Jed Perl - Calder: The Later Years: 1940-1976

On June 14, 1969, a bright, cloudless Saturday, Alexander Calder and his wife, Louisa, were in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the dedication of La Grande vitesse, the enormous steel sculpture he had made for the plaza in front of the recently completed City Hall. Calder, who was seventy that June, had been dreaming about a new kind of public monument since soon after he became an abstract artist early in the 1930s. But it was only in the 1960s that those dreams were becoming realities. The times were nothing if not dramatic, and the unprecedented arrival of a colossal abstract sculpture in the heart of a conservative midwestern city was just one more small twist in a decade full of surprises. The summer of 1967 had become the Summer of Love; the antiwar movement had brought down a president; a month after the dedication of La Grande vitesse a man walked on the moon. Although much too old to be part of the decades youthquake, the Calders embraced the idealistic spirit of the 1960s. The immense abstract monuments that Calder was beginning to create were as bold, as wild, as brilliant, as strange, as idiosyncratic, and as unprecedented as the times in which they were produced. A good friend, thinking of Calders indefatigable experimentation, wrote that some of his new work suggested an adventurous and carefree student-like march.

On the day of the dedication of La Grande vitesse, some two thousand people gathered in downtown Grand Rapids to welcome the artist and his art. The mood was celebratory, with children cavorting at the foot of the monument. The local symphony played a work for woodwind and percussion composed for the occasion by Aaron Copland. Copland and Calder knew each other a little and shared the steadiness of purpose that American modernists needed to forge an art with international ramifications. La Grande vitesse was a revolutionary geometry, and to move around it was to encounter a complex of occasionsoccasions that the men and women of Grand Rapids were only beginning to grasp. What Calder had created was an imaginative exaltation.

Dedication of La Grande vitesse, June 14, 1969.

Calder had a fine time in Grand Rapids, although he afterward confessed to an old friend, the architect Josep Llus Sert, that he had been a little reluctant about traveling to Michigan for the dedication.

What he may not have known was that sixty years before La Grande vitesse was inaugurated, Frank Lloyd Wright had designed a house for Meyer May, the president of a Grand Rapids clothing emporium. Wrights Meyer May House was a work of stirring originality, with a mass, a dynamism, and a visual drama that bear comparison with some of Calders monumental works. Among those in attendance at the dedication of La Grande vitesse was Robert Blaich, the director of design at Herman Miller; he had been a member of the committee that approached Calder about creating a work for the city. As part of the celebrations Calder was given an Eames lounge chair.

Calders Spiny (maquette, 1939) and the logo for the Herman Miller company, as reproduced in Carl Dairs Design with Type, 1952.