The sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and the painter Joan Miró (1893-1983) first met in Paris in 1928 and became life-long friends. This original and visually stunning book places the mobile sculptures of Calder alongside the poetical paintings of Miró and provides fresh insights into the visual dialogue between these two artists. What did the painter see in the sculptor? What did the sculptor see in the painter? These questions are answered through an extensive examination of the exchange of artwork and correspondence between the two artists, maintained across two continents and through the turmoil of war.

The concluding volume to the first biography of one of the most important, influential, and beloved twentieth-century sculptors, and one of the greatest artists in the cultural history of America--is a vividly written, illuminating account of his triumphant later years. The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened their home to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. In the postwar decades, they divided their time between the United States and France, as Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo '67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Jed Perl makes clear how Calder's radical sculptural imagination shaped the minimalist and kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. And we see, as well, that through everything--their ever-expanding friendships with artists and writers of all stripes; working to end the war in Vietnam; hosting riotous dance parties at their Connecticut home; seeing the "mobile," Calder's essential artistic invention, find its way into Webster's dictionary--Calder and Louisa remained the risk-taking, singularly bohemian couple they had been since first meeting at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The biography ends with Calder's death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight--only weeks after an encyclopedic retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum in New York--but leaves us with a new, clearer understanding of his legacy, both as an artist and a man.

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen--further enrich the story.

An insightful new look at one of the 20th century's most celebrated artistic visionaries Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is one of modernism's most captivating and influential figures. First trained as a mechanical engineer, Calder relocated from New York to Paris in the mid-twenties where his acceptance into the city's burgeoning avant-garde circles coincided with the development of his characteristic form of kinetic sculpture. His early work Cirque Calder, which was presented throughout Paris to great acclaim, prefigures the performance and theatrical aspects that dominate Calder's pioneering artistic works and are situated as a primary subject of intrigue in this publication. Rather than simply refashion sculpture's traditional forms, Calder envisioned entirely new possibilities for the medium and transformed its static nature into something dynamic and responsive. Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture provides detailed insight into that pioneering process through reproductions of personal drawings and notes. Also featured is new research from a wide range of renowned scholars, furthering our understanding of the remarkable depth of Calder's beloved mobile sculptures and entrenching his status as an icon of modernism.

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen--further enrich the story.

Forty important lithographic prints with line and composition comparable to the works of Miro's friend Picasso. Eerie, droll, technically brilliant, and aggressive.

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 mobi≤ 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.

The concluding volume to the first biography of one of the most important, influential, and beloved twentieth-century sculptors, and one of the greatest artists in the cultural history of America--is a vividly written, illuminating account of his triumphant later years. The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened their home to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. In the postwar decades, they divided their time between the United States and France, as Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo '67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Jed Perl makes clear how Calder's radical sculptural imagination shaped the minimalist and kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. And we see, as well, that through everything--their ever-expanding friendships with artists and writers of all stripes; working to end the war in Vietnam; hosting riotous dance parties at their Connecticut home; seeing the "mobile," Calder's essential artistic invention, find its way into Webster's dictionary--Calder and Louisa remained the risk-taking, singularly bohemian couple they had been since first meeting at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The biography ends with Calder's death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight--only weeks after an encyclopedic retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum in New York--but leaves us with a new, clearer understanding of his legacy, both as an artist and a man.