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Alexander Calder: A Chronology

 

1898                Alexander Calder is born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, the son of painter Nanette Lederer Calder and sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder.

 

1909                At age 11, using the workshop he had been given, Calder cuts and folds single sheets of brass into sculptures of a duck and a dog, which he gives to his parents as a Christmas present.

 

1919                Calder receives a degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.  He embarks on a series of jobs, including a position as a timekeeper and engineer at a logging camp in Washington State.  The mountain landscape inspires him to develop his talent as a painter.

 

1923                Calder moves back to New York City and begins studying at the Art Students League.  He begins to make illustrations for newspapers and advertisers.

 

1925                For the National Police Gazette, Calder makes illustrations of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus; he closely observes the rigging of the tent and its spatial relationships.  Working at the Bronx Zoo and the Central Park Zoo, he begins a series of hundreds of brush drawings of animals.  In autumn, he moves into a one-room apartment on 14th Street.  Lacking a watch, he constructs his first wire sculpture, Rooster Sundial, which he installs on the window sill.

 

1926                In July, Calder decides to move to Paris.  There he creates miniature, articulated sculptures of circus figures, which he fabricates from wire, wood, leather, cork, rubber, and cloth.  The performances of his Cirque Calder win him the friendship of artists including Jean Hélion, Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp.

                        In autumn, a friend suggests that Calder sculpt a figure entirely from wire.  He creates his first sculpted caricature of Josephine Baker, followed by a series of other caricatures and figures from myth.

 

1929                Inspired by an exhibition of mechanical birds, Calder creates his first mechanized sculpture, Goldfish Bowl, as a Christmas gift for his mother.  His work becomes more gestural and abstract.

 

1930                In October, a visit to Mondrian’s studio “shocks” Calder into complete abstraction.  In December, he returns to the United States to marry Louisa James.

 

1931                In February, Calder and his wife settle in Paris.  Calder joins the Abstraction-Création group, through which he mounts his first exhibition of abstractions in April.  During a visit to Calder’s studio, Marcel Duchamp coins the term “mobile” for his moving sculptures.

 

1932                On the occasion of an exhibition titled Calder: ses mobiles, Jean Arp retroactively categorizes the artist’s previously exhibited sculptures as “stabiles.”

 

1933                In June, the Calders return to the United States, settling temporarily in New York City.  They purchase a small farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, borrowing the money for the down payment, and spend the rest of the year renovating the house and converting the icehouse to a studio.  Calder constructs kitchen cabinets out of the crates used to ship their belongings to Roxbury.

 

1934                Calder makes his first outdoor works, fabricating them from aluminum.  He installs the objects on hillsides around his house by planting their tripod feet into the soil.  When the works fail to withstand the elements, he makes a sturdier outdoor sculpture, Steel Fish, out of welded steel.

 

1937                Early in the year, with Devil Fish, Calder creates his first sculpture enlarged from a maquette.  In May, he creates a sculptural installation, Mercury Fountain, as a commission for the Spanish Pavilion of the World’s Fair.

 

1938                Calder builds a new studio in Roxbury, on the foundation of a burned-out barn.  He is given his first retrospective exhibition, Calder Mobiles, at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts.

 

1939                Calder creates a large mobile, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, as a commission for the staircase of the new building of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 

1940                Calder creates the large-scale Black Beast, his first sculpture to be fabricated by technicians under his direction.

 

1943                Calder’s second museum retrospective, Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions, is presented by The Museum of Modern Art.

 

1949                Calder makes his largest mobile to date, International Mobile, for the 3rd International Exhibition of Sculpture, where the work is hung over the main stairwell of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

1952                Calder is chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where he is awarded the grand prize for sculpture.

 

1953                Calder takes his family to France for a year.  While in Provence, he fabricates five or six large standing mobiles for the outdoors.

 

1957                Calder receives many commissions for large-scale public sculptures.  For the Port Authority of New York, he creates the monumental mobile .125 for the International Arrivals Terminal at Idlewild Airport (now JFK).  For the U.S. Department of State, he creates Whirling Ear.  For the Third Triennial in Milan, he makes Fungi Neri, based on a maquette created in 1942.

 

1958                Commissioned by UNESCO, Calder creates La Spirale for the organization’s headquarters in Paris.

 

1962                Calder creates Teodelapio, commissioned by the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, and permanently installed in Spoleto.

 

1967                Calder makes Man—made of stainless steel and standing 67 feet high—for Expo ’67 in Montreal.

 

1968                On the occasion of the Olympic Games, Calder makes El Sol Rojo—at 80 feet in height his tallest work—for the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City.

 

1969                Calder completes La grande vitesse, a monumental stabile commissioned by the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan.  It is the first sculpture to be funded by the public art program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

1973                Calder receives the first commission under a new program of the General Services Administration, which commits .5 percent of the budget for new federal buildings for the creation of public artworks.  Calder’s Flamingo is installed in front of the John C. Luczynski Federal Building in Chicago, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.  Calder completes Four Arches, commissioned by Security Pacific Corporation, Los Angeles.

 

1976                Calder completes Jerusalem Stabile and L’Araignée rouge.  Death of Alexander Calder on November 11 in New York City.