Experiencing Calder’s mobiles firsthand is the only way to fully comprehend their multisensory brilliance, but this footage of Black Mobile with Hole in motion is an apt substitute. Unlike a photograph, the clip reveals how the sculpture carves new forms by way of its movements. As Sartre wrote in 1946, “These hesitations and resumptions, gropings and fumblings, sudden decisions, and, most especially, marvellous swan-like nobility make Calder’s mobiles strange creatures, mid-way between matter a

American artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is celebrated for revolutionizing sculpture with his renowned mobiles and stabiles, which range from the miniature to the monumental. "Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection" traces Calder's career over 45 works, highlighting his most important themes, styles, and materials from the 1920s through the 1970s while celebrating the transformative gift to SAM from patrons Jon and Kim Shirley. Experience the unique vision of a modern artist who le

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is celebrated today as the American artist who made sculpture move. Although best known for his invention of the mobile‚ he worked in astonishingly varied media‚ including drawing‚ painting and sculpture‚ as well as set design for dance and music performances. Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor now open, NGV International. #NGV #NGVCalder • © 2019 Calder Foundation, New York / Copyright Agency, Australia. | National Gallery of Victoria

In the early 1930s, Alexander Calder’s mobiles provided a dynamic, new experience of sculpture that incorporated movement, activating their architectural settings and inviting viewers’ engagement. French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, once wrote that a Calder mobile is “a pure stream of movement in the same way as there are pure streams of light.” In this video, the High’s Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art, Claudia Einecke, talks about this amazing work of art and gives a

Calder’s oeuvre features spectacular shifts in scale; there are standing mobiles less than two inches high and stabiles over eighty feet high. Jed Perl writes, “[Calder] had a preternatural sensitivity to matters of size and scale, whether the relation of the part to the whole within a single sculpture or the relation of the sculpture to the men and women who looked at it, touched it, and walked around it and sometimes even through it.” The standing mobile seen here in action, Toadstool with Fea

A panoply of mobiles intermingle in Calder’s studio, two-part bronzes twist on the beach, and a standing mobile flutters against the sky in Works of Calder, a twenty-minute film that debuted at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art on 24 January 1951. Initially proposed to the artist by actor Burgess Meredith, this remarkable film features music by ‪John Cage‬ and was directed by Herbert Matter. In addition to the mind-bending fusion of art and avant-garde music, it includes an interlude of a young boy—

The Calder Sidewalk The Legendary Sculptor’s Immobile Creation in Rustic Terrazzo Alexander Calder is best known for his abstract mobiles. There are also his stabiles (as his nonmoving sculptures came to be known). Then there’s his sidewalk. The 75-foot piece of permanent sidewalk art is always on view, where it was first installed in 1970, stretched out in front of three avant-garde art galleries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The sidewalk, with its abstract design, was created late in Calder’