Alexander Calder was born in 1898 in Lawton, Pennsylvania and died in 1976 in New York. Having studied mechanical engineering, he left Stevens Institute of Technology in the 1920s for New York where he pursued his artistic debut at the Arts Students League, a school where Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Louise Bourgeois would also study. In parallel, Calder worked as an illustrator for multiple newspapers and agencies.
In 1926, he moved to Paris and discovered Avant-Garde European art, particularly the work of Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp. Fascinated by the circus, between 1927 and 1929 the artist created the « Cirque Calder »: a gathering of 200 characters made of wire, laundry pins and cloths which he would present in two-hour performances. Sitting in front of this piece, the artist would move the characters such as a puppeteer and this event was eventually televised on the BBC in 1938. The « Cirque Calder » went on to be exhibited internationally, notably at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2009.
In 1931, he joined the collective Abstraction-Création, alongside avant-garde artists such as Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. It was during these years that Calder began to develop his famous ‘mobiles’, abstract sculptures made from wire, metal, and wood. Sometimes ornamented with « Mondrianic » or even primary colors, these surrealist shapes reflected the influence of fauna and flora. The name ‘mobile’ exemplifies Calder’s attraction to playful movement: his sculptures rotate with the wind and are sometimes equipped with small motors before the artist relegates movement to the forces of nature and chance. In 1949, he constructed his largest ‘mobile’ for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was exhibited in the main staircase of the museum. This kinetic art remains one of the most established facets of Calder’s work, along with numerous drawings, paintings, monumental sculptures and décors.
In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art organized the first retrospective in his honor. In 2007, the same museum hosted the exhibition « Focus: Alexander Calder. » In 1952, he was awarded the grand prix of the Venice Biennale. More recently, the Beaux-Arts museum in Montréal exhibited over 150 of his artworks in 2018. Calder received the Bicentennial Artist Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art of New York City in 1976, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.