Alexander Calder at Pace London

Posted: 25 April 2013 by Sam Phillips

If painter Paul Klee 'took a line for a walk’, then sculptor Alexander Calder took a line for a dance. His signature mobile sculptures – the highlights of an exhibition of the American artist at Pace London – move musically in all directions, their multiple metal lines curving with the energy and grace of a ballerina, their biomorphic shapes suggesting the expressive flourishes of a jazz dancer, all elements twirling around in space according to the ebb and flow of air currents.

_{Installation view of Calder After the War at Pace, London, 19 April – 7 June 2013. Courtesy Pace, London.}

The show focuses on a highly productive four-year period in Calder’s output, from 1945 to 1949. The Pennsylvania-born artist, who in the 1920s and 1930s became a key figure in the School of Paris, had by this time settled back in the States, and had risen to popular prominence following an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

_{Installation view of Calder After the War at Pace, London, 19 April – 7 June 2013. Courtesy Pace, London.}

The undeniable cheerfulness of his work contrasts with the anxiety prevalent in European and American art of the post-war period, although interestingly the Existentialist par excellence Jean-Paul Sartre was a fan, and he wrote a lyrical essay on the artist, which is reprinted in a bound-in booklet in Pace’s handsome exhibition catalogue. Norman Foster RA reminds us in the same book that Calder trained as an engineer, and describes his work in architectural terms: ‘his beautiful mobiles share a language of plates, cantilevers, arms, suspension elements and connections – deceptively simple, but wonderfully sophisticated.’

_{Calder with Root (1947), Alexander Calder, Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin, New York, 1947. Photographer: Unknown. Photo credit: Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, NY © 2013, Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London, or any other relevant international copyright societies.} The show also features Calder’s ‘stabiles’ – standing sculptures exemplified by interlocking and irregular metal shapes – and his standing mobiles, where mobile elements are suspended from the top, side or bottom of floor-based works. There is a compelling juxtaposition between the fragile mobile armatures and the earth-bound structures to which they are attached. In Root (1947), for example, a black, solid, tree-like form has at its root a lovely and light metal squiggle, suspended underneath it and almost imperceptible.

Other allusions to the natural world abound. Fish (c.1945) is a simple outline of an aquatic creature that hangs horizontally above, but it is lit in such a way that its shadow seems to swoop upwards on the wall like a bird. Baby Flat Top (1946) appears like an insect, the metal lines extending outwards like spindly arms and legs.

_{Alexander Calder, 'Baby Flat Top', 1946. Sheet metal, wire, and paint 49 x 78 ¾ x 17½ inches (124 x 200 x 44cm). Photo credit: Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, NY © 2013, Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London, or any other relevant international copyright societies.}

Calder’s works have a sense of restlessness, with symmetrical elements and the repetition of forms in one piece often avoided. Exceptions include the mobile Snow Flurry (1948), which sports only silver circles, becoming something like a blizzard or perhaps a bush in winter, and Triple Gong (1948), a highly elegant hanging piece in which brass circles of differing sizes are attached to the mobile by metal wires that all curve in the same shape.

The upstairs gallery shows some of Calder’s paintings, which use a visual vocabulary of colourful shapes and squiggles reminiscent of Klee. Indeed, across the exhibition, one is reminded of how uniquely Calder intersects with other art movements and artists: the geometricism and pared-down palette of Piet Mondrian, who encouraged him towards abstraction; the Surrealism of Joan Miró, his friend whose shapes in two dimensions Calder’s work resembles in three; and the Constructivism and kineticism of Russian avant-gardists like László Moholy-Nagy. But somehow, with all the myriad influences, Calder still manages to be singular.