The Adoration of Alexander Calder

One night, lying on the deck of a ship in the Panama Canal in 1921,
Alexander Calder found himself halfway between the sun and the moon.
The sun, red, was rising. The moon, pale white, was vanishing. “When I
have used spheres and discs,” the artist once said, “I have intended
that they should represent something more—the earth is a sphere,
but also has miles of gas about it, volcanoes upon it, and the moon
making circles around it. The sun is a sphere—but also is a
source of intense heat—a ball or a disc is rather a dull object
without this sense of something emanating from it.” The sun and the
moon are also rather dull objects without the sense of
something—or everything—being suspended between them, as if
on invisible, connecting wires. That’s Calder’s cosmos: a place of
delicate, perfect balance. There may be volcanoes, but there are not
eruptions; the sun may be intensely hot, but glaciers are safe.
Everything moves, but in a poised dangle. Would Calder see the same
universe today?

Well, he probably would. Calder was notoriously imperturbable.
Time magazine dubbed him “The Merry Modernist.” Aside from one
outburst, in which he and his wife bought a full-page ad in the New
York Times protesting the Vietnam War in 1966—”Reason is not
treason,” it read—Calder’s output is surprisingly innocent of the
turbulent years during which he lived, from 1898 to 1976. By all
accounts he was good-natured—a certain type of guy’s guy (the
type with lots of stuff in his pockets and a lifelong inclination to
work with his hands) and a certain type of American’s American
(acquainted with Europe but impervious to its superiority complex). His
obituary in the Times described a big party for him just
before his death, at which point he was wildly popular, though critics
have always questioned his seriousness. “He loved [the party], and we
loved him, and we shall go on doing it for ever and ever,” the obit
ended with a crash, the writer, John Russell, virtually laid out and
weeping. (Russell also proclaimed that Calder’s marriage to Louisa
James, great-niece of William and Henry James, “has a high place in the
annals of monogamy.”)

To this day, there’s always a Calder show somewhere. A cynical
observer might say it’s because of the promotional prowess of Calder’s
grandson, who established the tightly controlling Calder Foundation
(images and even descriptions of the art are policed), but that would
be overstating the case. Calder’s art is popular for a bizarrely simple
(almost tautological) reason: It has universal appeal to humans, beyond
questions of taste. He invented the mobile. The entire form. Calder is
the reason babies have mobiles in their cribs. (Marcel Duchamp is the
one who invented the term, in 1936, to describe Calder’s moving
sculptures.)

On one hand, Calder reduces us all to hypnotized babies. On the
other hand, watching certain constellations of tiny, perfectly
balanced, colored abstract shapes cast dazzling, spinning shadows on
the wall is simply a neurologic holiday. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who
wrote, “Mobiles have no meaning. They make you think of nothing but
themselves. They are; that is all.”

Seattle has reason to consider Calder carefully—he’s supposed
to mean something to us. In 2000, two Seattle collectors named Jon and
Mary Shirley paid more than $10 million to bring his 39-foot red
Eagle here. (The sculpture was made in 1971 for a bank plaza
in Fort Worth; when the bank building was sold, the sculpture was
marooned until the Shirleys bought it.) The Eagle is one of
Calder’s “stabiles,” another term given to Calder’s work by another
artist, this time Jean Arp, describing Calder’s grounded sculptures as
the opposite of his “mobiles.”

The huge stabiles do not have the same basic charms as the mobiles.
Eagle stands overlooking the water and mountains, on the
promontory at the northern end of downtown, appearing to face head-on
the particularly majestic scale of the Seattle environment, as if the
artist had put the creature there for just that purpose. Of course the
truth is that Seattle nourishes Eagle as much as (even more
than?) the other way around. In addition to the natural associations,
its airplanelike construction, with rows of visible rivets, is made
poetic by Seattle’s (increasingly melancholy) history as Boeing-town.
Eagle practically aches toward the other end of downtown,
where port cranes loom like lost lovers.

And now we can officially say: Eagle, schmeagle. The rest
of the Calders the Shirleys have collected are on display for the first
time at Seattle Art Museum in an exhibition called Alexander
Calder: A Balancing Act, which includes mobiles, maquettes, wire
sculptures, jewelry, photographs, and video from all periods of the
sculptor’s long career. With the exception of one sculpture (owned by
Seattle collector Barney Ebsworth) and one painting (and Calder is not
a very good painter), all of the show’s objects by Calder are owned by
the Shirleys and eventually will be given to SAM. (Will the Ebsworth
work, the playful sitting Hen, come to SAM? “We can’t confirm
that at this time,” curator Michael Darling wrote.) Videos and
photographs by other artists picturing Calder working or performing his
famous wire circus fatten up the show nicely, adding a dimension of
life that would otherwise be sorely lacking, since only one of Calder’s
meant-to-move sculptures is physically moving in the galleries (it has
fans on it from all sides). People can be seen trying to subtly wave
their arms to create a breeze or quietly blowing in the direction of
the hanging objects, hoping the guards don’t notice.

That is the essence of Calder, not the earthbound Eagle,
which is beamed into the galleries via live video feed, its stature
appropriately diminished. No, the real star among the Calders that live
in Seattle is Bougainvillier (Bougainvillea), from 1947, an
exquisitely delicate standing mobile with a generous, curved black base
ringed by a black sphere stretching up to a red cantilever that sprouts
leggy branches and tiny white blossoms. It’s like a garden nymph from
outer space. The way it’s put together—part industrial tidiness,
part jewelry—is not too showy or cute, and the shapes feel
specific but abstract (neither Miró-redux nor stock-surrealism,
both of which occasionally plague Calder’s work).

Unfortunately, Bougainvillier is mounted on giant white
slabs like a sardine in a tomb. The presentation of the entire show has
this unpleasant stagy quality. Everything is cordoned off and
separated, in vitrines or on pedestals or by lines drawn on the floors,
in contrast to historical photographs of jangling roomsful of
Calders—or Herbert Matter’s cinematic photographs of Calder’s
teeming studio. SAM is being overly protective, and the strictly formal
interpretations in the wall labels give the same dulling, hands-off
impression.

Past the staginess and inconsistency—and with the puffed-up,
monumental Eagle finally, thankfully to the side—we can
distill this exhibition (and this collection) down to a handful of
exemplary works, including Bougainvillier, some tiny stabiles
(sculptures in their own right, not maquettes), three enchanting
hanging mobiles from the 1940s (one with a chunk of wood, one meant to
make a sound), bits of jewelry, and the 1961 video of Calder performing
his wire circus. The beloved circus performers—a stripping
scarecrow, a unicycling dinosaur, a leopard-print-sashed weight
lifter—are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art; another
major collection of Calders resides at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., which organized a major retrospective in 1998. The
Shirley collection can’t compete with any of these landmarks, but it
provides enough material (especially augmented here) to make a fair
assessment of Calder. To me, still, he is reticent. I find myself
unable to get at the heart of his lightness of being. I just stand with
everyone else, flapping my arms.