Alexander Calder

Calder came from three generations of it and was steered away from all of them: his grandfather carved the William Penn statue atop Philadelphia City Hall, his father made public sculpture across the city, and his mother painted portraits, but neither parent wanted their son to be an artist. He studied mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology instead, graduating in 1919 and drifting through engineering jobs afterward. In 1922 he signed on as a ship's fireman on a voyage to San Francisco, which ended the engineering track for good. He enrolled at the Art Students League in New York the following year, studying under painters rather than sculptors, and moved to Paris in 1926 still unsure what kind of artist he was.

In Paris he built a miniature wire-and-cloth circus and performed it by hand for friends, then began making wire portraits and abstract constructions. A 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian's studio, all white walls and colored rectangles, pushed him fully into abstraction, and within two years he had solved the problem the visit posed him: sculpture that moved on its own, driven by air rather than a motor. Marcel Duchamp supplied the name mobile. The Museum of Modern Art bought its first Calder for 60 dollars in 1934; by 1948 he was nearly selling out a Rio de Janeiro show. Public commissions followed for decades — a Chicago plaza, a Senate office building, an Olympic stadium in Mexico City — work he kept making until his death.

The volume he produced eventually became a legal problem rather than an artistic one. Calder made thousands of pieces across sculpture, jewelry, painting, prints and stage design, much of it through assistants and foundries, and the record of what he personally made versus authorized became genuinely contested after his death. The Calder Foundation sued the estate of dealer Klaus Perls in 2013, alleging sales of forged works and concealment of hundreds of pieces; a judge dismissed the case. A separate 1995 dispute over a posthumously fabricated version of an unrealized design ended in a settlement. None of this touches the work itself, which was never in question — only which pieces of a very large and very collaborative practice can be called his.

Calder died of a heart attack in New York in November 1976, days after a major retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum. His family boycotted the posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony that January, a protest for amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, in keeping with the anti-war poster prints he had made in the late 1960s. The Calder Foundation, run by his descendants since 1987, has kept the market and the authentication disputes both alive. Auction prices have only climbed — a 1957 mobile sold for 25.9 million dollars in 2014 — and major museums, from the National Gallery to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, have mounted retrospectives well into the 2020s.

Alexander Calder's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Cirque Calder artwork
  A miniature wire-and-cloth circus performed by hand for friends in Paris 1926
• Lobster Trap and Fish Tail artwork
  Suspended mobile made for the Museum of Modern Art stairwell 1939
• La Grande Vitesse artwork
  Grand Rapids, Michigan — the first civic sculpture funded by the NEA 1969
• Flamingo artwork
  Red stabile at Chicago's Federal Plaza 1974
• BMW 3.0 CSL Art Car artwork
  The first of the BMW Art Car series 1975
• Mountains and Clouds artwork
  Installed posthumously in the Hart Senate Office Building 1985

• 1919 aged ~21 Graduates Stevens Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering
• 1922 aged ~24 Works as a ship's fireman on a voyage to San Francisco The trip ended his engineering career without deciding what would replace it.
• 1926 aged ~28 Moves to Paris and begins the Cirque Calder
• 1930 aged ~32 Visits Piet Mondrian's studio and turns fully to abstraction
• 1931 aged ~33 Marries Louisa James
• 1932 aged ~34 Builds the first mobiles driven by air rather than a motor Marcel Duchamp coined the name.
• 1968 aged ~70 El Sol Rojo, his largest work, is installed for the Mexico City Olympics
• November 11, 1976 aged 78 Dies in New York, days after his Whitney Museum retrospective opens

• Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986
  Modernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. jewelry recipient and friend
• Isamu Noguchi 1904–1988
  Sculptor and designer whose works blend Japanese and American modernist traditions. fellow American sculptor of his generation
• Jackson Pollock 1912–1956
  Abstract expressionist whose drip painting technique revolutionized modern art. contemporary in postwar American art