Alexander Calder landed in Paris 100 years ago - in 1926. He was a young American artist who quickly made friends with the artists of the day - Marcel Duchamp and Fernard Léger and Jean Arp as well as American born entertainer Josephine Baker. He was known to a small circle of friends and art lovers. 100 years later, the Louis Vuitton Foundation is giving everyone a chance to discover or re-discover the extraordinary artist Alexander Calder was. This exhibition arrives at the exact time it is needed. In an era of chaos and resentment all over the Western world, Calder’s work shows us how joyful and good and positive and creative life can be. With just a pair of pliers and wire you can create an entire world, a circus with acrobats and animals and clowns. You can make a portrait of your friends, like Fernard Léger or Josephine Baker. Like a child, he built structures to play with the wind or huge colorful structures like medieval fortresses or strange creatures. His sense of play is always present, even in the names he chooses for his works. The monumental sculpture he made for the city of Grand Rapids, in Michigan, was christened “La Grande Vitesse”, a play on the name of the city in French.
Stepping into the exhibition called “Calder, Rêver en Equilibre”/Dreaming in Equilibrium, is like entering an enchanted world. The 300 works on loan from the Calder foundation and from great art institutions and collectors around the world, are a dream machine. In this monumental retrospective, one of the largest ever organized, visitors discover the range of Calder’s mind, creativity and genius, from painting to sculptures to jewelry. He loved humble material - wire, wood, paint, scraps of metal - like a young child. His art is about movement, sound, color, light, shadows, the full and the void. There's lightness and power at the same time, an extraordinary combo. Wandering around the 3,000 sqm of the exhibition you can regularly hear people’s exclamations of joy or surprise or enthusiasm. It is impossible to refrain oneself from expressing one’s feelings as one moves from one museum gallery to the next and then retraces one’s steps to look again. The amazing beauty of Alexander Calder’s work is that the experience viewers have with it is often random: it depends on light, on air currents, on the movement of people around a structure, on the sound produced by exterior factors. His poetic jewelry pieces become moving sculptures on the body. Calder’s works are not “programmable”. This “untamable” character adds to their profound appeal.
In the 1930s, sound and noise in artworks were revolutionary, just like the shadow cast by his wire sculptures and mobiles (a name coined by Marcel Duchamp). Calder was a pioneer who just made what his beautiful mind and his agile hands told him to do. He did not set out to revolutionize modern art. “A genius of the nothing,” write Suzanne Pagé, artistic director of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, “mechanic of the discarded, recycler of the ordinary, Calder became a master of movement, expressing life first of all, using forms inspired by the animal and plant kingdoms at every scale, capturing the vibration of the world in perfect tune.”
At 28, Alexander Calder, whose parents were artists - his mother was a painter, his father and grandfather were sculptors - arrived in Paris in 1926, had first studied mechanical engineering before studying at the Art Students League, in New York. Very quickly, the young artist became friends with the group of avant-garde artists congregating around Montparnasse, on the Left Bank - Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miro. In 1933, Calder returned to the United States, but throughout his life, he came back to France regularly after the war. He had a beautiful home and studio in the peaceful village of Saché, in the Loire Valley, where he’d spent several months each year.
After having gone through both floors of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, it’s a good idea to step out into the garden, walk around the 2 monumental sculptures on the green lawn - 5 Swords and Black Flags - echoing the shape of the foundation itself. They seem to be communicating with us in their own language which we don’t speak, but understand. Sitting on the long benches facing them is not entirely dissimilar to sitting next to Ryoanji Temple rock garden in Kyoto. There’s a special vibration that aligns us with the vast universe. Alexander Calder is a magician.
– Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Calder, Rêver en Equilibre. Fondation Louis Vuitton. Until August 16. fondationlouisvuitton.fr
