Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933 (Whitney Museum of American Art)
by Joan Simon
from The Whitney Museum of American Art
A team of international scholars discusses Calder’s many innovations of this period, chief among them his abstract, motorized, and mobile works. They analyze the extended cast of Calder’s animated Circus, made in Paris between 1926 and 1931, and include previously unpublished photographs by Brassaï and Kertesz of Calder and this beloved performative sculpture. The essays critically explore the intellectual, cultural, and artistic milieu of Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the contexts of Calder’s friendships with Miró, Mondrian, Duchamp, and Man Ray, among others. What emerges in this fascinating book is a nuanced and detailed understanding of how Calder’s distinctive career first took flight.
Calder, 1898-1976 (Album Series)
by Jacob Baal-Teshuva
from Benedikt Taschen Verlag
When the final tally of key movers in the plastic arts of this century is compiled, there is no doubt that maestro of movement Alexander Calder (1898-1976), the man who put the swing into sculpture, will be near numero uno. Calder took it off the plinth, gave it to the wind, and left us kinetic playgrounds of the spirit. He operated at the point where Modernity and nature Fused, developing an environmental art that changed the medium Forever. Visiting his Paris atelier in 1932, Duchamp coined the term "Mobiles" For Calder's delicate wire and disc pieces, constructions that would soon become immensely popular. But he didn't rest on his innovations. Friends with Miro, Mondrian and Leger, Calder also turned his hand to painting, drawing, gouaches, toys, textiles and utensil design. A graphic master who sketched as much in air as in ink, the Sixties and Seventies saw Calder take on the monumental, translating the dynamics of cities into both his Mobiles and "Stabiles". At a time when sculpture was perceived to be the antithesis of movement, Calder unmade gravity and freed the elements in a body of work that is still sending a wind of change through the art world today.
The Surreal Calder
by Mark Rosenthal
from Yale University Press
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is a key presence in the history of modern art, and yet he is rarely seen or remembered in the context from which he initially emerged as an artist. When Calder became "Calder" – well known for his signature mobiles and stabiles – it was due to a unique variety of presiding influences. His artistic parentage consisted of Marcel Duchamp, who provided the name of and concept for the mobile; Piet Mondrian, who introduced pure abstraction to him; and Joan Miró, who communicated the central theses of Surrealism. Although Calder went on to play a major role in Surrealist manifestations during the formative years of the movement, including being shown in the defining 1936 "Exposition surréaliste d'objets" in Paris, he has since been separated from those beginnings. Indeed, at this point in time, Calder is never included in exhibitions of Surrealist art, even though he was incubated by that phenomenon and contributed mightily to it.
This book will put the artist back in midst of Surrealism so that his achievement is more profoundly understood within that context. Works by artists such as Miró, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte will delineate the Surrealist milieu and some of its chief aspects. The following theses are also explored: Calder's wit, caricature, and linear flights of fancy; his marvelous personages and fantastic creatures; biomorphic forms from an imaginary vision of nature; and his constellations, apparent views of celestial space.
Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder
by Pedro E. Guerrero
from Stewart, Tabori, & Chang
What a thrill this book should be for those who have yet to fall in love with sculptor Alexander Calder, who died in 1976. And it will deepen the affection the rest of us already hold for him and his fabulous creations. The author, photographer Pedro Guerrero, first took his camera to Calder's Connecticut studio in 1963, on a routine assignment with an editor from House and Garden magazine. As soon as they arrived at Calder's shambly, magical, jam-packed home, Guerrero could sense that the editor was less than enthralled. "If I had known you were going to photograph that room," she later sniffed, "I would have straightened the slipcovers."
"What a thing to notice!" writes Guerrero, who was, as he put it, "plotting my next move." Over the next 13 years, he photographed Calder, often with his beautiful wife, Louisa, in different houses and studios, all of them mesmerizingly overflowing with wire sculptures, homemade toys for their grandchildren, stabiles, mobiles, piles of mail, chairlike contraptions, and sculptural kitchen paraphernalia. "Be careful where you step," Calder warned Guerrero in the studio, "everything here is important."
Calder at Home is as playful and entertaining as the artist's famous Circus acrobats and animals installed (alas, behind glass) in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art. From the foreword by Calder's grandson to Guerrero's final, pensive photograph of the master alchemist, this is a book to dream on. --Peggy Moorman
Inspired by a 1963 trip to Alexander Calder's home for "House & Garden", this book, a 13-year odyssey to document the artist's lifestyle, features an intimate, insider's view of the way he lived, worked, and entertained. 150 photos, many in color .
Calder in Connecticut
by Alexander S.C. Rower
from Rizzoli International Publications
Engaging and authoritative, this visual biography includes many previously unpublished photographs, documents, and reproductions of little-known art works. An account of the home and studio by Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder's grandson, and an affectionate tribute by Calder's neighbor, playwright Arthur Miller, complete the volume, produced in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.
Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer's Journey with Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, and Louise Nevelson
by Pedro E. Guerrero
from Princeton Architectural Press
Pedro Guerrero spent his entire career, more than 60 years, photographing houses of some of the most illustrious American architects and artists of the twentieth century. Emerging from a modest background, his first professional job at the age of twenty-two in 1939 was photographing Taliesin West, the Arizona home of Frank Lloyd Wright. For the next 20 years, Guerrero was the chief visual interpreter of Wright's homes. Guerrero was soon photographing houses belonging to such legendary artists and architects as Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Marcel Breuer, John Huston, Philip Johnson, Julia Child, Edward Stone, and Alexi Brodovitch.
Spanning nearly a century, Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer's Journey is a fascinating memoir illustrated with over 190 of the author's own photographs. Guerrero steps out from behind the camera and, for the first time, tells his own story along with the stories of the contradictory and complex lives of the extraordinary people he has known, including candid anecdotes about the personal quirks of some of America's legendary magazine editors, architects, and artists.
Alexander Calder (Cambridge Monographs on American Artists)
by Joan M. Marter
from Cambridge University Press
This study, now published in paperback, provides the most complete scholarly account yet published of the life and work of Alexander Calder. The son and grandson of acclaimed public sculptors, Calder was trained as an engineer. Working in Europe during the 1920s, he was exposed to a range of avant-garde art, including Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, Constructivism, and works created at the Bauhaus. These sources, together with Calder's abiding interest in American folk art, were fundamental to the evolution of his wood and wire sculptures, which fundamentally challenged the principles of Western sculpture established in antiquity. Calder's creation of the mobile and stabile, two forms of sculpture that are synonymous with modernism, is also analysed in detail. Including a new plate section and 170 halftones, many published here for the first time, Marter's book is an absorbing study of Calder's special contribution to twentieth-century art and culture.
This study provides the most complete scholarly account yet published of the life and work of Alexander Calder. Paperback has a new four-colour cover and a colour section.
Calder Sculpture
by Alexander S.C. Rower
from Universe Publishing
The Essential Alexander Calder
by Howard Greenfeld
from Harry N. Abrams
The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was one of the most inventive and beloved artists of his time. He was best known for his mobiles--hanging, dangling, perfectly balanced innovative sculptures that twist and orbit in the breeze--and for his stabiles, stationary sculptures, often enormous, that grace and enliven public spaces around the world.
