ARCHIVE

ALEXANDER CALDER
FROM THE ARCHIVES
The simplicity of Alexander Calder's playful sculptures makes them susceptible
to interpretation - an impulse that must he resisted, wrote Mahonri Sharp
Young, a friend of the artist, in June 1977. Robert O'Byrne
S
andy is about as unsymbolic a person as
I know,' Alexander Calder's wife Louisa
once declared of her spouse. The comment
was seemingly made after Swiss-born
dealer George Staempfli quizzed the artist over
possible symbolism in his work and Calder had
trouble coming up with a response. Louisa Calder
was the great-niece of Henry and William James,
and the bracing air of New England level-headedness
is evident in her pronouncement. One wonders
whether it will have been taken into account by the
organisers of a retrospective opening at Dsseldorfs
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen this month
('Alexander Calder: Avant-Garde in Motion'; 7
September-12 January 2014).
Calder's output is susceptible to interpretation
precisely because it appears too simple not to
contain hidden meaning. Yet the temptation to
engage in exegesis was resisted by Mahonri Sharp
Young when he wrote about an earlier Calder
exhibition in the June 1977 issue o Apollo. The
artist had died a fortnight after this show first
opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
and Young brought a personal intelligence to his
observations since not only had he known Calder
but he was likewise the son of a sculptor.
The fathers of both men spent time studying
at the Acadmie Julian in Paris, and after respect-
ively returning to the United States each benefited
from commissions offered by the many cultural
institutions built at the start of the last century.
Sculpture by Mahonri Mackintosh Young decorates
the American Museum of Natural History, while
that of Alexander Stirling Calder can be found
throughout Philadelphia.
Of course there were divergences as well as
parallels: Young's background was Mormon (his
great-grandfather Brigham Young founded Salt Lake
City and was president of the Church of Latter-Day
Saints for 30 years until his death in 1877) while
that of Calder was resolutely artistic (his great-
grandfather had been a Scottish tomb carver, and
his grandfather was likewise a sculptor). But surely
the common roots meant author approached artist
with an unusual degree of empathy. Young might
almost have been describing himself when he wrote
of Calder as being 'born to the trade' and thus not
needing to find his way around: 'technical pro-
cedures, the bane of so many men, never bothered
him at all; he used everything in sight...We carry on
too much about the difficulty of art: impossible if you
can't do it, it's easy if you can.'
This last remark is equally applicable to writers,
and Young must be applauded for bringing the same
lightness of touch to his text as Calder did to his
mobiles and stabiles. Nothing better exemplifies the
artist's deftness than Cirque Calder which initially
brought him to public attention in the late 1920s.
Young applauded the attention paid to this work by
Jean Lipman, an old friend and patron of Calder who
organised the Whitney exhibition. Like Lipman he
recognised the worth of the more modest pieces: the
figures in the circus, the jewellery, the household
objects. Maybe, he wrote, 'Calder is more himself in
the little things he made for his friends and family
than in the massive works in all the public places in
the world. Sometimes it seems as though there is not
an airport without its Calder, but these great mech-
anical birds, do they really fiy like the table models?'
Young appreciated the humanity of the man as
much as he celebrated the talent of the artist. He
noted that while Calder 'had a perfectly real sense
of his own worth, and an ability to remember slights
as keen as the next man's, he did not take himself
as seriously as we are now being asked to take him'.
Among Calder's most attractive attributes were a
want of self-reverence and a sense of humour,
neither often encountered in the art world. More-
over his humour was essentially benign, making
even his largest pieces - what Young called 'a race
of monsters yet unborn' - unthreatening and
approachable. Despite friendship with certain
Paris-based artists in the 1930s, Young was also
correct that the affinities with Dadaism which
another critic James Johnson Sweeney was inclined
to highlight 'are more in form than spirit: Dada is a
little short on innocent merriment.'
'The esthetic value of these objects cannot
be arrived at by reasoning,' wrote Calder in the
catalogue accompanying an exhibition of mobiles at
the Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts, in August
1933. His attitude did not change over the next four
decades. 'He remained remarkably unstuffy,' Young
recalled in Apollo, 'and he resolutely refused to make
portentous remarks about his own work.' Likewise
Young resisted waxing solemn. By so doing he paid
a more faithful tribute to Calder than any amount
of pondering over potential S5Tnbolism. @
NEXT
ISSUE
PREVIEW
PAD London 2013
FEATURES
Apollo talks to
Ellsworth Kelly
Art and alcohol
Turner and Constable
go to Margate
Collector interview
with Mr Chow
COLLECTORS' FOCUS
British political cartoons
REVIEWS
From around the world,
including Mary Queen
of Scots in Edinburgh,
Erank Holl in Surrey,
and the reopened
Lenbachhaus in Munich
130 APOLLO SEPTEMBER 2013