Alexander Calder is, to my mind, America’s greatest-ever sculptor, but he suffers from overfamiliarity. Everyone knows his light-as-air mobile, and his red-painted behemoths in public plazas across the country. “Calder: Hypermobility,” which opens today at the Whitney Museum of Art, manages to make the artist new again. It is a show about motion that stops you in your tracks.
Not a retrospective, or even a partial retrospective, “Hypermobility” resembles theater – a dazzling installation of 36 sculptures arrayed in a single gallery on the museum’s top floor. Curator Jay Sanders, whose field is performance art, suggests that Calder’s obsession with kinetic activity makes him a legitimate forefather of our current generation of performance artists. He has designed the gallery to look like a walk-in abstract painting, with alternating walls of white and midnight blue echoing the flat planes of primary color in Calder’s work.
Done in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the show highlights Calder’s early and lesser-known forays into abstraction. Before his sculptures were driven by air currents, they were driven by electric motors – and it is exciting to see so many sculptures suddenly switched on after decades of inactivity. My favorite, “Two Spheres,” of 1931, is mesmerizing and balletic. It consists of a black plank of wood across which two white-painted balls are slowly propelled, coming together and then drawing apart like dancers in a pas de deux.
Born in Philadelphia, the son of two artists, Calder avoided art for as long as he could, training instead as a mechanical engineer. He moved to Paris, in 1926, and supposedly became an abstract artist almost overnight after a visit to Mondrian’s studio. But Mondrian’s austere right angles echo only distantly in this show. Curving lines dominate, and the overall feeling of dreaminess can put you in mind of Miro’s Surrealist masterpieces from the 1920s. You can say that Calder combined Surrealist poetry with American ingenuity. The point is underscored by a second show in New York right now, a superb assembly of Calder’s so-called “Constellation” sculptures at the Pace Gallery, at 32 East 57th Street.
I was surprised to realize that the Whitney show does not include the Calder Circus, one of the best-known and most beloved works in its collection. For years, it occupied a central spot in the lobby of the museum’s Madison Avenue building, and generations of parents and children paused before it to marvel at the clowns and acrobats and tiny toy figures made from wood and wire and rags. But the piece probably encouraged viewers to value Calder as “fun” rather than radical, and the current show goes a long way in correcting his reputation as one of art’s most radical creators of form.
My only qualm with the Whitney show is that it spills over into the adjacent café. A giant hole has been cut in the wall of the Calder gallery to allow viewers to see into the restaurant and beyond it, to the cityscape rising in the distance. It’s scenic, yes, but brings unwanted noise and light. We don’t need the view. Calder is view enough.
