Jed Perl - Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940

I wasnt brought upI was framed. With these seven words, Alexander Calder summarized his early years, giving his memories some of the same precision, grace, depth, wit, and aplomb that animated his art for half a century. There was a literal sense in which Calder was framed, for both of his parents were artists who used their handsome, sturdy young son as a model. There were also other, deeper implications to this haiku-like pronouncement, which Calder inscribed at the top of an empty sheet of paper amid a sheaf of autobiographical ruminations that date from the 1950s, when he was already middle-aged. Calders passionate pursuit of a truly modern expressionin works large and small produced in the United States and in Francewas prefigured by his parents. They were Francophiles, cosmopolitan in their artistic outlook, as their son would be. They, too, were committed to the promise of a new art, even if their sons generation eventually eclipsed theirs, leaving much of the work of Calders father, Alexander Stirling Calder, looking old-fashioned.

Calder in his house in Roxbury, Connecticut, 1964. Nanette Lederer Calders portrait of her son around the age of six hangs on the far wall. Photograph by Ugo Mulas.

Calders mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a portrait painter with a wonderfully fluid, quietly dramatic style. She devoted many canvases to her children, not only her son, who was born in Philadelphia in 1898 and who would eventually be known to the whole world as Sandy, but also his sister, Peggy, born in Paris two years earlier. A portrait of Calder that his mother painted when he was six or so hung prominently in his house in Roxbury, Connecticut, for many years. It hovers in the background of a dramatically lit interior by the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas; the foreground is dominated by the altogether grown-up Calder, seated in an armchair beneath one of his mobiles, his eyes closed, perhaps taking a nap, as was his wont. In Nanette Calders marvelous, dreamy composition, her son is seen in profile, wearing a cape and a tartan cap given to him by his paternal grandfather, who had grown up in Scotland. Sandy looks like a figure out of a fairy tale, a little prince facing a promising future.

Nanette Lederer Calder. Calder in Scottish Cap and Cape, c. 1904.

Calders fatherwho eschewed the Alexander that hed inherited from his father and gained a considerable reputation as A. Stirling Calderdevoted most of his energies to large-scale public works. But he scored a significant success with Man Cub, a statue of his son, Sandy, at the age of three, standing buck naked, his feet firmly planted on the ground, an orange clenched in his right hand. The lusty boy, as Man Cub was described soon after it was finished, is a baby Hercules with a surprisingly gentle face. That face reappears, with the baby fat nearly gone, in Laughing Boy, a head Stirling modeled when Sandy was seven. Here Sandy, with cupid lips, mischievous eyes, and a cap of thick, unruly hair, brings to mind a young satyr or a budding Bacchus. In Stirling Calders work, Nanettes little prince is reimagined as a mythical beingthe young powerhouse, the genial charmerand the classical sources suggest, if not for Sandys father then certainly for us, what will turn out to be the boys more than natural powers.

No wonder Alexander Calder always felt extraordinarily special, even long before he distinguished himself in any significant way. As a grown man, Calder sometimes complained about the time he had spent holding still while his mother put him in a frame or his father put him on a pedestal; he griped that he had been paid a mere twenty-five cents for two hours of work. The way he inscribed the word Art in his autobiographical notes, with the A capitalized and the three letters enclosed in quotation marks, suggested a certain irony about his parents attitudes. Their aestheticism was surely too much a matter of old-fashioned idealism to appeal to their son, who even in his most austerely visionary works always insisted that his visions have an immediacy, a grounding in the here and now. Nevertheless, there could be no question that Artthe whole passionate adventure of la vie bohme, which had brought Stirling and Nanette together and held them together for more than fifty yearswas the great edifice in which Calder was born, the world he first knew. By turning his energies to the life of art, he was following in his fathers footsteps, answering the siren call of the imagination.

The glorious trapthe trap of the artists life or, at least, the creative lifehad been set when Calder was a boy. And the origins of that trap went even further back than Stirling and Nanette Calder, for Stirlings father, Alexander Milne Calder, was also a sculptor. Although he didnt himself live what might be called a bohemian life, he was certainly familiar with all the risks and excitements of the artistic vocation. France, where