Being Surrounded by Passion and Talent

At the beginning of March, Alexander Calder's Arc of Petals (1941) was returned to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection after having been on loan for several months. It hangs in the entrance hall making it a work that every single visitor notices, so I figured I ought to find out a bit about it, and about Calder himself. In this post, I'll share with you a snippet of what I learned.

Calder was born in Pennsylvania in 1898 to artist parents who fostered his creativity from a very young age, providing him with the tools to produce figurative metal objects and sculptures, (though they supposedly did not want him to become an artist). In 1926, he moved to Paris where he joined the Avant-Garde art scene and met Mondrian, who inspired him to enter an artistic phase of complete abstraction. It was at that point that he began making creations that embody kinetic energy, an energy that's the product of motion. Calder called this new type of art,"plastic forms," which indicates the use of multiple materials and colors moving at different speeds, yet creating a cohesive whole. Later, Marcel Duchamp called such works "mobiles".

Until World War II, Calder worked primarily with metals, however metals became increasingly more scarce during the course of the war and resourcefully Calder began using any material that was available to him, such as the glass shards that you can see in the mobile on the right, which belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

In the early 1930's, Calder moved back to the United States, where he began producing non moving works, which Jean Arp dubbed "stabiles." Fun fact: the early stabiles, large as they might seem, can all be taken apart and fit into the largest USPS boxes because Calder had to be able to send them to his dealer in Paris to have them sold. The Calder foundation has loaned a really awesome stabile to the PGC, which is placed is placed on the terrace, over the Grand Canal making it a true sight to be seen... By the 1950's Calder was engaging primarily in the production of large scale, public artworks that are dispersed throughout the world, and by the time Calder passed away in 1976 he had produced over 16,000 works.

While I was researching Calder and his fabulous creations, I came upon the picture above of Calder with his Mercury Fountain (1937) standing in front of Picasso's Guernica (1937) in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. I loved the picture because not only are both artists inspiring to me, but Arc of Petals at the PCG is actually placed between Picasso's The Studio (1928) and On the Beach (1937).

1. Hugo P. Herdeg, Calder with his Mercury Fountain (1937) in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, July 1937. Photograph.

2. Alexander Calder, Mobile, c. 1937. Glass, China, Iron Wire, and Thread. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

3. Alexander Calder, Sabot, 1963. Sheet metal, Bolts and Pain. Calder Foundation, New York. (By the way, my cousin Jamie took this awesome photo when she visited in Feb.)

4. Me in the PGC entrance hall with Calder's Arc of Petals (1941) and Picasso's The Studio (1928). (Thanks for taking this photo for me Tuey!)