My Way: Calder in Paris

Alexander Calder (1898–1976), always known as Sandy, was the youngest of three generations of renowned sculptors, each of whom was named Alexander Calder. Their places in the history of American art and the patrimony of Philadelphia’s civic sculpture are unique. Sandy’s mobiles and stabiles gave him the stature of a major international figure in twentieth-century art, and few artists have matched the diversity of his works, which include mobiles, stabiles, bronze, wood, and wire sculpture, theater sets and costumes, decorated jet planes and cars, drawings, oil paintings, gouaches, books, jewelry, tableware, kitchen utensils, tapestries, and rugs.

The founder of the dynasty, Alexander Milne Calder (1846–1923), emigrated from Scotland to Philadelphia in 1868. He did the incomparable sculptural ornamentation of Philadelphia’s enormous City Hall, a twenty-year project of some 250 works he began when he was twenty-six. At the top of its clock tower is his masterpiece and the city’s ultimate icon: the colossal bronze statue of William Penn, Philadelphia’s Quaker founder. City Hall visually anchors the lower end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In the next generation Alexander Stirling Calder (1870–1945) sculpted the most beautiful fountain in Philadelphia, the Swann Memorial Fountain near the midpoint on the parkway. Like his father, Sandy, the youngest Calder, was born in Philadelphia, and his mobiles and stabiles left an indelible imprint on its civic art, especially his mobile Ghost in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which dominates the upper end of the parkway. When that mobile was installed, a local touch of irreverence honored the generational progression of Calder sculpture up the parkway by naming the collection “The Father, Son and Unholy Ghost.”

The two cities in the three Calders’ tale are Philadelphia and Paris. In addition to their roots in Philadelphia (they are buried in nearby Bala Cynwyd), all had lived in Paris. Sandy’s father and mother (a painter) studied there, and Alexander Milne may have also done so. In Three Calders: A Family Memoir Sandy Calder’s sister, Margaret Calder Hayes, writes, “it was the experience of Paris at a crucial, formative stage that puts its seal on the way each of these men approached his work.” The one whose art was most deeply affected by exposure to Paris was Sandy. He believed that his experience there in the late 1920s and early 1930s decisively affected his career. As he put it, “I got the first impulse for doing things my way in Paris.”

The centerpiece of writing about Sandy is his own Calder: An Autobiography With Pictures (1966). Its account of his Paris years is an essay in how the nutrients of time and place can get into the marrow of an American artist’s work. Oversized and lavishly illustrated, the book at first glance looks as if it ought to be docked on a coffee table, but any sampling of the text invites a complete reading. Sandy dictated the work to his son-in-law, Jean Davidson. Creating the book this way, Calder made the reader his listener. The transcribed text has the inviting qualities of amiable relaxed speech—a pastiche of constant candor, occasional run-on thoughts, brief lapses of memory, and dashes of earthiness.

The book makes Calder readily knowable and appealing because of the steady presence of his plain self. The literary historian and critic Malcolm Cowley, a friend, suspected that the French may have perceived Calder as “the Noble Savage, one who disregards social conventions and judges everything by his instinctive standards. . . . He made ribald jokes, not suggestive ones. He liked to draw the outlines of opulent breasts or buttocks in copper wire, or with his blunt hands in the air; at parties he liked to goose dignified ladies; his hands were roaming, but not his eyes.” Cowley also made a point of Calder’s marital fidelity. He was a one-woman man and the woman was his wife, Louisa. They were the jolliest of party-givers and loved dancing, and she was an enthusiastic accordionist.

His decisive Paris experience occurred during the years 1926–1933. His treatment...