American, 1898–1976

Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, to artist parents, Calder studied painting at the Art Students League in New York before moving to Paris in 1926. There, he gained renown for his Cirque Calder, a multipart artwork comprising dozens of miniature handmade objects, which he performed for audiences of artist colleagues and friends. With a series of human likenesses made from wire bent into formation, Calder used line to float shape, levitate it, and remove sculpture from the pedestal, evoking volume without the accompanying mass.

Uniting all of Calder’s works is a dependence on a viewer’s perception of their many elements to achieve their full expression: they contain infinite forms, none of them final. In time—or as Calder wrote, with “familiarization” some of a work’s possible expressions will emerge. In this way, the viewer completes an exercise in perception begun by the artist himself. “The admission of approximation is necessary,” Calder wrote, “for one cannot hope to be absolute in his precision. He cannot see, or even conceive of a thing from all possible points of view, simultaneously. While he perfects the front, the side, or rear may be weak; then while he strengthens the other facade he may be weakening that originally the best. There is no end to this. To finish the work he must approximate.”

Calder’s artistic endeavors ranged from mobiles to stabiles (static sculptures) both small and large, to jewelry and paintings. Today his works can be found in numerous museum collections around the world including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.