, Alexander Sterling Calder (1870‱945), tentatively switched from Beaux-Arts to a more modern style in the course of his career. His “Swann Memorial Fountain,” 1924, on Philadelphia’s Logan Circle, marked a “stylistic transition,” according to art historian Wayne Craven. It represented a compromise between his traditional style and avant-garde “theories of simplification and abstraction.” Craven notes that the father, who had a very successful career, never progressed much further toward Modernism, adding, “It would be for his son, whose wire figures were then beginning to attract attention, to push ahead the frontier of Modern art.”
Alexander Calder earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, but switched focus and enrolled at the Art Students League in 1923. With the assistance of such teachers as Guy Pene du Bois, Boardman Robinson and John Sloan, he was introduced to printmaking and mastered drawing techniques to the point that he could complete a picture without lifting his pen. ‘I seemed to have a knack,” he observed after sketching people on the subway, “for doing it with a single line.”
Calder’s reductive linear approach, filled with wit, economical strokes and an ability to capture the essence of his subjects, lent itself to the lighthearted, abbreviated caricatures that were in vogue at the time.
To support himself while studying in New York, Calder worked for the National Police Gazette , providing humorous illustrations of local events and sports. He wrote an instructional book, Animal Sketching , in 1926.
Calder’s ability to capture a subject’s distinctive and essential features in lively drawings carried over into his earliest print work at the Art Students League. His sketchy, lithographic style, according to Roberts, “echoes the unaffected technique and deliberate simplicity of the artist’s contemporaneous commercial illustrations.”
These early linear exercises, especially his brush and ink sketches of animals, were akin to the marvelous wire sculptures that established Calder’s reputation in Paris in the mid-1920s. Each used a single line to record both the contours and the disposition of a form in space.
Settling in Paris, hotbed of the avant-garde, for seven years starting in 1926, Calder used his printmaking skills to advertise his much-acclaimed “Cirque Calder” (featuring fascinating animals and performers shaped out of bent and twisted wire) and exhibitions of his work.
He rubbed elbows with now-famous members of the avant-garde, including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. Of particular importance was his friendship with British expatriate William Hayter, known for his innovative printing techniques, who encouraged Calder to explore stylistic effects achievable through diverse printmaking processes.
On view are three Calder prints of “The Big I,” a soft-ground etching edition printed at Hayter’s Atlier 17 in 1944. “It is quite remarkable,” says co-curator Garr, “that we have three versions of the same print from one edition,” and an early one at that. She adds that she is “fairly certain that Calder had a direct hand in the making of this particular print.”
A visit to Mondrian’s Paris studio in 1930 stimulated Calder to work in a new, abstract sculptural style, leading to his first stabiles and, soon, mobiles. They formed staples of his distinguished career.
At the same time, Calder found varied outlets for his abiding interest in painting, drawing and printmaking. In 1931, for instance, he created a series of playful animal drawings, like “Lion and Gnat” for a new edition of Aesop’s Fables . In this and other publications, the artist retained “the linearity and sense of quick execution seen in his earliest illustrations while also calling upon the single-line drawing technique he reportedly learned from&⁒obinson&t the Art Students League,” says Roberts.
In 1931, Calder married Louisa Cushing James, grandniece of Henry James and daughter of a dedicated pacifist. She served as his artistic muse and partner in pursuit of public issues.
Returning to the United States in 1933, the Calders established a home base and studio on an 18-acre farm in Roxbury, Conn., while maintaining close connections to Paris. In 1953, they acquired a property in Sache, France; thereafter, he spent much time working there. Today, it is a school for sculptors.
Like many of his artist contemporaries, Calder translated his interest in modern dance and music into set designs for works by avant-garde composers, such as Erik Satie. The care with which he approached such projects is suggested by the arrows, broken lines, numerical notations and other guidance in “Score for Ballet 0-100,” 1942, created for an uncompleted undertaking with American composer Harrison Kerr. The engraving conveys Calder’s plans for a huge mobile that would have extended over the space of the stage.
Calder used a style similar to his pen and ink drawings in later years in etchings for various books. Reportedly sketched in a couple of hours, his depictions of Death and Santa, for E.E. Cummings’s play Santa Claus , 1974, for example, consist of simple outlines of the skeletal body of the former and the down-at-the-mouth Santa Claus. Each manages to convey the artist’s “witty sensibility and penchant for improvisation,” as Roberts puts it.
Calder, a fervent colorist, enlivened his lithographs with wide swatches of intensely saturated colors in bold forms that often echoed his sculptural work. “Composition,” a 1957 lithograph with carefully placed and shaped blobs of yellow, blue, red, white and black, seems to presage a mobile. Similarly, a red, black, yellow and tan lithograph, “The Giant Yellow Ant-Eater (Tamonoir jaune),” 1963, clearly describes a monumental stabile. Overlapping areas of metal and marks for bolts to hold the piece together are carefully noted.
The handwritten instructions and intricately balanced forms in an undated drypoint, “Grandeur-Immense (Schema mobile),” suggest the forethought with which Calder, contrary to conventional wisdom, planned his iconic mobiles.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Calder began to create numerous gouache paintings that were translated into lithographs. After acquiring the place in Sache, in the early 1950s, he used a small building as his painting studio or “gouacherie.” As he worked mornings on gouaches, it is speculated that Calder thought through compositional and spatial problems relating to sculptural projects. “Calder’s gouaches, and by extension the lithographs based on them,” says Roberts, “are best understood as studies for his sculpted works.”
As Garr points out, Calder was not a “fastidious artist, or one that works ‘cleanly.'” Because he worked so rapidly on his gouaches, “drips and spatters are a very common feature” of such works.
Calder’s practice was to pass his gouaches on to master printmakers, who fairly faithfully replicated the original design, mimicking colors, shapes and figures, along with brushwork, feathery edges and paint splatters “to accurately reflect Calder’s loose and confident painting strokes,” observes Garr.
An undated lithograph, “(Spirals),” contains gaily painted forms that clearly resemble a mobile. The sweeping, multicolored lines set against bands of color in a lithograph, “Music Maestro Please,” no date, and a similar composition in an undated gouache, Untitled (Spiral), may well have helped the artist think through elements of a mobile project. “To argue that [such images] somehow represent a sculpture reduced to a flat surface is to miss the point,” Roberts contends. “The [images] instead tell of Calder’s ability to move fluidly between the spatial arrangement of sculpture and the graphic idiom of prints, drawings and paintings as he worked out new compositional arrangements.”
Calder’s stepped up print production coincided with his increasing international fame, as his mobiles and stabiles were exhibited †and won prizes †worldwide. This popularity, along with his whimsical predilection for making small objects for friends, led him to create such nonsculptural items as jewelry, ceramics, tapestries, patterned fabric, wallpaper and kitchenware. His jewelry, particularly, has enjoyed renewed acclaim in recent years.
This exhibition reflects Calder’s well-known exuberance, light-heartedness and originality of artistic expression. It fully lives up to the artist’s conscious effort to create things that are “fun to look at.”
Garr sees Calder’s printmaking prowess as further proof that “he never stopped creating and making art throughout his lifetime&If he was awake, he was producing some kind of art.” She cites a friend’s recollection of witnessing the artist “using the insides of a loaf of bread to make small dough sculptures one at a time at the dinner table!”
With hands and a mind that were never idle, Garr posits that Calder used the medium of printmaking “to extend his reach into the consumer market in an efficient manner,” generating income that helped free him to work on “major art commissions.”
Moreover, this display of Calder’s printmaking achievements adds to our understanding of a multitalented artist who successfully explored the aesthetic possibilities of varied media, beyond his acclaimed sculptural works. As Roberts sums up, “Study of Calder’s prints alone, to say nothing of his other ancillary projects, exposes his lasting interest in literature and figurative illustration, his facility in translating two-dimensional studies into three-dimensional objects and his acute concern over national and world events. In looking beyond Calder’s sculpture, we are offered a more complete picture of his artistic achievements and historical importance.”
The Bruce has planned an ambitious schedule of programs in connection with the Calder exhibition that include a lecture by Eric Zafran, the curator of “Calder in Connecticut,” a previous exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, on December 2; and a panel discussion titled “Authenticity Issues with Fine Arts Prints” on December 16. Films and other activities are also scheduled throughout the exhibition.
The Bruce Museum is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, www.brucemuseum.org or 203-869-0376.
