Review by Choice Review
Veteran art critic Jed Perl delivers a highly readable, albeit hefty, first volume of a planned two-volume biography of prodigious American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976). Benefiting from interviews, Calder's early autobiography, and unfettered access to the Calder Foundation's archives and art, Perl portrays an optimistic young man whose skillful hands and curious, nimble mind led to unparalleled innovation in modernist sculpture. Also explored are Calder's parents, artists themselves, who nurtured their son's inventive instincts. By the time Calder was 40, when the book ends, his joyful wire figures and noble sheet metal mobiles were already exhibited regularly in Europe and the US, both at popular world's fairs and in fine art museums. Calder's early career has been the subject of four scholarly publications since 2004. What can Perl contribute? His statement in chapter 12, "Calder abhorred heavy-handedness, in philosophizing as in everything else," reveals much. This is a social chronicle. After a peripatetic yet cosmopolitan upbringing, Calder lived in Paris for many years, immersed in surrealist, Dadaist, and abstractionist avant-gardes. Perl breezes through descriptions of lively relationships with friends, family, colleagues in both Europe and the US. While frustrating digressions clog Perl's lengthy narrative, Calder's creative enthusiasm and proactive mind continually reemerge, driving the book forward. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates; professionals; general readers. --Ann Schoenfeld, Pratt Institute
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
FEW POPULAR MODERN sculptors present so consistent a mind-eye contradiction as does Alexander Calder. When his name crosses my thoughts, I register: major, but slight. I see one of his 1940 s mobiles in a museum and think: Wow. In Jed Perl's biography, "Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898-1940," the artist makes a similarly paradoxical impression. The roughly 700-page book places his life on a broad and dramatic canvas. A cosmopolitan figure, Calder divided his time almost equally between the United States and Europe. He witnessed the fallout from two world wars, and contributed significantly to the upheavals that were Modernist art and culture. Given all this, one might expect him to unfold, on the page, as a textured, possibly complicated, personality and thinker. But no. The young Calder and his middle-aged counterpart are almost identical: self-assured, hard working, constitutionally cheerful - and that's about it. If you view biographies as, by definition, accounts of psychological development, you may find this one puzzling. To readers in search of dark-minded revelations, it will be a page-turner in the wrong way. Calder was a doer. That's the main thing about him. As he once said in a rare recorded instance of self-analysis: "My fingers always seem busier than my mind." And that busyness, a habit of semipurposeful experimentation, seems to have generated new ideas almost spontaneously, the way rubbed sticks produce fire. And this way of working - focusing on your fingers, being your own source of friction - made Calder's early mature art look different from most of what was around it. By the time he arrived in Paris in 1926, aesthetic warfare was long entrenched, and a grim business. Cubism had surgically altered the slumberous body of 19thcentury Realism. Dada tormented it with shocks of satire. Surrealism was in the process of prying open its dreams. Along comes Calder with his motorized mobiles, art machines that looked like toys, with bobbing abstract forms that suggested flowers, or fish, or planets. Of course you stopped to stare. But how, in a hard world, were you supposed to react? Sneer? Sigh? Smile? His art still poses the same question today. Calder, nicknamed Sandy, was born in Philadelphia in 1898 and came from a line of artists. His Scottish emigré grandfather was a professional sculptor, as was his father, Stirling Calder. (He carved the George Washington figure on the marble arch in Manhattan's Washington Square.) His mother was a portrait painter. The family's life of genteel, peripatetic bohemianism was a model Calder would follow. As a boy he was an inventive tinkerer, building mechanical trains from scratch, making doll-size jewelry and astonishingly sophisticated animal sculptures from metal scraps. When it came time for college, the builder prevailed, and Calder chose to go to engineering school. The jobs that resulted weren't much fun - draftsman for an electric company and so on - but happened to yield one transformative experience. In 1922, while working as a mechanic on a passenger liner, Calder woke one day on the ship's deck at dawn to see the rising sun and the setting moon, two perfect geometric forms hanging in balance in the sky. It would be impossible to draw the exact link between the "lasting sensation of the solar system" he received in this moment and the beginning of his career as an artist - the marriage of poetry and physics? - but a year later he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York. There he studied painting and took a day job as a sketch artist for the National Police Gazette, on an entertainment beat that had him frequenting the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The circus was a popular theme in art at the time. Calder carried images of it in his head during his first trip to Europe in 1926, and in Paris he made a miniature version with dozens of hand-manipulated figures of wire, cork and fabric. Calling the ensemble the "Cirque Calder," he lugged it around to galleries and parties and put on shows. These one-man performances became his entree into the avant-gardes of Paris and, later, New York. And he followed them up with slightly more conventional sculptures: openwork wire figures and portrait heads of pop personalities (Josephine Baker, Calvin Coolidge). He didn't sell much, but he attracted some fans and eventually at least one harsh critic. The novelist Thomas Wolfe caught a Cirque Calder performance in an haut monde New York salon, thought it the last word in elitist pandering and said so in the scathing "Piggy Logan's Circus" chapter of "You Can't Go Home Again." What counted career-wise, though, was that Calder was interacting with other artists, supportive ones, mentors even - among them Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró - who saw that he was doing something unusual. And a single visit to Mondrian's Paris studio in 1930 determined the direction he would take. Just the sight of the older artist's geometric paintmgs installed as if afloat m a white-painted room, persuaded Calder to make his own sculptures fully abstract. The earliest examples were the motorized, tabletop-scale pieces for which Duchamp invented the generic name: "mobiles." Then came the suspended works, their dangling elements set into motion by air currents or the touch of a hand. Even today, they feel truly far-out. With them, Perl suggests, Calder gave sculpture a dimension of movement in space, which was also movement in time, that it had rarely had before in Western art. And with this work, Calder, then in his mid-30s, made his defining contribution to Modernism. Around this time he married Louisa James, an American whom he'd met on a trans-Atlantic ship. A grandniece of Henry James, she came from a wealthy lineage, and the match would be a lasting one, producing two daughters. For years the couple improvised households in rented apartments and studios, eventually settling in two permanent rural homes, one in Roxbury, Conn., and the other in the village of Saché, southwest of Paris. Their life in the Saché house lies beyond the chronological framework of the book, which ends when Calder is in his early 40 s and settled in the United States around the start of World War II. (The biography's second volume is tentatively scheduled to appear in 2019.) Given the book's length and weight of detail, the break is not unwelcome. Perl has assembled a vast, almost ragbag amount of data, not all of it riveting, and has woven commentary in and around it. As a result, the narrative has a frustratingly digressive pace, though even when we feel we've wandered far from the central path the writer's lucid style persuades us to stick with him. And, again, there's the matter of Calder's personality. When Perl calls it "fundamentally imperturbable," he may be saying most of what there is to say. We're assured that the artist had hidden depths, though we never convincingly see them. Perl comes closest to explaining the Calder phenomenon when he writes, toward the end of the book, that at 40 the artist was "still the little boy tinkering in the shop his parents had provided for him." That's saying a lot. What the book gets absolutely right - thanks in part, actually, to the pacing - is its demonstration of Calder's staying-in-place-while-flying move from toy-making to art-making, and how profound that move was. Calder's suspended mobiles - by far his most interesting work - are baby-crib toys that are also experiments in the mechanics of gravitational balance. That they can hang high means everything; it's what makes them serious. Because height automatically implies depth, and you feel that when you see them. That's the wow part, and Perl's book captures it as well as a book can. HOLLAND COTTER, co-chief art critic of The Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2009. Calder gave sculpture a dimension of movement in space that it rarely had before in Western art.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Art critic Perl (Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, 2008) joins the select ranks of multivolume arts biographers, among them Hilary Spurling on Matisse and John Richardson on Picasso, with the first in a foundational two-book inquiry into the unusually sunny life and exuberantly radical work of sculptor Alexander Calder. The grandson, nephew, and son of artists, Calder tried to thwart his destiny by studying engineering, a fortunate detour, given the technical finesse of his future constructions. Perl incisively portrays Calder's impressive and intriguing family while tracking the bohemian, coast-to-coast upbringing of this precocious smiling Buddha of a boy, marking the genesis of his signature playful ingenuity in his youthful passions for birds and animals, toys, tools, and tinkering, skating, dancing, puns, math, science, and theater. Starting out in New York as a magazine and newspaper illustrator, Calder developed his command of line and caricature, a perfect vehicle for his sardonic, ironic, and comic spirit. In 1920s Paris, this perpetual experimentalist created a remarkably vital miniature circus and powerfully expressive calligraphic wire works, then catalyzed a kinetic revolution, creating sculptures-in-motion that inspired Marcel Duchamp to coin the word mobile to describe them. Graced with 400 photographs, Perl's dynamic and illuminating biography, as buoyant and evocative as Calder's sculptures, concludes with the ebullient and cosmic artist poised for ever more creative adventures and renown.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Perl (New Art City) delivers a hulking and exhaustively researched biography of American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976), focusing on the first four decades of his life. Calder was born in Philadelphia into a dynasty of artists (his father and paternal grandfather were both sculptors with public works and his mother was a portrait painter). It was only after studying engineering and a stint working in the boiler room of a ship that Calder decided to seriously pursue art. He began as a painter but turned to creating playful kinetic wire sculptures. After a life-changing visit to painter Piet Mondrian's Paris studio in 1930, Calder began making completely abstract sculptures, which caught the attention of art-world heavyweights on both sides of the Atlantic. For the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, his subtly political Mercury Fountain was given prominent placement alongside Picasso's Guernica, showing the world that Calder was more than modernism's playful jester. The biography ends when Calder has entered his "classical style," characterized by large-scale mobiles of arresting complexity. Perl throughout emphasizes Calder's debt to the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in his ability to blend fine art with everyday objects such as children's toys. Generously illustrated and delivered in vibrant writing (he describes one of Calder's tabletop standing mobiles as "the spiderweb strength and delicacy of an Emily Dickinson poem"), Perl offers what will be without question the authoritative source on the man whom the French affectionately nicknamed le roi du fil de fer-"the wire king." 400 illus. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A meticulously researched biography of one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.New York Review of Books contributor and former New Republic art critic Perl (Art History/New School for Social Research; Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture, 2012, etc.) chronicles how Alexander Calder (1898-1976) grew from a crafty boy into a master sculptor who, along with Picasso and Mir, pushed the world of art toward the frontiers of modernism. Calder wrote of "trying to get at evolution' [from] toys to sculpture," and Perl divines exactly this thread amid a tremendous amount of source material and shows the progression from Calder's tinkering childhood to the celebrated, clowning Cirque Calder of the 1920s, all the way to Calder's inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's epochal exhibitions "Cubism and Abstract Art" and "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" of the mid-1930s. The author unveils a network of Calder's influences. "Artistic inspiration," he writes, "involves instincts, apprehensions, and revelations ranging from the subliminal to the nearly spiritual, and the zigzagging, even ricocheting connections need to be mapped in ways that defy strict rules of evidence." Calder's parents were both artists, and although they encouraged him to pursue a degree in engineering, they also exposed him to art that would later shape his career. Duchamp's 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, for example, possessed a kineticism that would eventually contribute to Calder's understanding of the vast conceptual capabilities of art. With wire fashioned into spirals and mobiles gently spinning through the air, Calder's lines would later adopt a sense of movement over time, a fourth-dimensional change through a three-dimensional space. Most triumphant is the way in which Perl explains how to read Calder's challenging forms; he clearly discusses the "difference between a volume and a void" and "the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement." "Sculpture could be a matter of lines," he explains, capable of synthesizing "science with sensibility, the engineered with the empathetic." Not only an essential record of the first 40 years of Calder's life, but an exceptional chronicle of the genesis of modernism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
