24 Spring 2012 Unstable Motives Propaganda, Politics, and the Late Work of Alexander Calder

24 Spring 2012 Unstable Motives Propaganda, Politics, and the Late Work of Alexander Calder Alex J. Taylor When Marcel Duchamp suggested to of this work is saved from cliché by its Alexander Calder the name “mobiles” sincerity, like Munro Leaf’s children’s for his suspended sculptures, Calder book Ferdinand the Bull, or in later and was apparently pleased with its dual strikingly similar terms, the image of meaning—referring, in French, to both Vietnam protesters inserting flowers into motion and motive. The suitability of the rifles of National Guardsmen. This Duchamp’s reference to motion is clear, is not the work of an artist blind to the but how, exactly, would one take stock political utility of his art. As the United of the motives of Calder’s sculpture? States settled into the conflicts and contra- Terra Essay Prize By conventional accounts, they would dictions of the Cold War, and Calder into be largely restricted to the aesthetics of his producing the celebrated mobiles and sta- This essay is the second annual winner of the Terra art—color and shape, tension and balance, biles of his late career, the acerbic wartime Foundation for American or, perhaps, the playful atmosphere they satire of Bayonets Menacing a Flower Art International Essay conjure. “His mobiles signify nothing, usefully suggests the sorts of meanings of Prize, which recognizes refer to nothing other than themselves,” which his work has subsequently been too excellent scholarship in the mused Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964, a remark often emptied. field of American art history approvingly quoted in most Calder This is not to claim that the contexts by a scholar who is based monographs, as if to excuse the frequent of Calder’s art have been ignored. His outside the United States. limitation of their focus to matters of relation to surrealism and members of the For more information formal invention and artistic chronology.1 interwar Parisian avant-garde with whom about this annual award, Even in the context of such approaches, he flirted, for instance, has now been well see AmericanArt.si.edu however, it is difficult to see how one recovered. Other scholars have examined /research/awards/terra/. could consider Calder’s Bayonets Menacing his relation to mass culture through his a Flower (frontispiece)—to pick only an interest in toys and the circus, or with obvious, though not isolated, example— science and technology as prefigured in Alexander Calder, Bayonets apart from its historical moment. With his early training as an engineer. But Menacing a Flower, 1945. Painted its proliferation of flimsy weapons, its the focus on his early work has been at sheet metal and wire, 45 x 51 x 18 1/2 in. Mildred Lane Kemper ridiculous dangling ciphers for militaristic the expense of the virtuosic high mod- Art Museum, Washington machismo slung low between its legs, and ernism of his most famous sculptures, University in St. Louis, University the hopelessly vulnerable petals about to which have attracted much less scholarly Purchase, McMillan Fund be deflowered, this work shows Calder’s analysis—as though their commercial © 2012 Calder Foundation, 2 New York /Artists Rights Society capacity for mordant critique. The bom- success is, frankly, a bit embarrassing. (ARS), New York bastically black-and-white symbolism The imbalance has been compounded by 25 American Art Volume 26, Number 1 © 2012 Smithsonian Institution a more general neglect of the history of to the contexts in which it was seen and postwar art, in which Calder is routinely the uses to which it was put. Calder’s absent, despite (or perhaps because of) his popularity in corporate foyers, jet age sustained popularity with museums and airports, and redeveloped urban plazas their publics. Unlike Henry Moore, whose produced a constellation of meanings that critical reputation has been resuscitated via were firmly ideological, but the focus here a rich revisionist and sometimes theoretical is limited to the most explicitly politi- scholarship over the last decade,3 Calder’s cized contexts of his art. With the now assigned position in postwar American extensive scholarship on the Cold War art history fails to recognize, much less functions of abstract expressionist paint- account for, his singularly prominent ing as a base, Calder’s art as it was used in standing in period visual culture. the exhibitions of the “cultural cold war” Focusing on the output of his later can be recontextualized by examining the career from the 1950s onward, this article contradictory expressions of political alle- offers new directions for understanding giance and dissent that characterized the the art of Alexander Calder in relation artist’s late-career public reputation.4 The 1 Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck in collaboration with Media Farzin, Didactic Panel and Model of Alexander Calder’s Vertical Constellation with Bomb, 1943 (detail of C-Print), 2007–9. From the series Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect. Installation: C-Print, plastic model on ped- estal, narrative wall label, and vinyl lettering, configuration vari- able. Photo courtesy of Henrique Faría Fine Art, New York, and the artists 26 Spring 2012 result is a position for Calder’s art that is Rockefellers. Perhaps the most striking as politically unstable as postwar America works in the exhibition were also the most itself, vacillating between propaganda and seemingly absurd: two reconfigurations of dissent and demonstrating the potential Calder’s Vertical Constellation with Bomb for abstraction to serve the most appar- (1943). The first was a sculptural simula- ently opposed political motives. tion, altering the original by drawing attention to its eponymous weapon amid otherwise white-coated forms made from Statues of Liberty carbon fiber, Plexiglas, and thermoplastic instead of Calder’s more homespun mate- I want to make things that are fun to look at rials of wire and wood. The second was a and have no propaganda value whatsoever. didactic panel that extended the militaristic content by annotating the components —Alexander Calder5 of Calder’s atomic form by turning it into a complex political diagram (fig. 1). In 2009 an exhibition by the Venezuelan- Not only does Yazbeck’s isolation of the born artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck in bomb imply the military significance of collaboration with Media Farzin drew Calder’s subject matter, but the relations striking connections between Cold between the likes of Albert Einstein, War politics and the work of Alexander Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Josef Calder.6 The exhibition presented a Stalin, Winston Churchill, Vyacheslav fabricated history that speculated on Mikhailovich Molotov, and others the political use of Calder’s art in Latin re imagine Calder’s wired-together sculp- America, juxtaposing extensive factual tural cells as a kind of network of power. evidence with appropriated Calder The associations might be unintelligible— sculptures. One didactic label connected the inclusion of Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Nelson Rockefeller’s role as Coordinator Sélavy among its protagonists certainly fits for Inter-American Affairs and his the diagram’s irrational history—but the responsibilities for “the cultural and recognition that Calder’s forms might suit propaganda side of wartime diplomacy” the dynamics of propaganda and politics is with his funding of the Hotel Avila in significant. Caracas, completed in 1942. The wall An examination of the inclusion of text described how the Harrison and Calder’s art in the international fairs Abramovitz–designed building, which and festivals of the postwar period contained a Calder mobile at its heart, confirms its use as a tool of American “projected the image of open democracy cultural diplomacy. While considerable . that literally jeered at totalitarianism.” attention has now been given to the Another work linked Calder’s 1953 ceiling connections between art and the Cold for Caracas’s university auditorium with War, Yazbeck and Farzin’s artistic take the major Cold War summit that took on the subject stands alone in specify- place there two years later.7 ing that Calder occupied an equivalent The simulated Calder sculptures position.8 Limiting discussion of the included in the exhibition made further cultural cold war to abstract expressionist connections between his work and the painting has already prompted others to visualization of American power in Latin remark that it is necessary to “broaden America. One of Calder’s derricklike the terms of the debate” to encompass towers from the 1950s was suggestively— the diverse art forms implicated in such if tenuously—linked to the oil interests efforts.9 Sculpture has, in one unavoid- of American corporations in Venezuela, ably politicized context, been drawn into including those associated with the dialogue with this scholarship, via the 27 American Art 2 Installation view of U.S. Rep Unknown Political Prisoner Competition art was “impervious to the traumas of resentation, Il Bienal do Museu (1953). For this occasion, organized by the Cold War.”11 de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil, 1953; organized by the the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Yazbeck’s exhibition was called International Program of the London, Calder’s proposed monument Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect, Museum of Modern Art, New was no less overtly ideological than the a title borrowed from an article Aline York. International Council / Inter national Exhibition event itself: a violently angular composi- Louchheim wrote for the New York Program Records, Museum

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