sign in sign up
<<
Home , Alexander Calder, Mercury fountain

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

Alex J. Taylor When 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 , 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 ? 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 and members of the For more information formal 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, 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 /Artists Rights Society capacity for mordant critique. The bom- success is, frankly, a bit embarrassing. (ARS), New York bastically black-and-white 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 militaris- tic 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 re­imagine 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. , 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 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 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 , 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 , New was no less overtly ideological than the a title borrowed from an article Aline York. International Council / International­ Exhibition event itself: a violently angular composi- Louchheim wrote for the New York Program Records, Museum of tion of metal forms pierced by an airborne Times in 1954. Louchheim had argued Modern Art Archives, New York. spear, certainly evidence of the “legible that the U.S. government’s failure Art by Calder © 2012 Calder and direct” symbolism that one commen- to sponsor an official presence at the Foundation, New York /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. tator at the time thought was evident in second International Biennial Exhibition Photo © , even the most abstract entries.10 Calder’s of Modern Art (1953) in São Paulo, New York /Licensed by SCALA / language may be cooler than the welded where countries from across the politi- Art Resource, New York techno-skeletons of Reg Butler, who won cal spectrum sought “prizes as proof of the competition, or even the serrated their country’s glory,” was interpreted carcasses of Theodore Roszak, but still, by the representatives of other partici- work such as this makes it difficult to pating countries as a sign of America’s accept Marla Prather’s claim that Calder’s “woeful indifference to culture.” Not that

28 Spring 2012 boasted in a 1956 press release, “seen in 21 countries in Latin America, Europe and Asia . . . as far north as beyond the Arctic Circle in Norway and south as far as São Paulo . . . , eastward to India and Japan, and westward to most of the European countries this side of the Iron Curtain.”14 The struggle against com- munism loomed large for the initiative, and while the degree of state support for such projects has been the subject of debate, there can be little doubt that the international presentation of American art was a manifestation of soft power—in Europe, an artistic flourish to the postwar reconstruction of the Marshall Plan. As Serge Guilbaut has described, MoMA was not only “striving to arbitrate modernist taste on a global level,” but modern art itself was conceived as “an antidote to the communist virus.”15 International touring 3 Alexander Calder, Triple Gong, Louchheim thought America’s participa- exhibitions of modern American art thus 1951. Press clipping from Aline B. tion, organized instead by the Museum laid claim to American cultural maturity, Louchheim, “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect,” New York of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), countering the allegations of artistic Times, January 3, 1954, SM36. was unsuccessful. Securing the “most philistinism and spiritual alienation; they Alexander Calder Papers, Archives prominent” position in the pavilion, the used the individualism of artistic expres- of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Art © 2012 Calder center of America’s contribution was a sion to demonstrate American freedom. Foundation, New York /Artists retrospective of forty-five works by Calder Although such surveys were deliber- Rights Society (ARS), New York in a dedicated “room of honor” (fig. 2), a ately diverse in their display of American privilege shared only by .12 art, Calder’s was rarely excluded. The If the role of art in defining American at the 1952 Venice identity lacked state sanction, the illustra- Biennale presented a retrospective of tion of Calder’s work in Louchheim’s Calder’s work, winning him that year’s article suggested that someone understood prize for sculpture. Calder was included its nationalistic potential. The illustra- in the exhibition Twelve Modern American tion from Louchheim’s piece, with the Painters and Sculptors (1953), opened at title of the article jotted on it, is among the Palais de Tokyo in Paris by the United the papers that Calder donated to the States ambassador C. Douglas Dillon. in 1963 (fig. 3). The exhibition subsequently toured to Captioned as “The U.S.A.,” Calder’s Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, high-spirited Triple Gong indeed read as a and Oslo. With the support of the United kind of national allegory. As with almost States Information Agency (established all major international exhibitions of by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in American art in the early 1950s, Calder’s 1953), MoMA later mounted Cinquante showing at São Paulo was managed by ans d’art aux États-Unis (1955) at the same MoMA’s International Program and Paris venue—and again Calder’s work was funded by a Rockefeller Brothers grant.13 prominently displayed and well received. Building on the museum’s established Retitled Modern Art in the United States, touring program, the International this exhibition then traveled to Zurich, Program exhibitions were, as MoMA Barcelona, Frankfurt, The Hague, Vienna,

29 American Art 4 Installation view of Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Gallery, London, 1956; organized by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. International Council / International Exhibition Program Records, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Art by Calder © 2012 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo, Alfred Carlebach © Museum of Modern Art, New York /Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, New York

and London (fig. 4). In 1956 the exhibi- well considered. He could hardly have tion appeared in Belgrade, Yugoslavia selected two other artists who, respectively, (fig. 5), with the support of the U.S. better demonstrated the “non-conformity Embassy there—the first exhibition of and love of freedom” that he thought modern American art in a communist distinguished modern American art from country. In West Germany alone, where the stilted realism favored by totalitarian cultural diplomacy was seen as especially regimes.17 crucial in containing the Soviet Union For the American pavilion at the and cementing American influence, there Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, Calder was were over a dozen exhibitions of Calder’s commissioned to create two works: a large work during the 1950s. Thirty miles from rotating sculpture as the centerpiece of the East Germany, in Kassel, the in the forecourt and a mobile for I (1955) and Documenta II (1959) exhibi- the foyer of the 360-degree “Circarama” tions both featured Calder’s work.16 theater that showed Walt Disney’s America On the other side of the Berlin Wall, the Beautiful. Two more Calder works were the United States National Exhibition in included in the 50 ans d’art moderne exhi- Moscow (1959) included two works by bition at the Belgian Pavilion.18 Robert Calder—an honor accorded to none of Haddow has claimed that the “confident the abstract expressionist painters. Invited formalism” of American art at Brussels was to Moscow for the occasion by the Soviet “not supposed to make earth-shattering Society for Cultural Relations, MoMA’s claims for American art but merely to Alfred Barr presented a lecture on contribute to the over-all atmosphere American art to Soviet artists, culminat- of insouciance and innovative modern- ing with the screening of films showing ism.” As another historian has described, Jackson Pollock and Calder at work. Barr’s American fair propaganda “showcased the choice of these two artists was surely eclectic material democracy of the here and

30 Spring 2012 unconstrained animation of the mobile.21 Calder’s prominence in exhibitions of modern art during the Cold War was more than simply the reflection of his success. Lacking the wild violence and anxiety of abstract , Calder’s kinetic sculptures served as ciphers for the dizzying freedom on which postwar America’s self-image so depended. Formally, Calder mobiles functioned as the high-art complement to another American fair staple, the ball-and-stick visualizations of chemical and atomic sciences that promised endless molecular miracles for everyday life. Like automated appliances (such as those that provided the backdrop for the famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Moscow Exhibition), Calder’s “invention” served as another kind of manifestation of “Yankee ingenuity”— 5 Installation view of Modern Art in now” such that “liberty was shown not as like generalized Rube Goldberg the United States: A Selection from some abstract right but as exposure to the machines—and provided the cultural the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Kalemegdan Pavilion, concrete freedom of making choices by correlate of high-tech novelties promised Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1956; orga- selecting among a myriad of spectacles and by American abundance. It is a point nized by the International Program artefacts.”19 cogently suggested by Clement Greenberg of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. International Council / “What emerges,” Life magazine in “The European View of American Art,” International Exhibition Program described in its ambivalent report of the his typically supercilious response to the Records, Museum of Modern Art Brussels fair, “is a slightly blurred image favorable reviews that Calder had received Archives, New York. Art by Calder © 2012 Calder Foundation, New . . . hedonistic, eclectic, trivial in spots, at the . Calder, he wrote, York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), cheerful and fundamentally humane.”20 “provides the kind of modern art one is New York. Photo © Museum of Calder’s resonance with such imagery is prepared for. There is novelty—even if it Modern Art, New York /Licensed evident in many accounts of his work. is only mechanical—and an abstractness by SCALA /Art Resource, New York Frank Seiberling’s 1959 response to a that seems racy and chic. This is modern Calder mobile, for instance, could be the way it looked when it was modern.”22 easily substituted for the values ascribed to Just as Sigfried Giedion, in his book the Brussels fair: “The character of these Mechanization Takes Command (1948), cel- shapes and their arrangement suggest to ebrated the mobile for its elevation of the me a free, affirmative spirit, orderly and aesthetics of invention, Calder’s art in the also fun-loving, adaptable yet indepen- exhibitions of the Cold War was held up dent, not complex yet subtle.” When René as an embodiment of American technical d’Harnoncourt, the director of MoMA superiority.23 and a member of the advisory panel for Calder’s position as the favored sculp- the Brussels exhibition, had claimed that tor of the state was also made clear by modern art was the “foremost symbol” the presence of his works in America’s of American democracy because of its international offices. HisHextopus “infinite variety and ceaseless exploration,” (fig. 6) was installed in the courtyard of it is not difficult to see how liberty and the United States Information Service’s freedom were usefully materialized in the Amerika Haus in Frankfurt—one of

31 American Art the largest buildings of a $120-million tiles, framed the Great Seal of the United Department of State program designed States. A catalogue of the predominantly to project a “distinguishable American abstract artworks on display at the U.S. flavor” through diplomatic architecture in Embassy in Moscow in the late sixties lists locations threatened by the proximity of work by Calder. Reporting on the Art in communism.24 Designed by Skidmore, Embassies program in the mid-1960s, a Owings & Merrill and completed in 1952, cooperative venture between MoMA and this sparkling international-style statement the Department of State, the New York of newness featured Calder’s spiky space- Times mentioned Calder among those age parabolas at its center, visible through artists involved in the task of “strengthen- the building’s glass facades that literalized ing our cultural image” abroad.25 the transparency of American democracy. That Calder’s art served as a sign for Calder designed what he described as a American freedom might seem, in these 6 Alexander Calder, Hextopus, 1955. “starry web” (fig. 7) for architect Josep highly ideological contexts and with 100 3/8 x 131 7/8 x 98 3/8 in. U.S. Lluís Sert’s U.S. Embassy building that the evidence thus far presented, like a Consulate (formerly Amerika opened in Baghdad. This idiosyncratic foregone conclusion, but it is only part of Haus), Frankfurt © 2012 Calder Foundation, New York /Artists wall-mounted piece, featuring fifty metal the picture. The image of Calder as one Rights Society (ARS), New York stars against a ground of blue-glazed of America’s premier artist-diplomats that

32 Spring 2012 and George Dondero. The cause for their complaints was eighty-four prints from MoMA’s collection that were on display at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. Busbey alleged that the exhibition was “communistic” and complained that such was designed to convey a “mood of revolu- tion.” Calder was the most eminent of the eight artists in the exhibition named in Congress as having files document- ing their communist links, obtained by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).26 However spurious the connection (the Congressional Record lists Calder’s 1944 “sponsorship” of a U.S.-Soviet relations dinner at New York’s Russian Institute as evidence of his sympathies), merely being named was not to be taken lightly. Other so-called evidence for Calder’s Soviet affili- ations would not have been difficult to unearth. For instance, in 1943 Calder had donated The Black Flower to the Museum of Western Art in Moscow.27 “The accusa- tion of communism,” wrote Calder’s friend Ben Shahn in 1953, “is the most powerful scourge that has fallen into the hands of reaction since heresy ceased to be a public crime.”28 In the case of Paul Strand, who in 1950 fled to Italy to escape the stigma of HUAC allegations, “to be a Left-aligned artist, not to mention an intellectual and an internationalist, was more than 7 Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1957, these examples suggest is complicated enough to draw unwelcome attention in in Josep Lluís Sert’s U.S. Embassy, by the ideological meanings that his art a McCarthyite political culture.”29 Baghdad. Art by Calder © 2012 Calder Foundation, New York / came to acquire in domestic politics. Along with other cultural figures Artists Rights Society (ARS), New As David Craven has argued, it is easy seeking to clarify their loyalties, Calder York. Photo, Louis Reens /Francis to exaggerate the propagandist uses of was listed in 1951 as a “committee Loeb Library, Harvard University, postwar abstraction, eliding the “insurrec- member” of the newly formed American Cambridge, tionary” ideological position of artists in Committee for Cultural Freedom, McCarthyist America and the allegations the U.S. affiliate of the anti-communist of dissent they experienced. The politiciza- Congress for Cultural Freedom that was tion of Calder’s art must take into account covertly funded by the CIA.30 Calder was the fact that he was among those artists the only American-born artist included whose activities were monitored by gov- among the canonical European modern- ernment agencies. In 1951 concerns about ists in the 1952 XXth Century Masterpieces Calder’s political sympathies were raised exhibition that the congress presented in in the United States Congress, in one London and Paris to “demonstrate with of the several attacks on abstract artists what vitality art has flourished in a free leveled by Representatives Fred Busbey world.”31 Nonetheless, to be named as

33 American Art a communist sympathizer was to find contradictory articulations in the domes- oneself in a perilous situation. Michael tic and international spheres. In the 1960s Gibson is alone in linking this context and 1970s, however, Calder’s increasingly and Calder’s 1953 move to France, even public politics would seek to combat such if he dismisses the idea: “Calder does not vulnerabilities. seem to have said anything that would suggest a connection between his move and the rise of McCarthyism in the An Artist at the Barricades United States,” he writes.32 Gibson is, no doubt, correct about Calder’s silence; to I don’t have much patriotism. . . . There’s admit such a reason for the move would nothing to be patriotic about. Trying to get have been tantamount to an admission your country to do what you think is right, of guilt. In the postwar decades, both that’s what I would consider patriotism. Calder’s art and life were unmistakably tangled in Cold War politics and its —Alexander Calder33

8 Alexander Calder with Fountain (1937) in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, 1937 © 2012 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo, Hugo Paul Herdeg / Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, New York

34 Spring 2012 “Calder is an exemplary citizen,” wrote piece, with its worker-heroes struggling the critic John Russell in 1976, “who for love in a postapocalyptic “festival of turns up on the right side of barricades blood.” Against Pichette’s stock poetic uni- whenever those barricades need to be verse of suns and moons, birds and bees, erected.”34 From protest posters and Calder’s forms make concrete the meta- badges to political advertisements, Calder’s phors of the play, from the astral bodies of involvement in a variety of activist causes star-crossed lovers to the suspended doom in the 1960s and 1970s was a significant of nuclear nightmare. “To dramatize [the] strand of his public reputation that has theme of atomic warfare,” in the words been subsequently neglected. But the of one account of the staging, Calder’s official uses of his art in the service of the “mobiles were hung like portentous clouds state continued, too, and, in a number of above towering stabiles, which symbolize instances, the conflict that resulted from war machines.”37 But the politics of the Calder’s opposition to government policy work were not simply pacifist: between the and the display of his art as an expression comrades and class conflict that dominate of freedom underscores the contradictory the play’s narrative and the radical left ideological positions of his practice. clique that ran the Théâtre National Calder’s willingness to use his art Populaire, Calder’s sets were indeed serving for explicitly political ends is prefigured revolutionary ends. Thus, while his mobiles in some of his earlier works. No less a were performing their role of U.S. cultural charged painting than Picasso’s diplomat at the 1952 Venice Biennale, (1937) was the backdrop for Calder’s Nucléa posited a less optimistic view of (1937), which Sert international relations: “the powder of war,” placed at the heart of his pavilion for that one soldier proclaims in the play, “speaks year’s Exposition internationale des arts et the purest language of diplomacy.”38 techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris From the late 1950s onward, Calder’s (fig. 8).35 The twisting metal work flowed, opposition to the dynamics of the Cold not with water, but with mercury—the War conflict became increasingly public valuable product of the Almadén mines and vociferous. In October 1958 Calder’s whose workers fought General Francisco name appears among those signing an Franco’s troops in the . advertisement in Calder’s public opposition to war was headlined “America Needs a New Foreign equally articulated in his support of the Policy.” The statement condemned Cold Call for an American Artists Congress War politics as a failure, undermining in 1936, of which he was one of 380 “the world’s belief in the United States” signatories. “What can artists do to oppose and increasing the “peril of annihilation.” the high-pressure drive towards war?” “Whether we like it or not, more than the group asked. “Because we know that one third of the earth’s population is our work as free artists is indissolubly governed by communist regimes,” it read, linked with continuing peace and the making it “imperative that all the world dominance in American life of democratic be opened up, and that travel, trade and principles.”36 cultural exchange be encouraged among all In the postwar period, Calder’s largely peoples.”39 In the early 1960s Calder also overlooked stage design for Henri Pichette’s publicly aligned himself with a number of play Nucléa (1952; fig. 9) is a further causes supporting free artistic expression. example of the political application of his With the credibility of HUAC waning sculpture. Amid the play’s “synthesis of and Calder himself having been subjected shrieks, violent verbal images, and deafen- to its scrutiny, he was listed as one of the ing stereophonic noise,” Calder’s abstract sponsors of a 1961 rally calling for its scenery suited the unnaturalistic antiwar abolition.40 In 1962 Calder and Shahn

35 American Art 9 Alexander Calder, stage design for Nucléa, 1952 © 2012 Calder Foundation, New York /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced from Dorothy Seiberling, “Calder: His Gyrating ‘Mobile’ Art Wins International Fame and Prizes,” Life, August 25, 1952, 86

organized a fund-raising exhibition for the portfolio of prints compiled by Varian imprisoned Mexican artist David Siqueiros, Fry to raise funds for the International the muralist and active Communist Party Rescue Committee.42 Calder’s involve- member jailed in 1960 for his antigovern- ment with Spanish Refugee Aid best ment revolutionary provocations.41 captures the extent of such fund-raising In this period, Calder began to use his activities and the significant impact they prints as a means of supporting a variety could produce. Although his support for of international refugee aid organiza- the group began in the 1950s, in 1965 tions. He contributed a serigraph to the he started to provide a steady supply of

36 Spring 2012 lithographs that the charity could sell artists, and professionals who signed to raise money for its activities. By 1969 an anti– petition that the organization listed Calder as one of spanned several pages of the New York its major sponsors.43 Calder eventually Times.46 He was photographed at the donated to Spanish Refugee Aid a total Spring Mobilization against the War in of 2,705 lithographs. Selling for between New York in April 1967 and attended the sixty and eight hundred dollars each, they March on the Pentagon in Washington in raised more than half a million dollars.44 October 1967. 47 In August 1967 Calder But it was the Vietnam War that was among the most famous signatories of provoked Calder’s most strident politi- “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” cal statements. In November 1965 a widely distributed petition whose Calder was one of fifty-eight antidraft position caused the federal sponsors of an advertise- government to prosecute its authors for ment calling for a March criminal conspiracy.48 His small badge on Washington against (fig. 10) for the major Moratorium to End the Vietnam War. A few the War in Vietnam March in 1969 used months later, he and his his characteristic red-and-black palette wife, Louisa, placed their and prominently included his signature— own antiwar advertise- deploying his artistic trademarks in aid of ment—a full page in the the peace effort. New York Times titled “A Calder’s opposition to the war was, New Year, Hope for New of course, not unusual among artists World.” Centered on one of and intellectuals in 1960s America, the swirl motifs Calder was then but the extent of his activities has been using in his gouaches, like a vortex downplayed, resulting in interpretations into the alternative reality they hoped of his art as disconnected from the 10 Alexander Calder, protest button for New Mobiliza­ for, it called for “an end to hypocrisy, self- social conflicts of the period. Though tion Com­mittee, 1969. 1 3/4 in. interest, expediency, distortion and fear, the colorful palette and floating abstract diameter. Collection of the author wherever they exist. With great respect motifs of Calder’s work for left-wing © 2012 Calder Foun­dation, New for those who rightly question brutality, social justice causes might have suited York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and speak out strongly for a more civilized the aesthetics of sixties counterculture, it world. Our only hope is in thoughtful is important to locate Calder’s stance in Men—Reason is not treason.” With his the contested terrain of the protest move- wife, Calder issued this statement in his ment. As a “peace liberal,” Calder was, capacity as the chairman of Artists for to borrow David Levy’s characterization SANE (National Committee for a Sane of the SANE milieu, at the “respectable Nuclear Policy), one of several profes- and decorous” end of the protest move- sional committees within the well-known ment. “Middle-class, middle-aged, and antinuclear and peace lobby group. In middle-of-the-road,” the kinds of protest Europe, Calder put his name to the affili- activities Calder participated in were, as ated Paris American Committee to Stop another has put it, marked by a “general the Vietnam War and was listed in media atmosphere of dignity and restraint.” reports as one of its founding members.45 Such a moderate presence was politically As his monumental stabiles began to strategic: the participation of elders in stride across America’s city streets, so too the peace cause helped clarify that it was did Calder. He attended two Marches on not merely a “student organization,” as Washington for Peace in Vietnam, orga- indeed one correspondent to the New nized by SANE, in November 1965 and York Times used Calder’s involvement May 1966. In June 1966 Calder’s name to substantiate.49 Calder’s production again appeared among the academics, of such work as the protest button and

37 American Art was wholly isolated from counterculture quarters. He was, for instance, a judge for the No More War poster competition that launched Ralph Ginzburg’s contro- versial and caustically antiestablishment Avant Garde magazine.51 Nor did Calder limit his visual response to the war to the otherworldly escape that his abstractions could offer. His 1967 antiwar image Pour le Viet Nam (fig. 11) shows a tragic figure rendered in an uncharacteristi- cally expressive wash, its inky drips and blemishes suggesting horrific wounds or burns. It is a potent image, prefigur- ing the graphic violence of later 1960s photojournalism and operating far from the aesthetic ambiguity of his abstract prints that could, and were, just as easily used for social justice fund-raising as for corporate identity programs. That, at the same time as all this, Calder was equally happy to lend his voice to the campaigns for Democratic candidates demonstrates his political prag- matism. Posters such as those for Abraham Ribicoff’s reelection campaign as senator for Connecticut in 1968 were calculated to be more than merely decorative. Asking for another design from Calder in 1974, Ribicoff’s brief was for a poster that would be “a strong, simple graphic statement that reflects boldness and vigor—freshness but with dependability and a sense of direction in troubled times.” No doubt hoping to capitalize on the name he 11 Alexander Calder, Pour le Viet illustrated advertisements was designed shared with America’s most famously Nam, 1967. Offset lithograph, to lend these causes the imprimatur of honest politician, he requested that “the 29 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. © 2012 Calder Foundation, New York /Artists one of America’s most famous artists: ‘Abe’ should come through clearly at a Rights Society (ARS), New York. established, without being stuffily glance.”52 Calder also supported George Photo, Calder Foundation, New establishment; modern, without risk of McGovern’s 1972 presidential race. For York /Art Resource, New York alienating more moderate constituents. the 1972 Art for McGovern fund-raiser, Just as the more militant activism Calder produced two new lithographs of the New Left, such as the Students designed around the candidate’s name. for a Democratic Society, tended to He also donated a mobile to the exhibi- dominate media coverage of the protest tion, priced at twenty-four thousand movement, so too has art history dollars, which seems to have been among tended to focus on the more confron- the most expensive works sold in aid of tational tactics of groups such as the the McGovern campaign.53 Calder also Art Worker’s Coalition and the Artists’ supported the negative campaigning Protest Committee.50 Not that Calder against McGovern’s opponent, sponsoring

38 Spring 2012 given to it by the workers. However, since it was conceived as one of a series, and followed Falcon, it is officially called Hawk.”56 One wonders if, in the heart of a university campus whose student protests against the Vietnam War had been spurred three years earlier by the presence of military recruiters, the pro- fessed misnaming of iron blades after a major supplier of military aircraft was a reference that could not be tolerated for Calder’s aggressively taut form. But since those on either side of the Vietnam debate were named doves and hawks, the title was bound to have problematic resonances. When the sculpture was moved to the new Berkeley Art Museum the following year (fig. 13), the predatory suggestions of the work’s title were modi- fied for its third incarnation—the suitably 12 Alexander Calder, Mankind an advertisement condemning Nixon’s paradoxical The Hawk for Peace. Must Put an End to War or War conduct in Vietnam that was placed by the Other public incidents in Calder’s Will Put an End to Mankind, 1975. 18 1/2 x 25 5/8 in. Prints and National Committee of Impeachment in late career point to conflicts between Photographs Division, Library the New York Times.54 For Calder, party Calder’s politics and the use of his art of Congress, Washington, D.C. politics were no less viable an ideological as a symbol of state power. In 1965 © 2012 Calder Foundation, platform than his protest activities—a President Johnson’s cultural adviser sug- New York /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York continuity that is nicely figured in his gested the staging of a one-time White later use of John F. Kennedy’s statement, House Arts Festival to show support for “Mankind must put an end to war or war the arts. The event was patently politi- will put an end to mankind” in a 1975 cal in its motives, designed to recapture poster for SANE (fig. 12). the high-profile artistic support that In at least two cases, Calder’s sculp- had been enjoyed by Kennedy, the tures were titled in a way that drew them first president to invite cultural leaders into the arsenal of his more ephemeral (including Calder) to his inauguration.57 statements. In 1966 Calder changed the Instead, the very public withdrawal of name of Object in Five Planes (1965) to the poet Robert Lowell on grounds of Peace and donated the full-size stabile to his opposition to Vietnam and the print- the American delegation to the United ing of his letter refusing the invitation Nations, to be displayed at its New on the front page of the New York Times York headquarters.55 A similar example turned the event into an embarrassing concerns the stabile installed on the media-relations debacle. “Every serious University of California’s Berkeley campus artist knows that he cannot enjoy public in 1969, although Calder’s involvement celebration without making subtle in the change of title is less clear. A note public commitments,” wrote Lowell. in fine print in the dedication pamphlet “At this anguished, delicate and perhaps attempted to clear up any ambiguity determining moment, I feel I am serving around the name of the work, suggesting you and our country best by not taking that it had been a point of contention: part.” Among the artists who followed “During its construction . . . Hawk went Lowell’s suit by refusing the invitation to under the name of Boeing, a nickname participate in the festival was Calder.58

39 American Art 13 Alexander Calder, The Hawk However, the White House still commitment,” but not even this coopera- for Peace, 1968. Painted steel, managed to undermine Calder’s protest. tion was required for Calder’s art to be 156 x 132 1/2 x 276 in. Berkeley Art Museum, University of Widely reproduced in newspapers across called into duty. The event’s organizer California, Gift of Alexander the country the day before the event, the jubilantly reported that Whale II had been Calder in Memory of Kenneth heroic image chosen to promote the festi- sited by J. Carter Brown, director of the Aurand Hayes © 2012 Calder val showed a ballerina executing a grand , such that the Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. jeté over Calder’s Whale II (1937/1964), works by “Calder and . . . [David] Smith Photo, Colin McRae, ca. 1974 which had been lent by MoMA. Dis­ saluted each other.”59 tributed by Associated Press’s wirephoto The day of the event was no less politi- service, the photograph powerfully cized. John Hersey insisted on reading visualized an uncontested celebration from his novel Hiroshima, and Dwight of elite arts on the steps of the White Macdonald and Thomas Hess harassed House—and Calder’s sculpture was at its attendees to sign an antiwar petition. very center. Lowell might have feared that With everyone talking about “the Lowell his presence would represent a “subtle problem,” Phyllis McGinley read a new

40 Spring 2012 media coverage, Johnson, as the event’s organizer later described,

found a reason to call to his office Senator Fulbright, the Rhodes Scholar and Vietnam War critic who was rapidly becoming a hero to “these people.” After the conference the President took the senator for a walk around the White House ground and had a photograph made with the two of them studying Calder’s Whale [II]. The expres­ sion on Lyndon Johnson’s face was somewhat enigmatic. But, anyhow, there it was, the picture in all the afternoon papers, LBJ and the Rhodes Scholar Vietnam critic taking an interest in culture together.60

Bolstering the image of “Johnsonian consensus” that had become so precari- ous, the photograph (fig. 14) positioned Calder’s sculpture as the contemplative locus for bipartisan unity. That Calder and his work were subject to competing and conflicting political positions was nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than by his nomination for the Medal of Freedom by President . Calder declined, responding to Ford in October 1976:

I was pleased to receive your invitation last week, but felt I could not accept in a case where my acceptance would imply my accord with the harsh treatment meted out to conscientious objectors and deserters. As from the start I was against the war and now am working with “amnesty” I didn’t feel I could come to Washington. When there will be more justice for these men I will feel differingly sic[ ].61

Compounding the explicitly politi- 14 Senator J. William Fulbright and verse telling the audience to “praise poets, cal stance of Calder’s refusal was his President Lyndon B. Johnson even when they’re troublesome.” This was acceptance of the French Legion of examine Calder’s Whale II at the White House Festival of the hardly the uplifting apolitical respite that Honor two years before, an award that Arts, 1965. Art © 2012 Calder the president sought. He skipped the first had been reported on by the American Foundation, New York/Artists eight hours of the event, appearing only press.62 Ford’s very public support for Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo, Yoichi Okamoto / briefly to deliver a terse address, leaving Calder’s monumental stabile in Grand Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the First Lady to manage the maelstrom. Rapids, , the president’s Austin, Texas But ever attuned to the importance of hometown, must also have made the

41 American Art rebuke sting, failing to repay the gener- the three missing awardees were simply ous support that Calder had enjoyed “unable to attend” and would receive from the government in his late career. their medals later. The position has been White Cascade (1975) had just been reasserted by the award’s official historian, installed at the Federal Reserve Bank in who wrote in 1996 that Calder’s award , and two major new Calder was “delivered at a later date,” as though commissions were planned for public its willing receipt was no less mandatory buildings in Washington, D.C.—Untitled than the draft itself.65 To the very end, for the National Gallery of Art, and the politicization of Calder’s art—as a for the Hart Senate symbol of patriotic freedom and a monu- Building. A few weeks after sending his ment to state power—remained in tension refusal to Ford, and with the two latter with the dissent that represented its projects incomplete, Calder died on antithesis. November 11, 1976. On New Year’s Day 1977, Ford announced to the press the longest list of In the Balance Presidential Medal of Freedom winners since the award had been introduced by In 1968 Calder’s work was included President Kennedy in 1963. The twenty- in MoMA’s important exhibition one Americans whom he intended to The Machine as Seen at the End of the honor included Nelson Rockefeller, Lady Mechanical Age. “This exhibition,” Bird Johnson, and the late Alexander wrote the curator, “is dedicated to the Calder. Little over a week later, the mechanical machine, the great creator ceremony was held at the White House. and destroyer, at a difficult moment in Ignoring Calder’s refusal to accept the its life.”66 Its tale of the rise and fall of award, Ford awarded Calder the medal machine-age utopianism culminated anyway. The official citation for his with Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New Presidential Medal of Freedom praised York (1960), the kinetic sculpture that the artist in terms that softly implicated had famously performed its shambolic his work in American patriotism, praising self-destruction in MoMA’s courtyard him for contributing “spirit and vital- a decade earlier. If Tinguely’s sculpture ity to his country” and claiming that owed some of its form to Calder’s pro- “[t]he face of America is richer and more totypes, it hardly shared the modernist beautiful for the many examples of his optimism of Calder’s machines for per- imagination which cover it.” One cannot petual motion. help but sense a sly justification for Ford’s Yet there were intriguing signs that exploitation of Calder’s name when he Calder’s ebullient abstractions were being described Calder’s sculpture as “a truly drawn into a more problematic posi- ,” as though the very publicness tion. Calder’s A Universe (1934) was also of his art validated the nation’s claim on included in the exhibition—and almost as its politics.63 if inspired by the collapse of the Tinguely, The Washington Post revealed that gave its own performance of failure. As Louisa Calder’s absence from the cer- one newspaper reported: emony represented a “boycott” of the award. “My husband felt and the family Last week as the lunarnauts sailed home, feels very strongly about freedom. In our Alexander Calder’s A Universe, 1934 went telegram to President Ford we said that bust. It was just an accident. The motor­ freedom should be for everyone,” she told ized mobile in New York City’s Museum of the newspaper.64 Most newspapers toed Modern Art had slipped a string. One of the the White House line, reporting that satellites which wound its curving way thru

42 Spring 2012 an airy, wiry armillary wouldn’t move. The Life is pleasure or pain, sanity or insanity, museum staff, alert as always, had turned off peace or turbulence. Our existence teeters the switch and placed two ordinary looking between winning and losing balance. We cards guaranteed to produce a teleologic struggle to accommodate unexpected events, shiver: “Do Not Touch,” “Out of Order.”67 to temper security with risk or the reverse. When did we last read a newspaper that The work was illustrated, and the caption did not warn of imperilled relationships brought home the cosmic disorder sym- of ecology, monetary and stock markets, bolized by the accident: “The universe was missile systems and branches of government? out of order at the Museum of Modern Détente and the Gallup Poll are synonymous Art.” Unlike the predetermined failure with shifting power confrontations. . . . The of Tinguely’s work, exhibited only via its artist who can realize the vision of a harmo­ documentation, the unexpected and very nious existence has our attention.69 public malfunction of Calder’s sculpture could hardly have been more fitting. This Elsen may have considered the balance of mechanical failure served as an accidental Calder’s sculpture an antidote for unstable epigraph for the exhibition itself. times, but his inability to see Calder’s At the end of the machine age, Calder’s sculpture outside the contradictions and claim to produce a powerfully national conflicts of their social context is telling, sculpture was increasingly insecure. for it was precisely “shifting power Just as the airplane had come to be as confrontations” that underpinned many powerful a sign for war and destruction of the public uses of Calder sculpture.70 as it was for peace, and the skyscraper Even aside from the explicitly ideological as much a symbol for alienation as civic stance taken by specific Calder works, aspiration, by the late sixties, Calder’s his art was inevitably understood via the optimistic looked distinctly media representations of his sociopolitical tarnished—as though the welded seams position, a space in which resistance could and haphazard braces in his stabiles might coexist with the various endorsements begin to split from the manifold ideologi- constructed by his patrons. At once a cal pressures brought to bear on them. By symbol of freedom and patriotism and a the time Calder’s (1970)— contradictory expression of dissent and commissioned for New York’s most protest, Calder’s late work was indeed audacious renewal project, the World characterized by unstable motives. Trade Center—was crushed on September As abstract design became an increas- 11, 2001, the unfortunate prescience of its ingly familiar mode of communication title made it difficult to see the work’s fate in twentieth-century visual culture, the as disconnected from America’s dimin- entanglement of an art of apparently ished claims to global hegemony. purely formal elements—shape, color, The sense that the confident abstrac- and movement—in the business of tion and formal balance of Calder’s politics importantly demonstrates the sculpture might be compensating for powerfully propagandist role that had contrary social realities was, however, not emerged for abstraction under industrial- a new theme. Writing in 1955, one critic ized capitalism. Preeminently suited to predicted that “Alexander Calder will the demands of communicative flexibility, laugh, one imagines, even in interstellar Calder’s art slipped as smoothly into the space. His mobiles and stabiles bring the role of propagandist as it did into that of refreshing touch of humor to a tensed activist. If totalitarian regimes embraced world.”68 Albert Elsen’s opening remarks realist art for its ability to support the for the catalogue of a Calder retrospective social order of the state didactically—as in 1974 followed a similar line: in Clement Greenberg’s famous account,

43 American Art whereby avant-garde art is “too difficult Theodor Adorno’s claim that to write to inject effective propaganda into”71— poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. But Calder provides a crucial complication abstraction far from guaranteed the at the opposite aesthetic extreme, where apolitical art that Calder, and many of the apparent symbolic emptiness of his subsequent interpreters, may have abstraction made it not simply vulnerable preferred. Calder might rarely have to being co-opted but able to be used depicted the conflicts of his time, but simultaneously by the most diametrically far from being disengaged from such opposed politics. events, his art was inextricably linked to In an interview in 1973, Calder the negotiation of power in mid- to late seemed certain that art should not twentieth-century America. As Serge attempt to represent the very tragedies Guilbaut has memorably termed the that he sought to prevent through his paradox in relation to abstract expres- advocacy for peace and freedom: “I sionism, “an art whose stubborn will to do not think . . . that an artist can remain apolitical became, for that very represent, in sculpture, tragedies such as reason, a powerful instrument of propa- Pearl Harbor, the atomic bomb or war ganda . . . for art to be politicized it had in general.”72 Here, his concerns about to be apolitical.”73 Serving contradictory the unrepresentability of atrocity echo ends in the struggles of Vietnam and the those of many others—from Dwight Cold War, the uses to which Calder’s art Macdonald’s criticism of the “moral were put became more entangled in the deficiency” of the naturalism of John ideological terrain of postwar America Hersey’s Hiroshima to, most notoriously, than he might have liked to imagine.

Notes

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Aesthetics, Balance, Joy, ed. Warren (New York: Engineering, December 1998, 52–57; trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Thames and Hudson, 2010), 21. and L. Joy Sperling, “The Popular Owen, 1964), 90. Calder scholarship Sources of Calder’s Circus,” Journal is dominated by essays commissioned 2 One of the few dedicated surveys of of American Culture 17, no. 4 (2004): for museum exhibition catalogues. Calder’s late work is Joan Marter, 1–14. While not properly formalist, their rev- “Alexander Calder’s Stabiles: erent tone has often excluded more Monumental Public Sculpture in 3 See the essays collected in Jane Beckett critical perspectives. Jed Perl, the art America,” American Art Journal 11, no. and Fiona Russell, eds., Henry Moore: critic of the New Republic and author 3 (July 1979): 75–85. The now volumi- Critical Essays (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, of a planned biography of Calder, nous and rich scholarship on Calder’s 2003); and Anne Middleton Wagner, exemplifies such hagiographic ten- early career includes Alexander Calder: Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern dencies. See, for instance, Perl, The Paris Years (New York: Whitney British Sculpture (New Haven: Yale “Calder’s Imagination,” in A. S. C. Museum of American Art, 2008); Univ. Press, 2005). Rower, Calder: Sculptor of Air (Milan: Mark Rosenthal, The Surreal Calder Motta, 2009). A corresponding anti- (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2005); 4 The phrase “cultural cold war” comes intellectual current is typified by Susan Davidson, and from Frances Stonor Saunders, The Lynne Warren’s recent claim that Alexander Calder: Between Surrealism Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the “One needn’t read the Kabbalah, and Abstraction (New York: L&M Arts, World of Arts and Letters (New York: plumb artist statements or manifes- 2010); and Elizabeth Hutton Turner New Press, 2000). Useful surveys of tos, have read philosophy, delve into and Oliver Wick, Calder/Miró (London: Cold War scholarship on American the psycho-sexual depths of an art- Philip Wilson Publishers in collabora- painting include Francis Frascina, ist’s autobiography, or be conversant tion with the Phillips Collection and “Looking Forward, Looking Back: with the socio-political context of Fondation Beyeler, 2004). Other more 1985–1999,” in Pollock and After: the artwork to appreciate a Calder.” specifically sociohistorical accounts of The Critical Debate, ed. Frascina, Warren, “Alexander Calder and Calder’s early career in America include 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, Contemporary Art,” in Alexander Joan Marter, “The Engineer behind 2000), 1–25; and Ellen G. Landau, Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Alexander Calder’s Art,” Mechanical “: Changing

44 Spring 2012 Methodologies for Interpreting (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of 18 Exposition Universelle et Internationale Meaning,” in Reading Abstract Art, 1998), 279. de Bruxelles, 50 ans d’art moderne Expressionism: Context and Critique, ed. (Brussels: Éditions de la Connaissance, Landau (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 12 Aline B. Louchheim, “Cultural 1958) lists two Calder works. 2005), 1–121. Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect,” New York Times, January 3, 1954, SM36; 19 Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: 5 Quoted in Selden Rodman, Aline B. Louchheim, “Modern Art Exhibiting American Culture Abroad Conversations with Artists (New York: Fete Excites São Paulo: Calder Shares in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Capricorn Books, 1961), 140. Honors with Picasso,” New York Times, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), December 1, 1953, J2. 89. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible 6 Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect Empire: America’s Advance through was first seen at Christopher Grimes 13 Nelson A. Rockefeller was both Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Gallery, , May 23–July 3, MoMA’s president and the treasurer Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007), 353. 2009. The exhibition was shown again of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. See at Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York, Helen M. Franc, “The Early Years 20 “Our Image at Brussels,” Life, July 14, October 14–November 13, 2010. The of the International Program and 1958, 44. recent touring exhibition Alexander Council,” in The Museum of Modern Calder and Contemporary Art, which Art at Mid-Century: At Home and 21 Frank Seiberling, Looking into Art (New pairs contemporary practice with Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1959), Calder originals, excludes Yazbeck’s York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 202. René d’Harnoncourt, “Challenge work. The catalogue claims Yazbeck’s 109–49. and Promise: Modern Art and Modern art merely “refers to Calder . . . in the Society,” Magazine of Art 41, no. 7 archetypal postmodern way.” Warren, 14 Press Office, “Report on Activities of (1948): 252. “Alexander Calder and Contemporary Museum of Modern Art’s International Art,” 25. Exhibition Program,” Museum of 22 Clement Greenberg, “The European Modern Art, New York, 1956. View of American Art,” in The Collected 7 Calder’s position in the propagandist Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956 program of this complex is well captured 15 Serge Guilbaut, “Ménage à trois: Paris, , ed. John New York, São Paulo, and the Love of O’Brian (: Univ. of Chicago in Monica Boulton, “The Politics of Modern Art,” in Internationalizing the Press, 1995), 61. Abstraction: The Tenth Inter-American History of American Art, ed. Barbara Conference Caracas, Venezuela, 1954,” Groseclose and Jochen Wierich 23 Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Latin Americanist 52, no. 1 (2008): 85. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Takes Command: A Contribution to Univ. Press, 2009), 160, 165. The dis- Anonymous History (New York: Oxford 8 In the essays collected in Frascina’s puted degree of “collusion” between Univ. Press, 1948), 476–77. Pollock and After, for instance, MoMA and the United States Calder is mentioned only in Michael Information Agency is described in 24 Quoted in Jane Loeffler, “The Archi­ Kimmelman’s 1994 counterrevision- Nancy Jachec, “Abstract Expressionism tecture of Diplomacy: Heyday of the ist essay commissioned by MoMA and the International Council,” in United States Embassy-Building in response to the allegations of The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Program, 1954–1960,” Journal of the earlier scholarship. See Kimmelman, Expressionism, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Society of Architectural Historians 49, “Revisiting the Revisionists: The Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 157–209. no. 3 (1990): 251. Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 16 “Art of U.S. Is Shown at Museum in 25 Josep Lluís Sert, “Drawings, Plans 294–306, esp. 297–99. Paris,” New York Times, April 25, 1953, and Project-Related Material: United 13. Modern Art in the United States: States Embassy—Baghdad,” Josep 9 Gay McDonald, “Selling the American A Selection from the Collections of the Lluís Sert Collection, Frances Loeb Dream: MoMA, Industrial Design and Museum of Modern Art, New York Library, Harvard Design School, Folder Post-War France,” Journal of Design (London: Tate Gallery, 1956). Franc, B019b. On Sert’s building, see Samuel History 17, no. 4 (2004): 409. The com- “The Early Years of the International Isenstadt, “ ‘Faith in a Better Future’: plaint is not new: the “marginalized” Program and Council,” 126–28. Josep Lluís Sert’s American Embassy position of sculpture in this scholar- Documenta (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, in Baghdad,” Journal of Architectural ship was also alleged in Joan Marter, 1955) lists five Calder works, whereas Education 50, no. 3 (1997): 172–88. “Postwar Sculpture Re/viewed,” Art Documenta II—Skulptur (Cologne: Donna M. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Journal 53, no. 4 (1994): 20. Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1959) Muse: United States Arts Policy and the lists four. National Endowment for the Arts, 1965– 10 Aline B. Louchheim, “11 Sculptors Will 1980 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Represent U.S. at International Contest 17 “Moscow to See Modern U.S. Art,” Carolina Press, 2004), 157–58. Grace in London,” New York Times, January New York Times, May 31, 1959, 60. Glueck, “Home-Grown Art Blooms 28, 1953, 29. “U.S. Abstract Art Arouses Russians,” in U.S. Missions,” New York Times, New York Times, June 11, 1959, 3. July 6, 1965, 1. 11 Marla Prather, “1953–1976,” in Alfred H. Barr, “Is Modern Art Prather, A. S. C. Rower, and Pierre Communistic?” New York Times 26 David Craven, Abstract Expressionism Arnauld, Alexander Calder, 1898–1976 Magazine, December 14, 1952, 22. as Cultural Critique: Dissent during

45 American Art the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Calder’s Almadén Mercury Fountain,” 45 Advertisement, “A New Year, Hope for Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 10. Marsyas 16 (1972–73): 97–106. New World,” New York Times, January Some of Calder’s files, obtained via Tuchman criticizes inaccuracies in 2, 1966, 137. “Branch of SANE Formed Freedom of Information requests by a another account, which makes an excep- in Paris,” Herald-Tribune, June 25, New York Times journalist, are outlined tion of its politics by claiming that 1966, 19. in Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: “Although Calder has little interest in Exposing the Secret War against America’s politics or world affairs, he did on one 46 Advertisement, “On Vietnam,” New York Greatest Authors (New York: Ballantine occasion, in the interest of art, pose as Times, June 5, 1966, 208. Books, 1989), 208–12. “Information a Spanish Loyalist.” Geoffrey Hellman, from the Files of the Committee on “Everything Is Mobile,” New Yorker, 47 Jean Lipman, Calder’s Universe (London: Un-American Activities, United States October 4, 1941, 29. For the quote, see Thames and Hudson, 1977), 337. The House of Representatives,” Cong. Rec. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, photograph of Calder protesting is avail- H3521 (April 4, 1952). The other artists eds., Artists against War and Fascism: able at http://www.gettyimages.com from the exhibition listed as having Papers of the First American Artists /detail/95576582/Premium-Archive. files were Antonio Frasconi, Milton Congress (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Goldstein, Robert Gwathmey, Leona Univ. Press, 1986), 34. Calder has been 48 Other signatories included Allen Pierce, William Rose, Alfred Russell, characterized as a “liberal” among the Ginsberg, Dwight Macdonald, Benjamin and Louis Schanker. leftist majority of the congress, which Spock, Noam Chomsky, and Herbert was later used by HUAC as evidence Marcuse. See Michael Foley, Confronting 27 Alexander Calder, Alexander Calder: An of artists’ communist sympathies. See the War Machine: Draft Resistance during Autobiography with Pictures (London: Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of Allen Lane, 1967), 185. American Artists and the Communist North Carolina Press, 2003), 95. Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: 28 Ben Shahn, “The Artist and the Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 123. 49 “Respectable and decorous”: David Levy, Politicians,” Art News 52, no. 5 (1953): The Debate over Vietnam (Baltimore: 35. Congress accused Shahn of having 37 Jacques Guicharnaud, Modern French Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), communist sympathies, and he lost com- Theatre: From Giraudoux to Genet 135. “Middle-class . . . and dignity mercial illustration work as a result. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), and restraint”: Milton Katz, “Peace Calder was also friends with the black- Liberals and Vietnam: SANE and the 177. Dorothy Seiberling, “Calder: listed actor Burgess Meredith, who Politics of ‘Responsible’ Protest,” Peace His Gyrating ‘Mobile’ Art Wins narrated the film Works of Calder and for and Change 9, nos. 2–3 (1983): 21, 24. International Fame and Prizes,” Life, whom Calder designed sets for a 1950 Mitchell Goodman, “The Line of Most August 25, 1952, 86. musical. Resistance,” New York Times, March 31, 1968, SM138. 38 Henri Pichette, Nucléa (Paris: Théâtre 29 Fraser MacDonald, “Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War,” History of National Populaire, 1952), 38: “la 50 Such radical practices are well docu- Photography 28, no. 4 (2004): 362. poudre de guerre parle le plus pur mented in Francis Frascina, Art, Politics langage de la diplomatie.” and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in 30 Calder is listed among the “American Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester Committee” in the group’s advertise- 39 Advertisement, “America Needs a Univ. Press, 1999); and Julia Bryan- ment “We Put Freedom First,” New York New Foreign Policy,” New York Times, Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in Times, April 1, 1951, 169. Others listed October 16, 1958, 40. the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: Univ. of include Clement Greenberg and Robert California Press, 2009). Motherwell. 40 Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers, 211. 51 Calder’s judging of the No More War 31 XXth Century Masterpieces (London: 41 Leonard Folgarait, So Far from Heaven: poster competition was advertised on the Congress for Cultural Freedom with the David Alfaro Siqueiros’ The March of rear cover of Avant Garde, January 1968. Arts Council, 1952), 4. Humanity and Mexican Revolutionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. 52 Quoted in Eric M. Zafran, Calder 32 Michael Gibson, Calder (London: Art Press, 1987), 19, 39–44. in Connecticut (New York: Rizzoli Data, 1988), 74. International Publications in association 42 Sheila Isenberg, A Hero of Our Own: The with Museum of 33 Quoted in ibid., 93. Story of Varian Fry (New York: Random Art, 2000), 153. House, 2005), 326. 34 John Russell, “Calder’s Universe 53 Both lithographs were illustrated in Enlivens Ark,” New York Times, October 43 Advertisement, “An Appeal to American William Wilson, “A Graphic Gallery 14, 1976, 43. Jews from Pablo Casals,” Commentary of Political Palettes,” , 48, no. 6 (1969): 22. October 26, 1972, C1. Jean Kennedy, 35 Calder, Calder: An Autobiography with the wife of Ted Kennedy, was photo- Pictures, 158. 44 Nancy Macdonald, Homage to the graphed looking at one of the posters Spanish Exiles: Voices from the Spanish in the Washington Post. See Sally 36 For a detailed account of the project, Civil War (New York: Insight Books, Quinn, “The Scene: This, That and the see Phyllis Tuchman, “Alexander 1987), 146–48. Other Thing Night for McGovern,”

46 Spring 2012 Washington Post, September 22, Patron: The United States Government 66 Pontus Hulten, The Machine as Seen 1972, 1. The price of Calder’s mobile and the Arts, 1943–1965 (Philadelphia: at the End of the Mechanical Age (New is listed in Paul Richard, “The Sale: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 6. Flashy List of Backers,” Washington 208–13. Quoted in Richard F. Shepard, Post, September 22, 1972, 1. Diana “Robert Lowell Rebuffs Johnson as 67 Thomas Willis, “Playful Terrors of Our Loercher, “‘Apolitical’ Artists Give for Protest over Foreign Policy,” New York Time,” , January 5, McGovern,” Christian Science Monitor, Times, June 3, 1965, 2. According to 1969, F2. September 25, 1972, 6, notes that “the Dwight Macdonald, Calder’s refusal was most expensive work sold as of this “because of our present foreign policy.” 68 William Sener Rusk, “New Ways of writing rang up $24,000.” The total Macdonald, “A Day at the White Seeing,” College Art Journal 15, no. 1 profit of the sale was “nearly $100,000.” House,” New York Review of Books, July (1955): 44. 15, 1965, 11. 54 See George Gent, “Presidential Alexander Calder: A Retro­ Campaign Stirs the Arts Communities,” 69 Albert Elsen, 59 For an example of the use of the image, spective Exhibition (Chicago: Museum New York Times, September 26, see “White House Arts Festival on 1972, 42. National Committee for of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1974), Today; Some Won’t Attend,” Chicago unpaginated. Impeachment, advertisement, “A Tribune, June 14, 1965, 3. Eric F. Resolution to Impeach Richard M. Goldman, “The White House and 70 Such meanings remain contested. Nixon as President of the United States,” the Intellectuals,” Harper’s Magazine, New York Times Quoting Lisa Ann Favero’s opinion , May 31, 1972, 23. January 1969, 43. that Yazbeck’s UNstabile Mobile (2007) 55 This is despite Calder’s insistence on embodied the “heightened instability” of 60 Goldman, “The White House and the the insignificance of his titles. See, for the Iraq war (Favero, Sculpture 26, no. 8 Intellectuals,” 44. instance, Gibson, Calder, 12. “U.S. [October 2007]: 75), Warren (Alexander Mission to U.N. Gets Calder Gift,” Calder and Contemporary Art, 27n16) 61 “Letter from Alexander Calder to Gerald New York Times, February 8, 1966, responded that “the writer perhaps Ford,” Calder Foundation, http://calder 34. See also A. S. C. Rower, “Plaques never has the opportunity to observe d’immatriculation,” in Alexander Calder, .org/chronology/period/1953-1976/230. Calder contributed a lithograph for that Calder mobiles, while undoubtedly 1898–1976 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne kinetic, are hardly unstable.” de la Ville de Paris, 1996), 38. Amnesty International’s portfolio for the Year of Prisoners of Conscience (1977). 71 Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde 56 Herschel B. Chipp, “Dedication,” in and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays Dedication of the Hawk 62 Albin Krebs, “Notes on People,” New [ ] (Berkeley: and Criticism, vol. 2, Perceptions and Univ. of California, 1970), unpaginated. York Times, February 6, 1974, 43. Judgements, 1939–1944, ed. John I am grateful for the assistance of Steven O’Brian (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Smith in locating this source. 63 Bruce Wetterau, The Presidential Medal of Freedom: Winners and Their Press, 1986), 20. 57 “Kennedys Invite Leaders in Arts,” Achievements (Washington, D.C.: New York Times, January 15, 1961, 32. Congressional Quarterly, 1996), 225. 72 Quoted in Maurice Bruzeau, Calder (New York: Harry Abrams, 1979), 49. 58 The White House Arts Festival affair 64 Quoted in Jacqueline Trescott, “The is described in David A. Smith, Medal of Freedom Awards,” Washington 73 Serge Guilbaut, “The New Adventures Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art Post, January 11, 1977, B1. of the Avant-Garde in America: and Politics in American Democracy Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 74–75; 65 Wetterau, The Presidential Medal of to the New Liberalism of the ‘Vital and Gary O. Larson, The Reluctant Freedom, 226. Center,’” October 15 (Winter 1980): 75.

47 American Art