Alexander Calder American, 1898-1976

Career

Calder's kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors. Dating from 1931, Calder's sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive". The wind mobiles featured abstract shapes delicately balanced on pivoting rods that moved with the slightest current of air, allowing for a natural shifting play of forms and spatial relationships. Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. 
 
In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals. As Calder's sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the early 1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. Calder often used prints for advocacy, as in poster prints from 1967 and 1969 protesting the Vietnam War. As Calder's professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings were marketed, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available.