.Calder, the Iron Wizard

Alexander Calder, “Characters”, 1945, oil on canvas, 122x153 cm.

Calder's paintings are very rare, he favored gouaches and sculptures.
Before Calder, everyone didn't know that a "mobile" was a moving sculpture. We owe the invention of the term to Marcel Duchamp …
“Christian Zervos, who published Cahiers d'Art, very kindly put me in contact with Aimé Maeght, who had a very good gallery in the 8th arrondissement. I brought many of Roxbury's mobiles to Maeght's house and I had an exhibition at his house in June 1950, following a Miró exhibition. This marked the beginning of a long association with Aimé. Towards the end of the Miró exhibition, Maeght invited us all to dinner at a restaurant. Guiguitte and I were dancing a polka when the orchestra started playing one. We became very popular and were applauded.”
So says Alexander Calder in his Autobiography. From then on he became close to the Maeght family. To distract little sick Bernard, Alexander and his wife Louisa come to give Circus performances in the Maeghts' Parisian apartment. It is a real miniature circus, made of wire and fabric, with its big top, its animals, its acrobats, its clowns and its extras, all animated and manipulated by a Calder trainer of wild animals, imitating all the voices .

The four suitcases containing The Circus by Alexander Calder.

Great portrait of Alexander Calder among his creations, wonderful characters and animals brought together in his now famous "Circus".

Calder exhibited for the first time at my grandfather's in the exhibition "Surrealism in 1947", he remained faithful to the Galerie Maeght until his death in 1977.

Fernand Léger, in front of his wire portrait created by Calder.

The mustachioed portrait, strikingly resembling, is astonishing by the contrast between the work, so thin, so transparent, so mobile, and the hundred-kilo man:
“It’s something like a tree trunk in motion […] Its place is rather outside in the wind, in the sun. »

In fact, rarely has a work corresponded so much to its author. Its mobiles and stabiles are so many winks, giggles and joviality, just like the character of the American giant. The man also knows how to commit to great causes and to speak out, in the United States, against the Vietnam War.

View of the Calder 1954 exhibition.

Aimé, convinced by his work, puts all his resources at the artist's disposal. “I had an exhibition of ten large stabiles at Maeght in February 1959. Madame Maeght, who was very enthusiastic about these objects, was quite surprised and she said to me: “Did you have to rack your brains to find this? ” Maeght must have agreed with Guiguitte because he bought the entire exhibition from me, in bulk, and in cash, before the opening; It was the first time a merchant had treated me like this. »

View of the Stabiles exhibition by Alexander Calder at the Maeght gallery, 1959.

Calder designed another immense stabile, Les Renforts, for the Foundation gardens. His first retrospective took place there in 1969, he enjoyed creating everything around it, including elements from the catalogue, an experience which made him say: "I did a big retrospective at the Maeght Foundation, it was very nice to collaborate with Aimé and Sert. I considered this exhibition almost as the end of ends. »

Alexander Calder, Les Renforts, at the Maeght Foundation

Each exhibition is an opportunity for joyful reunions and memorable celebrations. The Maeght girls are still there. At the Maeghts, he is with family, he finds his friend Joan Miró there. The complicity between the two artists is perceptible even in their tribute works. Another man shares their poetic universe, Prévert, who, better than anyone, knows how to capture and share with the simplicity of his words, the magic of the “iron fowler”. Each uses basic elements to deliver their complex art to us. Simplicity of colors for Miró, shapes for Calder and words for Prévert. The bibliophile book Fêtes is the best illustration of this closeness of thought between Calder and Prévert.

Jean-Paul Sartre sketched by Calder. Funny, the cigarette smoke that writes Sartre.

Excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's text, "Les Mobiles des Calder," published in the catalog of the Galerie Louis Carré for its exhibition in the same year, 1946.

"If it is true that sculpture must engrave movement in the still, it would be an error to compare Calder's art to that of the sculptor. He does not suggest movement, he captures it; he does not dream to bury it forever in bronze or in gold, these glorious and stupid materials, doomed by nature to immobility. With insubstantial and vile materials, with small bones or tinplate or zinc, it rises. strange arrangements of stems and palm leaves, pucks, feathers, petals. They are resonators, traps, they hang at the end of a string like a spider at the end of its thread or else they settle on a. base, dull, folded in on themselves, falsely asleep; a wandering thrill passes by, it gets entangled in it, animates them, they channel it and give it a fleeting form: a Mobile is born."

Magnificent text by Sartre, no?

Bird with roubignolles, 1930, wire, 22.5x27 cm.

Alexander Calder, "The Reinforcements", model, 1963, stable, 58x43x36 cm.

Alexander Calder, "L'Homme", 1967, stabile for the city of Montreal, 21x33 meters.

Alexander Calder, "Portrait of Florence Maeght", 1969, marker on guestbook.

Calder, Poster for the Maeght Gallery