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An art historian investigates the technical grounding of the sculptor's imagination. By Joan M. Marter LEXANDER C ALDER IS renowned as the crea tor o f his experiments with wire, sheet metal, and wood. two of the grea test sc ulptural innovations of this Later, while Calder w as a student at Lowell High Acentury: mobiles, those m agical moving sc ulp­ School in San Francisco, he oft en visited his fa ther's stu ­ tures hang in g in maj o r art muse ums and m o dernist dio on the grounds of the Panama-Paci fi c Exposition of building lobbies ac ross the globe, and stabiles, the large­ 1915 , w here Calder senior was overseeing the design and scale abstract constructions that ]jghten th e mood of oth­ production of conunemorative sc ulpture. Sandy recalled erwise stark public spaces in many cities. Few art lovers his visit to the studio in a large iron workshop: kn ow, however, that prior to se tting out on his highly [IJ was very much interested in th e pointing mac hine successful artistic career, Calder received an engineering for enlarging small sc ulpture. This consisted of two educa tion (predominantly in mechanics) from Stevens parallel needles, one longer than the other, according Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. to the enlargement. It worked with a parall elogram.

To the engineer's eye, C alder's mechanical background Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/120/12/53/6382001/me-1998-dec2.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The small sculpture and the framework for the large nught be sometlUng less than a revelation, given the evi­ sculpture were pl aced o n two turntabl es, which dent technical proficiency exhibited by the thousa nds turned together through sprockets and bicycle chain of artworks-ranging from matchbox-size mobiles to ... I'd be particul arly fasc inated by the lTlechanics, the seven-story-tall stabiles-he produced. Notorious for his rotating lTlOti o ns and the parall el needles o f the reluctance to comment on his own work, Calder has for process. (Calder, A utobiography) several decades fascinated art hjstorians and critics seek­ ing to identifY the sources of his artisti c vision. These Calder's attraction to this pointing device would actual­ analyses have naturally fo cused on influential modern art ly lead, years later, to a m otorized construction entitled movem ents of the 1920s and 1930s, including construc­ Pantograph (1933). But this recollection of Ius youth also tivism, surrealism , D ada, and the Bauhaus school, as indicates that in 191 5 he was more interes ted in tinker­ Calder's main creative antecedents. ing with m ac hines than in claiming Though tlus conventional interpretive Ius position as the third generation of approac h has yielded many useful in­ Calder sculptors in America. sights, the significance of the sculptor's Eventually, Calder's fascinati on with technical and engineering expertise has construction and industrial m aterials become increasingly cl ear in recent led him to decide to study mechanical yea rs. The ways Calder combined his engineering. His parents were pleased; engineering skills and personal ingenu­ they had disc ouraged their children ity with his knowledge of the ava nt­ from beconu ng artists, because it was garde deserve closer considerati on than a life fill ed with hardships and eco­ they have received. Calder 's ac hieve­ nomic uncertainty. " I guess that was ment shows how mechanical engineer­ the only profession I had hea rd of ex­ i.n g principles can have an important, if cept for 'artist,' and [ like mechalucs," un expected, effect on fields outside the wrote Calderin the 1950s. [n1915, profession, particularly on the develop­ Alexander Calder, 1937. Calder enrolled at the Stevens Insti­ ment of a Uluqu e artistic conception. tute, where he obtained a bachelor's Born 100 years ago, "Sandy" Calder was the son and degree in engineering four years later. College records grandson of well-known sculptors who worked in the tra­ indicate that the future artist excell ed in m echanical ditional Bea ux-Arts style. Though inunersed in an artistic drawing, descriptive geometry, mechalu cal engineering lrulieu at home, Calder's innate talent for working with laboratory, and applied b neti cs. mechanical apparatus and m ateri als was encouraged by His training in physics and kineti cs se rved him well in both his parents as well as by ru s fa ther's brother, Ronald his later experiments with motorized devices and with . Calder, the mechanically incli ned member of the fanUl y. wind- driven m obiles made fro m m aterials of varying Fo r example, when Calder was nine years old and weights and densiti es. In the few written statem ents he living in Pasa dena, Calif. , his uncle Ron helped him made about his earl y mobiles, Calder asc ribed som e of construct a special coaster wagon. After this experi ence, his concepts of motion to the influential D adaist M arcel the youngster was eager to set up his own workshop. At Duch amp, the Italian futurists, and the noted cubist that point, according to Calder's autobiography, " [ got Fernand U~ ge r 's film Ballet Meca niq ~ l e, but he used sci­ my first tools, and was given the cellar with its windows entific terminology to explain his method of construct­ as a workshop. M other and Father were all for my efforts ing kineti c devices. T he technical precision and the to build things myse lf .. . " There, and in subse qu ent equilibrium found in Calder's later m o to rized and workshops in other homes, the yo ung Calder continued wind- drive n m obiles are partly indebted to the engi­ neering curriculum at Stevens. joa//. M. Marter, a professor of art history. at R u tgers, After graduation, Sandy C alder tried many diffe rent T he State UniIJersity of New j ers ey, i//. New Brunswick, jobs, including an ass ista.ntship to a hydrau]j cs engineer. is the author of A lexand er Calder (Cambridge Unfortunately, none of them proved satisfactory. As his UlI i IJersity Press, 1997, paperback edition). friend Eli zabeth Hawes w rote in 1928, Calder " had to

M EC H ANI CA L ENG I NEERI NG IJ ECEMU EI\. 1998 53 spend a lot of time fi nding o ut he things out of wire before-j ewelry, was n't an engineer." For instance, "In toys-but this was my first attempt to June 1922 ... Calder found a position represent an animal in' wire." as a fireman on th e pass enger ship These playful wire animals and fi g- H .F A lexander, traveling from N ew ures occupied him for the next five York to San Francisco via the Panama years and beyond. Calder's cleverly de- Canal. His mechanical ingenuity was signed crea tures and characters, toy- put to use. During the voyage, Calder like works that today might be called ri gged up a baffl e to direct fres h air "acti on fi gures" from their uncanny toward him as he worked in the boil- ability to ape natural postures and mo- er room ." It was on this trip that the tions, gained particular notice in Paris, "wonders of the universe" were w here he now made regular visits. Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/120/12/53/6382001/me-1998-dec2.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 impressed upon him. H e writes in C ald er's amusing crea tions were abl e his auto biog raphy : " It was ea rly to mimic a frog's jump, or the way a one m o rning on a calm sea, o ff duck bobs forwa rd. Eventually, the Guatemala, when over my couch-a artist assembled a troupe of these wire coil of rope-1 saw the beginning of sculptures into his Circus, a miniature a fi ery red sunrise on one side and the wire-frame big top populated by de- moon looking like a silver coin on lightful carnival pel{ormers and circus the other. O f the whole trip this im- animals, which Calder brought to life pressed most of all ; it left me with a in impro mptu performances in his lasting sensation of the solar system ." apartment (a nd for which he som e- According to Calder, he m ade the times charged a fee to pay the rent). final decision to study art after seek- Soon, the American expatriate's exu- ing employm ent w ith a Canadian Aztec Josephine Baker, 1942. berant Circus nights became a much- logging engineer, a friend of his father's, who advise d sought-after diversion for the Parisian avant-garde. him to do what he really wanted to do. Although none In an article for the N ew York Herald in 1927 , C alder of the positions he had found as an engineer really sa tis- wrote: "It seems that during all of this time I could never fi ed him, som e would prove useful in his later work. forget my training at Stevens, for I started experimenting Decades later, for example, Calder would compare his with toys in a mechanical way. I could not experiment mobiles designed for the open air to sailing vessels, and with a mechanism, as it was too expensive and too bulky, in his late yea rs he constructed giant stabiles by using so I built miniature instruments. From that the toy idea templates like those used in shipya rds. suggested itself to me, so I fi gured I might as well turn my D espite choosing an artisti c ca reer, Cald er remained efforts to something that would bring remuneration." very much the enginee r. In 1925 , he needed a timepi ece According to ano ther America n artist, Clay Spohn, for the sm all bedroom of his apartment in M anhattan, Calder received several commissions for commercial and instead of simply purchasing a clock, he designed a work during his initial stay in Paris: wire ro oster to use as a sundial. In his autobiography, he recalled: " I had no clock and faced so uth, so I m ade a Calder got an idea for a mechani cal display piece for sundial with a piece of wire-a wire rooster on a ve rtica l a cl eaning and pressing establishment on the Boule­ rod with radiating lines indica ting the hours. I'd made vard R as pail .. . It was made of wire and ca rdboard with a clock attac hment so th at it would operate continuously. T he cardboard was attached to th e wire, whi ch in turn was attac hed to th e clock in some way. On one pi ece of cardboa rd there was painted a man bending over with a surprised look on his face and his arms and hands outstretched. T his was a cutout to fit the dim ensions of the man. Then th ere was a another piece of card­ board cut to resemble just a leg and foo t (without showing w here it ca me from). E"~o often.the leg and foot would move up and ki ck th e man bending over-in th e sea t of th e pants, causing the man to be lift­ Dog, 1909. ed off th e ground. It was a very hu-

54 DECEM BER 1998 M ECH AN I CAL ENG I NEERI NG Contact with members of Abstraction-Creation, a Paris-based artists' group that Calder joined in 1931, and his friendship with artists such as the abstract painter Joan Miro, the scu1ptor Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp un­ doubtedly proVided the catalyst for his experimentation with an abstract idiom. But there are other factors to be considered in the analysis of Calder's early preference for cosmic imagery and his rapid development of a mature aesthetic based on static and kinetic elements. Calder often acknowledged that his first impulse to work in the abstract resulted from a visit to Piet Mondrian's stu­ dio in the fall of 1930. Several weeks after his visit to the

atelier of the Dutch abstract artist, Calder made his first Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/120/12/53/6382001/me-1998-dec2.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 abstract constructions. In Mondrian's studio the American had seen a white wall with cardboard rectangles of varying colors tacked upon it. This wall actually impressed him more than Mondrian's paintings, and Calder proposed that the rectangles could be made "to oscillate in different di­ rections, and at different amplitudes." The visit proved to be the "shock that started things," as he said later. Mter the 1930s, the most innovative and resourceful decade of Calder's career, images of the cosmos dominat­ ed his artistic production and were repeatedly mentioned in' the artist's statements about his work. "From the be­ ginning of my abstract work, even when it might not have seemed so, I felt there was no better model for me

Form Against Yellow, 1936. to choose than the Universe," he wrote in the Museum oJ Modern Art Bulletin in 1951. morous sort of thing. Just the sort of thing the French When Calder decided to produce plastic models of the would 'be amused with. And it did attract consider­ universe, he examined existing astronomical instruments as able attention. a basis for his personal conception, while maintaining an In a similar case, the mischievous Calder devised a wire dog that he attached to a spig­ ot in Spanish sculptor Jose de Creeft's studio. The dog lifted its hind leg when the water was turned on. Calder's most important innovation in the development of wire sculpture was the sus­ pension of his wire forms from a single wire thread. A small wood-and-wire caricature of a monkey was the first, soon followed by sever­ al caricatures ofJo se phi ne Baker, the star of La Revue Negre at the Folies Bergere and an inter­ national sensation in 1925. The American­ born Baker had come to Paris at the age of 19, and she startled European audiences with her uninhibited sexuality and exuberant dancing. Calder intended the supple wire body to be free to quiver, sway, and rotate at will, an apt parallel to the agility and sensuality of actual performances by the "Ebony Venus." These suspended wire constructions took Calder one step closer to the creation of the wind­ Black Beast, 1940. driven mobiles of the 1930s. Even before he began composing abstract elements to form mobiles, interest in recent scientific speculation. Newspaper head­ Calder had taken into account the delicate equilibrium lines of the early 1930s were full of reports of astronomical the sculpture would need to hang properly and move discoveries, such as the first sightings of PIu to, numerous freely. It was Calder's first essay in kineticism, an interest asteroids, and other galaxies, not to mention startling evi­ that occupied him for decades thereafter. dence of the expansion of the universe and Einstein's theo-

ME C H AN IC AL ENGI N EERI NG DEC EMBER 1998 55 Fig Hratif in 1932, Calder prepare d a statement to accompany a reproducti on of Little Universe, an open wire orb re­ sembling an arrnillary sphere: How does art come into being? Out of volumes, motion, spaces carved out within th e surrounding space, the universe. Out of clifferent mass­ es, tight, heavy, middling, achieved by variations of size or colo r. Out of clirectional lines- vectors represent­

ing motion, velocity, acceleration, Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/120/12/53/6382001/me-1998-dec2.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 energy, etc.-li nes which form sig­ nifi cant angles and directi ons, nu k­ ing up on e or several to talities. Spaces or volumes, crea ted by the slightest opposition to their masses, or penetrated by vectors, traversed by momentum. None of this fixed. Steel Fish, 1934. Eac h element ca n move, shift, or ry of relativity. The sculptor also allowed that he had been sway back and forth in a changing relation to each of fascin ated by "eighteenth-century toys demonstrating the the other elements in the universe . Thus, th ey reveal plan etary system." These armillary spheres and orreries not only isolated moments, but a physical law or valia­ may have come to his attention during visits to the ti on an-lOng the elements of life. Not e:>-.1:ractions, but Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where Calder was born abstractions. Abstrac ti ons which resemble no living and where he spent many of his childhood years. things except by their manner of reacting. In reply to a query posed by curators at N ew York Within a year of the visit to Mondrian, Calder's concept City's Museum of Modern Art, C alder said: of abstrac t forms in motion was fu lly realized with the creation of the mobile, but even his initial constructions r think at the time [1 930] and practi cally ever sin ce, the manifest a racli cal change in his work. The witty wire cari­ underlying sense of fOl1n in my work has been the sys­ catures of animals and acrobats were abandoned for spheres, tem of the Universe, or part thereof For that is a rather arcs, and constellations accompanied by analytical descrip- large model to work from·. What I mean is that th e idea of detac hed bodi es fl oating in space, of different sizes and den­ sities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and sur­ rounding and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me th e ideal source for fo rm. I would have them depl oyed , some nearer together and some at immense di stan ces. And great clisparity among all the qualities of th ese bodies, and th eir mo­ tions as well. A very exciting moment for me was at the plan­ Finny Fish , 1948. etarium-when th e mac hin e was run fas t for th e purpose of explaining its opera­ tions that confirmed the scientific orientation of his vision, tion: a planet moved al ong a straight line, then sudden­ for C alder combined his interest in cosmic imagery with ly made a complete loop of360 degrees off to one side, th e technical mastery of physical principles that resulted and th en went off in a straight lin e in its ori ginal clirec­ from his training as 'a mechanical engineer, At the time, he tion lepicyclic motion] ." (M/ lSC u/II of Modem A rt Bul­ wrote: "Why not plas tic forms in motion? Not a simple letin , Spling 195 1) transitory or rotary motion but several motions of different For the first number of A bstraction-Creation, Art No /!- types, speeds, and amplitudes composing to make a resul-

56 DE C EMBER /998 MEC II AN/ C AL ENG I NEER I NG tant whole. Just as one can compose colors, or forn15, so one can compose nlotions." In the 1930s, Calder experimented with motorized sc ulptures driven by recondi­ ti oned electric motors he had salvaged from broken phonographs and the like. "With a mechanical drive," he said in 1937, "you can control the thing like the choreography in a ball et and superimpose various move­ ments: a great number, even, by nleans of cams and other mechani cal devices." T hese recycled electric drives were unreliable, Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/120/12/53/6382001/me-1998-dec2.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 however, and this problem later led him to­ wa rd building wind-driven works. H enri Gabriel, a younger sc ulptor who also crea ted suspended mobiles, observed that " Calder's hanging mobiles use balanc­ ing volumes and corresponding weights of Ra t, 1948. the parts, as well as the mechanics of lever calculation, to m ake mobiles coherent works of art. coins upon its smface." The Mercury Fountain represents a Alexander Calder, with his technical knowledge and en­ culmination of Calder's use of his engineering skills. gineering expertise, perfected the elements of the mobile Like Leonardo da Vinci, Calder was primarily interested and thus furthered the development of a technical-artistic in problem solving, in experimenting with materials, me­ dualism in this medium." chanical systems, and devices. Calder's studio was like a It was during this period that Calder became interested laboratory, with experimental works piled into corners or in l oan Miro's abstra ct "biomorphic" forms. One critic suspended from hooks in the ceiling. One day in the noted the appearance of a " new orga nic strain in Calder's Roxbury, C onn., studio, I found a dusty, mouse- ea ten art that alludes to forms in the natural world w ithout carton of sketches from the 1930s. In these preliminary being tied specifically to any one of them." This biomor­ studies for motorized mobiles, Calder had made careful phic motif survived in Calder's m easurem ents for each kinetic art until the end of his life. elem ent and had determined During the Spanish Civil War, the direction of motion. The the Spanish government asked precision of these drawings con­ Calder to contribute a work for firmed my suspicion that the the Pari s Exhibition of 1937. playful movements of his con­ T he Loyalists wanted to high­ structions were initially as much light their stand against Franco's a product of calculation as of in­ siege of the Almaden region of tuition. In Calder's early years as Spain, which supplied more than an artist, it seems he was system­ 60 percent of the world's mer­ ati c in his approach to "com­ cury. These m ercury mines posing motions." Later, having served as a symbol of the COutl­ perfected his technical methods, try's national pride. The idea was he became ever more inventive to build a fountain in w hich with his moving sculpture. mercury flowed, rather than wa­ The most engaging aspect of ter. M ercu ry Fo un ta in, Calder's Calder's sculpture was its inter­ first m ajor commission and a ac tion with space. Mobiles par­ popular attraction at the expo­ ti cipated in lively dialogues with sition, was installed near Pablo their environs, reacting to air Picasso 's mural-sized Guern ica. currents and human touch. The In the StelJe ns In dica tor, the .stabiles enfolded and incorporat­ alumni magazine of the Stevens ed spatial volume. As Calder put Institute, the artist recalled his it: "I paint with shapes." _ triumph with typical Calder hu­ Si li ce 1998 is th e lOath al/lliveriary ~f mor: "The fountain proved quite Calder's birth, the National Gallery oJ Art il1 a success, but a great deal was ~VashillgtOIl alld the Sail Fral/cisco Mll sell1ll due, of course, to the curious oJ lvlodem Art hOlle 1I101l1lled a 1IIajor retro- . spective exhib it oJCaldey's oellvye. 77,e accol/I­ quality of the m ercury, whose pal/yillg photographs depict selected artworks density induced people to throw Aluminum leaves, Red Po st, 1941. displayed ill this exhibitioll.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DECEMBER 1998 57