Monday June 1 was a beautiful day. Sun with a high of 24C and no humidity. Our destination was the Calder: Dreaming in Equilibrium exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, located in the Bois de Boulogne, the famous park on the west side of Paris. We took the Métro to the Charles de Gaulle-Étoile stop near the Arc de Triomphe and then caught the free shuttle bus to the Fondation. We have been to the Fondation before. It is a fantastic space. The building was designed by Frank Gehry (1929-2025) and opened in October 2014. The building is comprised of twelve glass sails and it was the perfect setting for Calder's works.
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| Entrance to the Fondation |
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| Just inside the building |
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Before we headed to the exhibit, we peered into the café,
which contains Frank Gehry's Fish Lamps. |
The retrospective exhibit marks the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Alexander Calder (1898-1976) in Paris. It filled the entire building. The approach traces his work's evolution and major stages. There was a long wall with key dates from his life. Some highlights from his amazing career (I am only going to mention some of his many exhibits and awards):
- 1898 -born in Philadelphia; his mother is a painter and his father a sculptor and the son of a sculptor
- 1923- enrolls in the Art Students League in New York
- 1926- publication of Animal Sketching; arrives in Paris on July 26, begins Cirque Calder, which he will develop over the next five years; first wire sculptures
- 1927- returns to the U.S.
- 1928- First solo exhibit in NYC; returns to Paris in November; a regular at Café du Dôme
- 1929- exhibits two large wire sculptures in Paris
- 1930- on October 14, Calder invites Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and others to a presentation of the Cirque; his visit to Mondrian's studio is a "shock", marking his transition to abstraction.
- 1931- marries Louisa James in Concord, Massachusetts; they settle in Paris; Marcel Duchamp dubs his mechanized works "mobiles". Jean Arp suggests the term "stabiles" for the fixed works.
- 1933- the Calders return to the U.S. They purchase a farmhouse in Roxbury (Connecticut)
- 1934- Mobiles exhibit at Pierre Matisse Gallery, NYC
- 1935- birth of Sandra, Calder's first daughter; builds mobiles for set of Martha Graham's dance company
- 1936 -participates in a number of exhibits at MOMA and London
- 1937- return to Paris in April. The architect Josep Lluís Sert commissions Mercury Fountain from the artist for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Expo to be shown alongside Picasso's Guernica and the Reaper, by Miró.
- 1938, returns to the U.S. and builds a large studio in Roxbury
- 1939- second daughter Mary is born
- 1941- during the war, many exiled artists and friends from their Parisian years, including André Breton, will gather at Calder's home
- 1945- Jean-Paul Sartre visits Calder in Roxbury and later NYC. Calder gifts him the mobile Peacock
- 1947- takes part in the Exposition Internationale du surréalisme in Paris
- 1948- the Calders travel to Brazil for exhibitions
- 1952- designs sets and costumes for Nucléa, Henri Pichette's play. Agnès Varda photographs the production; he represents the U.S. at the 26th Venice Biennale and wins the Grand Prize for Sculpture.
- 1953- the Calders spend the summer in Aix-en-Province and he creates his first large-scale outdoor work with a forge; acquires a 17th century stone house in Saché. Builds a large studio and house there over the next two decades
- 1957- installation of large mobile at John F. Kennedy International Airport
- 1958- monumental sculpture Spirale is installed in UNESCO headquarters in Paris
- 1967- Participates in Expo 67 in Montreal with Trois disques I
- 1968- named an officer of the Legion of Honour; visits Mexico City to see the tallest stabile he has ever made. El Sol Rojo was commissioned for the summer Olympic Games.
- 1969- inauguration of La Grande vitesse, a monumental sculpture created for Grand Rapids.
- 1973 - Calder gives Mercury Fountain to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona.
- 1976- The Whitney Museum presents Calder's Universe, an extensive retrospective that tours 15 cities in the U.S. and Japan; President Gerald Ford awards Calder the Medal of Freedom, which he refuses instead asking for amnesty for conscientious objectors. When Ford awards it to him once again, after the artist's death, Louisa Calder refuses to attend the ceremony. Calder dies on November 11 in New York.
There was one introductory piece entitled: Black Widow, 1948. During that year, Calder travelled to Brazil to exhibit his work. Black Widow was installed in the Institudo de Arquitetos do Brasil in São Paulo. Three of the elements are cutouts, which let through the light and air.
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| Black Widow, 1948. |
The first gallery deals with Calder's formative years.
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| Animal Sketching, 1925-- while still enrolled at the Art Students League, Calder made hundreds of sketches of animals at the Bronx and Central Park zoos. 141 of these were published in his manual Animal Sketching: Animals-Action. |
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| Fourteenth Street, 1925. Calder painted the spectacle of modern life and was especially fond of illuminated evening scenes. |
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| The Flying Trapeze, 1925. Calder was very fond of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. |
When he arrived in Paris in 1926, Calder began making a miniature circus, continuing to add new acts until 1931. Cirque Calder was one of the earliest forms of performance as art. According to him,"in all, there are about 20 acts with an intermission, peanuts, and exotic gramophone music played by my wife."
By 1930, it was the focus of avant-garde attention. In the mid-1920s, during the same period he was creating the Cirque, Calder concentrated on wire sculptures, including a number of what he called "three-dimensional line drawings".
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| The Brass Family, 1929 |
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| Part of the Cirque Calder |
There were many more pieces from the Cirque-- but they were hard to photograph as they were under glass and there was a lot of reflection.
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| Circus Scene, 1929 |
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| Elephant and Trainer, Bearded Lady, and Little Clown, The Trumpeter |
There were a number of other artists' work in the exhibit. Pablo Picasso met Calder in 1931 when he viewed a Calder exhibit of his nonobjective sculptures privately. He also visited the debut of Calder's mobiles. They had a number of shared interests, including the world of the circus.
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| Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Acrobate, Paris, 19 Janvier 1930 |
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| Kiki de Montparnasse II, 1930. Calder produced three wire portraits of Alice Prin (1901-1953), known as Kiki de Montparnasse. |
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| Josephine Baker IV, c. 1928 and Aztec Josephine Baker, 1930. In 1926, Baker became the subject of one of his first wire sculptures. He was able to create kinetic figures echoing the dancer's disjointed movements. |
Fernand Léger (1881-1955), became a close friend as they had shared artistic concerns, particularly an interest in movement, rhythm and the animation of form.
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Léger, Composition à la toupie, 1930.
This painting was one of more than a dozen by Léger in Calder's collection. |
In 1942, the exhibition
Paintings by Paul Klee and Mobiles and Stabiles by Alexander Calder was held at the Cincinnati Art Museum, deliberately juxtaposing the work of these two artists. Two decades later, when Calder was asked which artists he most admired, he said, "Goya, Miró, Matisse, Bosch and Klee."
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| Paul Klee (1879-1940), Or the Mocked Mocker, 1930 |
In October 1930, Calder visited Piet Mondrian's Parisian studio. He was profoundly moved by the "simplicity and exactitude"of the abstract pioneer's workspace. He was especially struck by a wall of coloured cardboard rectangles that Mondrian continually respositioned in compositional experiments. Determined to "paint and work in the abstract", over the course of the next two weeks, he produced a series of paintings free of any figurative references. He quickly returned to sculpting realizing that "wire, or something to twist, tear, or bend, is an easier medium for me to think in."
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| Pier Mondrian (1872-1944), Composition in Colours/Composition No. 1 with Red and Blue, 1931 |
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| Untitled, 1930 |
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| Three other Untitled pieces from 1930. |
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| Untitled, 1930 |
There were a number of mobiles from two Calder exhibits in 1931 and 1932.
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| Object with Red Discs, 1931 |
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| Object with Red Ball, 1931 |
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| Fernand Léger, Les Perroquets (Les Acrobates), 1933. Léger was fascinated with dynamic motion in two dimensions and throughout his career, he repeatedly turned to acrobats as a subject. |
In 1933, Hitler's rise to power contributed to the Calders decision to return to the U.S. In May, 1933, his final solo exhibition in Paris before leaving revealed new directions in his non-objective work: the use of unfinished, natural materials and found objects, as well as the exploration of sound.
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| Cône d'ébène, 1933 |
On his return to the U.S. in 1933, Calder settled in his 18th century farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, which became his primary residence. He briefly returned to Paris in 1937 for six months to take part in the Pavillion of the Spanish Republic at the International Exposition. His Mercury Fountain, shown beside Picasso's Guernica, also reflected his desire to intervene in public space.
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| The Circle, 1934 |
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| Hugo P. Herdeg, Calder with Mercury Fountain, Spanish Pavilion, International Exposition, July 1937 |
The fountain is a series of ellipse forms with liquid metal mercury pouring into it. At the bottom of the flow, the mercury hits an element of the mobile, which in turns vibrates. In 1973, he gave
Mercury Fountain to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Alain and I have seen the original in Barcelona.
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| Mercury Fountain (1:3 scale model), 1937/1943. This model remained in Calder's possession. It was made to represent the 1937 important project for the artist's major retrospective at MOMA in 1942. |
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| Black Beast, 1940 |
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Peacock, 1941. Calder gave Jean-Paul Sartre Peacock made from flattened Connecticut license plates. Sartre went on to compose an essay Les Mobiles de Calder for a 1946 Paris exhibit. He wrote about Peacock in that essay.
Sartre also described Calder's objects as "strange creatures, mid-way between matter and life". |
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13 Spines, 1940
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In the 1940s and 1950s, fish became a recurring motif in about a dozen of Calder's suspended mobiles.
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| Fish, 1942-- Between figuration and abstraction, Calder suggest the movement of fish and their rhythm. |
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| Devil Fish, 1937 |
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| Red is Dominant, 1947 |
Calder also did a number of paintings in the late 1940s and 1950s. One gallery contained both paintings and mobiles from this period. In 1952, there was an exhibit in New York, entitled: Alexander Calder: Gongs and Towers.
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| Paintings and works from Gongs and Towers. |
There was a room of Calder's jewellery called "Portable Sculptures". Calder made his first pieces of jewellery in 1906, for his sister Peggy's dolls. From the late 1920's he crafted pieces by hand using brass wire and pieces of glass or ceramic as the jewels. Later he employed silver and occasionally gold to fashion his pieces. He made numerous pieces of jewellery for his wife but also for other personalities including Charlotte Perriand, Peggy Guggenheim and Bella Chagall.
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| Brooch, c. 1948, Gift from Calder to his wife, Louisa |
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| Médallion LJC, Gift from Calder to his wife, Louisa James Calder |
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| Louisa, c. 1945. Gift from Calder to his wife, "Louisa" is abstracted in the design. |
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| Wedding Ring, 1930 |
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| À bas la Méditerranée, c. 1937 |
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| Broche Carlotte Perriand, s.d/n.d., Brooch created by Calder for Charlotte Perriand, 1946 |
There was another room with an extensive collection of photographs of Calder. From his arrival in Paris in 1926, he was the subject of many portraits by the most important photographers of the day.
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| André Kertész, Calder with Miss Tamara, Paris 1929. He is pictured with a large-scale version of Miss Tamara, the steel and rubber dachshund made for the clown Paul Fratellini. |
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| Man Ray, Portrait of Calder, c. 1931 |
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| Ewald Honks, Calder with a wire portrait, Berlin, 1929 |
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| Agnès Varda, Calder with 21 feuilles blanches (1953), Paris, 1954 |
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| Herbert Matter, Calder in his studio, Roxbury, 1941 |
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| Gordon Parks, Calder with Snow Flurry (1948), Roxbury, 1952 |
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| Henri Cartier-Bresson, Calder in his house Le Carrol, Saché, 1970 |
There was a room of Calders
Constellations of carved wood and wire, developed in his Roxbury studio in 1942-43, when his usual aluminium sheet metal was difficult to source due to war rations. These works premiered in 1943 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Certain
Constellations are fixed, while others are kinetic and many were designed to be hung high on the wall.
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| Constellation with Sundial, 1943 |
We stepped outside for a moment to get some sun and sit near the small café on a lower part of the terrace.
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A quick sun break
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Art Critic Gabrielle Buffet had called Calder a "sculptor of wind, lunar blacksmith". A number of his suspended mobiles created between 1941-1961 were brought together in a section called
Sculptor of Wind.
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| Black Clouds, c. 1939 |
The next piece,
France Forever, 1942 is topped by a Lorraine Cross- the symbol of General de Gaulle's Free France movement during the Second World War- and the blue, white and red of the French flag. The symbolism of the mobile is as exceptional as the context of its creation. Calder created the work at the request of architect Paul Nelson (1895-1979), in support of the association France Forever, founded in New York in 1940 to support the French Resistance. The mobile is a defiant representation of freedom.
There was a small gallery entitled: Crags & Critters. In 1974, just two years before his death, he returned to the figure. He debuted his Critters with his Crags, cut out black metal panels.
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| Critter Diable, 1974 |
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| Untitled, 1971 |
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| Crag, 1974 |
From the mid 1930s, Calder began executing large-scale works, which in the last decades of his life grew to colossal dimensions.
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| Southern Cross, 1963. Calder kept this sculpture for himself in Roxbury. The standing mobile is made up of two clearly distinct parts, accentuated by the choice of two strongly contrasting colours. |
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| Red Lily Pads, 1956 on the ceiling. |
We went out on the top terrace for the wonderful views.
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| On the terrace-- the modern buildings in the background are in La Défense, the modern business district three kilometres west of the city limits. |
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| View of the Bois de Boulonge |
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| Model of the building designed by Gehry |
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| Another view as we left the building to view the last two sculptures in the exhibit. |
There were two monumental sculptures to view in the garden of the Fondation. In the 1970s, Calder spent much of his time living and working in France. He had become a virtuoso of monumental form, working with industrial foundries in Tours (France) and Roxbury (United States).
Black Flag employs bold geometric shapes and painted metal.
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| Black Flag, 1974 |
Calder's earliest experiments with large outdoor sculpture date to the summer of 1934. These standing mobiles, installed on his Roxbury property were modest in scale and relatively delicate-bending in strong winds-yet they revealed his ambition to work on a monumental level.
Five Swords was created in the final year of Calder's life. It represents the culmination of his long engagement with large-scale abstraction.
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| Five Swords, 1976 |
A perfect end to a monumental career and exhibition. We then headed to the exit of the Fondation property.
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| Photo from one side of the building |
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| In front of the water feature- it really is a ship that takes you on a voyage |
We caught the shuttle bus back to the Métro station near the Arc de Triomphe. It has been a while since we were out that way. We decided to have a very late lunch at Café de Paris, which is on the street behind the Champs-Élysées. We thought it would be quieter and it was.
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| Arc de Triomphe from where we were dropped by the shuttle bus |
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| Café de Paris |
Alain and I shared a very large club sandwich which came with frites and salad. We also had a glass of Chardonnay--- so civilized- a glass of very drinkable wine that costs just 6 euros. A coke or soda is 5 euros, so a no-brainer. It was lovely sitting out in the sun.
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| Half a portion!! The server even brought a white tablecloth! |
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| Perfect day in Paris |
We decided we would walk down the Champs- Élysées for the equivalent of two Métro stops. Very busy and full of high-end stores that we didn't check out.
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| Louis Vuitton store in the shape of luggage |
We walked by the Guerlain perfume store with its beautiful wrought iron details. We thought it looked familiar and remembered we had seen a 1930 photo at the Lee Miller exhibit that she had taken of a detail of the store. We were able to crop one of our photos and create a similar photo.
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| The outside of the Guerlain store on the Champs-Élysées |
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A black and white cropped version of a photo we took on June 1.
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From the Lee Miller exhibit-- her 1930 Guerlain photo
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We'll always have Paris! One of our favourite days of our trip. Perfect weather (no heat wave, but sunny and warm). A great upbeat Calder exhibit at the beautiful Frank Gehry designed building followed by a lovely Paris café experience. We headed back to the apartment where we had a light, late dinner.
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