MY MAGICAL ATTIC: ALEXANDER CALDER: DREAMING EQUILIBRIUM AT FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

May 30, 2026

ALEXANDER CALDER: DREAMING EQUILIBRIUM AT FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

ALEXANDER CALDER: DREAMING EQUILIBRIUM AT

FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

ALEXANDER CALDER: DREAMING EQUILIBRIUM AT FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

April 15, 2026 – August 16, 2026

The Fondation Louis Vuitton will celebrate the centenary of Alexander Calder’s (1898-1976) arrival in France in 1926 and fifty years since his death with a retrospective that explores all facets of his œuvre. “Calder. Rêver en Équilibre”1 spans half a century of creation, from the late 1920s and the first staging of the artist’s Cirque Calder performances that captivated the Parisian avant-garde, to the monumental sculptures that redefined public art in the 1960s and 1970s. At the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Calder’s mobiles – floating within Frank Gehry’s architecture – transform the exhibition into a choreographed dance.

One of the most important exhibitions ever dedicated to Alexander Calder, “Calder. Rêver en Équilibre” has been conceived in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, its principal lender. The display also features loans from international institutions and leading private collectors, bringing together nearly 300 works: stabiles and mobiles – to use the Calderian terminology for static and kinetic abstractions – as well as wire portraits, carved wooden figures, paintings, drawings, and even jewelry, designed as unique sculptures. Throughout the chronological journey spanning more than 3,000 m2, the exhibition will highlight Calder’s fundamental artistic concerns: movement above all, but also light, reflection, humble materials, sound, the ephemeral, gravity, performance, and the interplay of positive and negative space.

The anniversary exhibition is enriched by contributions from Calder’s contemporaries. Works by the artist’s friends Fernand Léger, Vassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian, as well as Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, will situate Calder’s radical inventiveness within the avant-garde movement. Thirty-four photographs taken by some of the most important photographers of the 20th century – Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Gordon Parks, Man Ray, Irving Penn, and Agnès Varda, among others – will show an artist walking a tightrope between art and life. “Calder. Rêver en Équilibre” will also feature focused presentations dedicated to key bodies of Calder’s work, including his beloved Constellation series and his dynamic jewelry.

In line with previous monographic exhibitions dedicated to major 20th and 21st century figures – such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Perriand, Mark Rothko, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter – the Fondation Louis Vuitton is dedicating all of its exhibition spaces, and for the first time its adjoining lawn, to Calder’s work. In doing so, the exhibition initiates a dialogue between Calder’s volumes, planes and movements and those of Frank Gehry’s architecture.

In his mid-20s, Alexander Calder reconnected with his family’s artistic legacy (son of a painter and sculptor, grandson of a sculptor) by turning first to painting and drawing. After studying at the Art Students League of New York, he moved to Paris in 1926. In the Montparnasse district, then the epicenter of the international art world, he quickly became part of a thriving creative community. There he presented innovative works – figurative and minimalist wire sculptures that drew critical praise – and a miniature circus. Thanks to an exceptional loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first in 15 years, the Cirque Calder is returning to Paris, the city where it was made. At the heart of this innovative body of performance art, Calder orchestrated miniature acrobats, clowns, and equestrians for ever-growing audiences. Fernand Léger, Jean Hélion, Le Corbusier, Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian were among the spectators.

Calder’s visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930, where he was deeply impressed by the environmental installation, marked a decisive shift toward abstraction, first in painting and then in sculpture. Marcel Duchamp suggested the name “mobile” in 1931 for Calder’s kinetic abstract compositions, which were presented by the artist in 1932 at the Galerie Vignon in Paris. Initially powered mechanically and later set in motion by the slightest breeze, these works drew “their life from the indistinct life of the atmosphere,” as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1946. Notably, in response to Duchamp’s terminology, Arp proposed the term “stabile” for Calder’s static objects of the early 1930s.

Although Calder returned to the United States in 1933, he continued to travel to Europe, notably participating in the Spanish Republic Pavilion in 1937 alongside Miró and Picasso. He returned to France after the war and established a studio in the hamlet of Saché in the Loire Valley in 1953. With one foot in each country, Calder expanded the very definition of sculpture until his death in 1976. Through movement, certainly, but also through a dynamic vocabulary deployed across all scales – from delicate metal assemblages animated by the slightest breath to monumental constructions – he created nonobjective sculptures that simultaneously existed in parallel with nature. As Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, the guest curators of the exhibition, comment: “Calder’s innovative approach expanded the dimensions of sculpture to include time as an essential fourth dimension.”

SUZANNE PAGÉ

Artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton

‘’The art of Calder is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.’’ 1

Marcel Duchamp

Mention “Calder” and the child within everyone smiles, the space comes to life, everything is alive. Shortly after the artist’s arrival in Paris in 1926, he made his name with his presentations of his Cirque; the avant-garde circles of Montparnasse were fascinated with the veracity and spirit of his articulated wire figures, with his sense of observation and his invigorating humor vying with the mastery of the engineer.

His very personal approach to all gravities would be found again in his mobiles, where the balance of opposites operates in a game that is as random as it is controlled and is always dreamlike. Today, Calder remains one of the most popular sculptors in the world, and his monumental stabiles and standing mobiles have spread across the globe, from Paris to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seoul, Jerusalem, Barcelona, Rotterdam, and more. Stripping all solemnity from public commissions, these sculptures, now predominantly anchored into the ground, have the power to enchant the site where they’re placed and bring it to life. Landmarks in an urban island, they activate their immediate space in an intimate connection with the earth, the wind, the sun, the rain, and the natural elements.

Born into a family of artists, his mother a painter, his father and grandfather sculptors in the academic tradition, Calder first studied mechanical engineering, freeing the resourceful, inventive child from any notion of submission to the canons of statuary. He would choose emptiness and impetus over mass and gravity. A genius of the nothing 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.

In the lobby of the Fondation, Rouge triomphant, a mobile from 1963, embodies the defining characteristics of his work: evoking vegetation, playing with light, air, shadow, and space, latent instability and lightness of materials, creating a choreography in which each element plays with its own freedom, while the ascending single red petal is the ballet master.

The exhibition opens on the pool level, with the years following his artistic training at the Art Students League in New York, with Calder as a painter of the city and an amused observer of the street, of construction sites, and sporting events, such as the illustrations he published in the National Police Gazette. The same sense of life is evident in his drawings of animals, captured with elliptical, empathetic lines.

The irresistible Dog (1926-1931), with is clothespin head, is our introduction to the world of the Circus, while pieces of broomstick, cork, leather, velvet, string, and a rubber tube harness Horse and Rider (1926-1931). Immediately mythical, thanks to its universal, timeless magic, that combines precision and veracity with real humor, the Cirque, begun in 1926, is the center of the first room. Some twenty scenes, bringing together characters, accoutrements, and various devices, surround the large model now conserved at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Wire, cardboard, corks, buttons, rhinestones, pipe cleaners, and bottle caps are transfigured by something much more than just brilliant craftsmanship. It is an arrangement of materials, carefully chosen for their language, color, and evocative power. Thus, in a new animal series, wood expresses the cow’s placidness and the impassivity of the lion at rest. The “King of Wire” uses the medium’s spring and elasticity to translate the impetus of acrobats, tightrope walkers, and athletes, or the erotic trepidations of Joséphine Baker’s belly dance. Elsewhere, in an expressive mode, the portrait of Fernand Léger plays with shadow, but is incredibly lifelike, with his moustache, eyebrows, and hat.

Decisive in his turn toward abstraction was Calder’s visit to Mondrian’s studio – not his paintings, but, above all, the arrangement of the space they commanded. This is illustrated here by a group of non-objective compositions, some of which were shown at Galerie Percier in 1931, with the accompanying booklet featuring an introduction by Fernand Léger, while at Galerie Vignon the following year, he would show his mobiles, so dubbed by Marcel Duchamp.

Initially fitted with a motor, such as Double Arc and Sphere (1932), they would acquire total autonomy in balance and harmony, “meticulously calculated and coordinated so that a whole set of movements would be triggered by the slightest draft, with each component playing its part in the dance.”1 Further on, Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/1933) integrates various objects, such as bottles and a gong, opening up new configurations and associations. Calder’s return to New York in 1933 coincided with an evolution to a more organic style, in line with his contemporaries Hans Arp and Joan Miró, whose biomorphic works are shown here in the same room, beside each other.

On the ground floor, Gallery 4 introduces three-dimensional paintings-in-motion preceding Calder’s research for what would be a masterpiece, Mercury Fountain, commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, included here as a maquette.

Its original neighbors were Picasso’s Guernica and The Reaper by Miró, works that express the political commitment of these artists. Skillfully calculated by Calder, the circulation of the mercury – an unusual material chosen precisely for its political charge – operates across three plateaus at a rhythm that allows the viewer to “watch it flow;” the tar, in addition to being anticorrosive, acts as a color contrast to the silver of mercury. Next, presented under the title “Between Matter and Life,” are the abstract works from the 1930s to the 1950s, the forms and movements of which exist in parallel to the plant and animal world: Four Leaves and Three Petals (1939); Eucalyptus (1940), and Bougainvillier (1947). Peacock (1941), which Calder gave to Jean-Paul Sartre, is “an iron-winged bird of paradise. It takes only a little warm air to brush against it as it escapes from the window and, with a little click, the bird smoothes its feathers, rises up, spreads its tail, nods its crested head, rolls and pitches and then, as if responding to an unseen signal, slowly turns right around, its wings outspread.”1

On the next level, Devil Fish (1937) – whose bolts take, from a structural constraint, a sensory and aesthetic advantage that we find in the stabiles – dances, while serving as an anchor for the Fish. These mobiles, incorporate colored glassware mixed with shards of mirror and porcelain as scales. Further along are the randomly resonant Gongs, and the Towers, slender scaffolding attached to the wall, both series begun in the early 1940s and 1950s, respectively. Here, Lily of Force (1945) stands apart, the quintessence of a freely unfurled flower, playing with the effects of counterweights without the least heaviness, its grace accentuated by its colors, as if dancing for the space. Alongside small bronzes, Gallery 6 is filled with jewelry. Wearable sculptures, following the movement of the body, they are made from brass, copper, steel, gold, and silver wire, sometimes including glass elements. They include brooches, necklaces, earrings, rings, and belt buckles, predominantly intended as sentimental talismans for loved ones, especially his wife, Louisa. A testament to the admiration aroused by the artist, the selection of thirty-four portraits of Calder by leading photographers – including Man Ray, André Kertész, Irving Penn, Agnès Varda, Marc Vaux, Arnold Newman, Hans Namuth, Ugo Mulas, and Henri Cartier-Bresson – show him at different ages, or, with Herbert Matter, in the midst of works that seem alive, part of the same life as that being led by their creator.

The Constellations occupy Gallery 7. Shown by Pierre Matisse in New York in 1943, they are mainly made from painted wood, assemblages of colored elements, at times geometric, at others organic, connected in a network. Placed on a pedestal or suspended from the wall, they qualify and create a world made up of a multitude of small cosmoses.

he last level brings together, without consideration for chronology, large-format mobiles – including Black Clouds (c. 1939), Red Maze III (1954), and Quatre Systèmes rouges (1960) – their potential unleashed in a completely open space, while La Grande vitesse (1:5 intermediate maquette, 1969) plays a stabilizing role. It is an introduction to the monumental outdoor sculptures to which Calder would later devote himself.

Next are the Critters, playful sprites emerging from a group of gouaches and inks on paper, whose vivid colors recall the buoyant dynamism of the final sculptures, Crag (1974) and Frange (1976).

The monumental stabiles occupy the “Cathedral,” while the delicacy of the points supporting Sabot on the ground is accentuated in the black-and-orange standing mobile Southern Cross (1963), both of which evoke the silhouettes of animals caught in suspended momentum. While the production of the stabiles had become industrial, the visibility of the craft in the rivets, bolts, and ribs reveal the fundamental presence of Calder the man bringing his sculpture to life. It is movement, “actual,” “implied,”1 or latent, that creates the special magic of his work, vectors of natural forces that speak of life, again and again, to each person and to the world.

The surging architecture of Frank Gehry echoes this work, and provides the ideal setting for Calder’s works, from the lobby where, free and joyful, Rouge triomphant creates a duet with the two monumental Stabiles, Black Flag and Five Swords, whose installation in the garden, used for the first time, was an obvious choice. As elsewhere, the presentation of a Calder exhibition is the result of a contradictory desire to be faithful to the spirit of a work whose principle is movement, while establishing a necessarily constrained system. Thus, at its inception, the presentation of the Cirque was a genuine performance, constantly reinvented, with the artist’s live commentary and even with sound effects orchestrated by Louisa. Today, the figurines, animals, and accessories must be protected while maintaining the vividness of these original performances. Considering this, a number of visual and audio presentations are being shown: Carlos Vilardebó’s 1961 documentary and the film made especially for the exhibition by Vic Brooks.

For the mobiles, we can but dream of the exhibition at MoMA in the fall of 1943, organized by the museum’s director and friend of the artist, James Johnson Sweeney, where the invective Please Touch had a thrilling participatory effect on a conquered public, as is clear from a document of the time bringing together Chagall, Martha Graham, Marianne Moore, Herbert Matter, and Calder himself.

The presentation of these works requires a kind of “reactivation.” Facing this problem for the 1996 retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, I proposed the participation of an artist, asking sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal, then in residence at Calder’s former studio in Saché, to suggest the individual positioning for each work, which in itself constituted an interpretation creation by a collaborating artist. For this exhibition, it has been Alexander S. C. Rower, committed to his responsibility and with his perfect affinity to the works, who, along with his collaborators, has ensured this new interpretation of mobiles and stabiles, their orientation, placement in space, lighting, and even what works were to become neighbors.

FIVE SWORDS, 1976

Sheet Metal, Bolts, and Paint

Dimensions: 17'9" × 22' × 29'

@ Calder Foundation, New York

LILY OF FORCE, 1945

Sheet Metal, Wire, Rod, and Paint

Dimensions: 270 x 250 x 160 cm

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

ROUGE TRIOMPHANT, 1963

Sheet Metal, Rod, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 9'2" × 19'2" × 15'

IMPARTIAL, 1946

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 48" × 60"

@Calder Foundation, New York

4 + 3, 1944

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 7'2" × 11'2" × 2'7"

Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris;

Gift of the Artist, 1966

SEVEN BLACK, RED AND BLUE, 1947

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 48 1⁄8" × 60 1⁄4"

@ Calder Foundation, New York

HELMET WITH EYES, 1946

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 30 1⁄4" × 25"

@ Calder Foundation, New York

LA BOTTE, 1959

Sheet Metal and Paint

Dimensions: 76 3⁄4" × 74 8⁄10"

Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

PINWHEEL AND FLOW, 1958

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 30 1⁄8" × 40 1⁄8"

@ Calder Foundation, New York

‘’ At first [my] objects were static (“stabiles”), seeking to give a sense of cosmic relationship. Then I felt that these relations were possibly not the most important and I introduced flexibility, so that the relationships would be more general. From that I went to the use of motion for its contrapuntal value, as in good choreography. 1’’

ALEXANDER CALDER

STREET CAR, 1951

Brass, Sheet Metal, Rod, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 9'8" long

Art Institute of Chicago

BOUGAINVILLIER, 1947

Sheet Metal, Wire, Rod, Lead, and Paint

Dimensions: 198.1 x 208.3 x 137.3 cm

Shirley Family Calder Collection, promised Gift to the Seattle Art Museum

Photo Courtesy of Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, New York

DISPERSED OBJECTS WITH BRASS GONG, 1948

Brass, Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 48.3 x 167.6 cm

Shirley Family Calder Collection, Promised Gift to the Seattle

BLACK FLAG, 1974

Sheet Metal, Bolts, and Paint

Dimensions: 23'5" × 19'9" × 17'2"

Calder Foundation, New York

In the 1970s, Calder spent much of his time living and working in France, his adopted home, where he was widely celebrated. In 1974 alone, he was appointed Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur and he received the Grand Prix National des Arts et des Lettres. He had become a virtuoso of monumental form, working with industrial foundries in Tours (France) and Roxbury (United States), executing public and private commissions worldwide. Black Flag exemplifies his mastery of industrial materials and his sustained engagement with dynamic form and spatial interaction. It also speaks to his intuitive and direct working process: “If a plate seems flimsy, I put a rib on it, and if the relation between the two plates is not rigid, I put a gusset between them … How to construct them changes with each piece; you invent the bracing as you go, depending on the form of each object.” Like many of his monumental works of the 1960s and 1970s, Black Flag employs bold geometric shapes and painted metal to assert a powerful presence within architectural and outdoor environments.

EUCALYPTUS, 1940

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimension: 240 x 154.9 cm

Calder Foundation, New York Gift of Andréa Davidson, Shawn Davidson,

Alexander S. C. Rower & Holton Rower, 2010

YUCCA, 1941

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimension: 103.5 × 38.1 × 27.9 cm

New York /ADAGP, Paris

UN EFFET DU JAPONAIS, 1941

Sheet Metal, Wire, Rod, and Paint

Dimensions: 80" × 80" × 48"

13 SPINES, 1940

Media

Sheet Metal, Rod, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 86" × 86"

Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

FOUR LEAVES AND THREE PETALS, 1939

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 80 11⁄16" × 68 1⁄2" × 53 1⁄2"

Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris;

Gift of the Estate of the Artist, 1983

PEACOCK, 1941

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 36 3⁄4" × 49 1⁄2"

Private Collection

BLACK BEAST (MAQUETTE) 1939

Sheet Metal and Paint

Dimensions: 21" × 28" × 17"

SÃO PAULO, 1955

Oil on Plywood

Dimensions: 48" × 53 1⁄2"

@ Calder Foundation, New York

LAOCOÖN, 1947

Sheet Metal, Wire, String, and Paint

Dimensions: 80" × 120" × 28"

The Broad, Los Angeles

APPLE MONSTER, 1938
Wood, Wire, and Paint
Dimension: 167.6 x 141 x 82.6 cm
Calder Foundation, New York
Gift of Alexander S. C. Rower

in Memory of Mary Calder Rower, 2015
© 2026 Calder Foundation, New York /ADAGP, Paris

GUI, 1976

Sheet Metal, Bolts, and Paint

Dimensions: 9'9" × 8'8" × 6'2"

CALDER’ S VAGUE¹ MULTIDIMENSIONAL UNIVERSE BY DIETER BUCHHART

(Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue)

‘’Calder suggests nothing. He captures true, living movements and crafts them into something. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves. They simply are: they are absolutes. ‘’

Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946²

“Nothing at all of this is fixed.”³ With these words, Alexander Calder summed up his artistic credo in his programmatic statement “How Can Art Be Realized?” in 1932. In so doing, he expressed the radicality of his thought and his artistic practice. With his wire sculptures of the 1920s and his early performances of the Cirque Calder (1926-31), the artist gained attention, making important connections in the Parisian avant-garde and achieving acknowledgment from the avant-garde. Comparable to Cubism’s break with traditional art history and the introduction of ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp more than a decade earlier, Calder established the apparently banal, theatrical (hand circus) performance as a fixed component of contemporary art. “Retrospectively, it has become acutely clear that the Cirque was at the premiere of performance as art... It was exactly this sense of immediacy that made Calder’s circus so compelling – challenging, as it did, the audience’s initial expectations.”⁴ As the “king of wire,”⁵ he built up his reputation on the Paris art scene; his kinetic sculptures, wind mobiles, and stabiles were what gained him worldwide acclaim. In the 1960s, Calder was finally able to realize many of his ideas for monumental sculptures in public space.

1 - A term used by Jean-Paul Sartre in “Les mobiles de Calder,” Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Louis Carré, 1946); trans. Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre (Calcutta: Seagull, 2008), available online: https://calder.org/bibliography/ alexander- calder-mobiles-stabilesconstellations-1946/jean-paul-sartreles-mobiles-de-calder/, accessed October 16, 2025.

2 - Ibid.

3 - Alexander Calder, “How Can Art Be Realized,” trans. Calder Foundation, available online: https:// calder.org/ 3 bibliography/abstractioncreation-art non-figuratif-1932/, accessed October 14, 2025.

4 - Alexander S. C. Rower, “Cirque Calder,” Alexander Calder & Fischli/Weiss, ed. Theodora Vischer (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2016), p. 56.

5 - The phrase “le roi du fil de fer” was first published in Gabrielle Buffet’s “Alexandre Calder ou le roi du fil de fer,” Vertigral 1, no. 1 (July 15, 1932). Cf. Gabrielle Buffet, “Sandy Calder forgeron lunaire,” Cahiers d’art, nos. 20–21 (1945–46). Translation courtesy “Calder in France,” Cahiers d’Art, no. 1 (2015). Alexander S. C. Rower, “Tracing Lineages,” Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start, ed. Cara Manes (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2021), p. 43.

But today, one hundred years after his arrival in Paris on July 24, 1926, and fifty years after the artist’s death on November 11, 1976, what constitutes the significance of andfascination with Calder’s œuvre in the age of transhumanism or posthumanism¹ in the age of social media, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and NFT (Non-Fungible Token) and of an “omniscient, omnipotent, divine AI”?² Why do numerous recent works of art and design imitate, borrow, or pay tribute to the idea and the implementation of Calder’s circus performance, wire sculptures, mobiles, and stabiles?

This retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton explores Calder’s radical modernism in the context of his period, but always with an eye on the relevance of the visionary’s artistic practice in our present and future.

THE FOURTH DIMENSIONS: A TRACE OF MEMORY OF THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE

After his years as an art student and illustrator, the idea of the “hand circus” performance began with “chance material.”³ Even though Calder still identified himself primarily as a painter when he moved to Paris from New York in 1926, his miniature circus represented “a laboratory in which some of the most original features of his later works were to be developed.”⁴ Soon, the presentation of his circus became a performance in which time, space, duration, and movement became an artistic subject – charged with the intensity of suspense – anxiety – release – entirely in the spirit of Henri Bergson, who argued that movement always takes place in concrete duration.⁵ The radicality of the trace of memory that Calder formed is one that addresses all five human senses, even including the olfactory, which is rarely addressed in art. His artistic performance is shaped by constant scene changes and rearranging that requires precise planning, ensuring the technical operation of the individual scenes with the simplest of means: hopping, jumping, floating, sliding, and movement in general. For example, Little Clown, the Trumpeteer is a smoking figure with a cigarette in its mouth that the artist pumps with air using a hose from behind, so that the cigarette actually burns and the clown is also able to inflate a balloon during the performance – this entirely in the sense of the Bergsonian endurance of memory. For the past survives in the present both as a trace in memory as well as by way of its essence itself, so that Bergson considers duration less as transience and more as constancy. The sculptural elements become a visual store of the past, as in the miniature-like sculptures of Calder’s circus.

1 - The complex interlinkage of various positions on transhumanism and posthumanism is founded on the critique of anthropocentrism. Various reconfigurations of the human, of humanity and an anti-hierarchical, reciprocal object-subject constellation are outlined in different lines of argument under the collective terms posthumanism and transhumanism. See Stefan Herbrechter, “Kritischer Posthumanismus und die ‘Humanities’ der Zukunft,” Philosophie.ch. Swiss Portal for Philosophy (December 22, 2016): https://www.philosophie. ch/2016-12-22-herbrechter, accessed October 16, 2025.

2 - Lena Göbl and Konstantin Obermayr, “Allwissend, allmächtig, allgegenwärtig - Göttliche KI?,” https://oe1.orf.at/programm/20240221/750138/ Allwissende-allmaechtige-goettliche- KI, accessed October 9, 2025.

3 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), p. 20.

4 - Ibid., p. 15. 17

5 - Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen,1912).

Time and thus the fourth dimension become part of the work. These sculptures are created using the simplest devices and characterized by reduction, and, in this way, the artist, despite simplification, succeeds in a precise characterization of the protagonists. In so doing, he distances himself during the performance from any illusion of a realistic representation, also by undressing figures like the “clown” all the way to their wire frame, like a skeleton. The “unfinished’ quality”¹ of the figures and props requires performative completion and its link to duration and the trace of memory. “Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment.”² This is also true in the scene with a coarse, awkward elephant that steps over its rider, a trainer with a prominent black top hat, but Calder suggests that the elephant crushes the trainer before blowing the straw from a bucket into the air using a hose as its trunk. The scenes are lively and at the same time so abstracted from reality, the performance is situated somewhere between wire sculpture and spectacle, presenting what Legrand-Chabrier aptly described as “stylized silhouettes.”³ Anticipation and irony are always in the background of the performance, whereas his voice, like that of a market-crier, and the use of, a whistle intensely stimulate the sense of hearing. The sounds, spoken, and yelled words are part of this experience, just like the music, which is actually performed and experienced, in contrast to Wassily Kandinsky, who translated music to painting and made it audible in his timbres of color and lines. Indeed, the sound poetry of Dadaists such as Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters and his Ursonate comes to mind.

That this is by no means an innocuous circus act is revealed by the rawness of the figures made using cheap materials, like the “Mahraja de Sharinabe-damned,” who throws an axe at his “prima ballerina” and then has her body removed by two stretcher bearers: violence as performance. In his circus laboratory, which quickly gained popularity in the Paris art world during the late 1920s, Calder found “the esthetic of the unfinished, of suspense and surprise.”⁴ The theatrical performances take up these principles and combine the traces of the past with those of the present.

THE “ KING OF WIRE ”: ENERGETIC ACTIVATION OF THREE – DIMENSIONAL SPATIAL LINES

By the late 1920s, instead of the chance materials used in Calder’s circus, wire was the basic material for his portraits of figures, such as acrobats and dancers, so that he became known as the “king of wire.”⁵ “They were now three dimensional forms drawn in space by wire lines – much as if the background paper of the drawing had been cut away leaving only lines.”⁶

1 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, p. 40.

2 - John Dewey, Art as Experience, (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), p. 17.

3 - André Legrand-Chabrier, “Un petit cirque à domicile,” Candide, no. 171 (1927), p. 7.

4 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, p. 19.

5 - Susan Braeuer Dam, “Calder in France,” Cahiers d’art, no. 1 (2015), p. 9.

6 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, p. 20.

While artists such as Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso in Female Acrobat allowed the line to emerge in space on a two-dimensional pictorial surface, Calder created three-dimensional spatial drawings that anticipated the postmodern idea of expansive drawings, which today are easy to produce with laser cutting technologies and 3D printers. Calder’s taut, hand-shaped wire generates by way of its vibrations a force field that in turn engenders the vitality of the figures, as in the portrait Fernand Léger, where the vibrations are amplified by the shadows of the spatial lines cast. They can be activated by touch, so that the energy inherent in the wire works portraying the dancer Josephine Baker or the tennis player Helen Wills brings them virtually to life, indeed amplifies life. In this way, the lines reverberate in the third dimension like animated spatial drawings, like the figures activated by Calder in his miniature circus. The characteristics of modernism inhere both in their energetic activation, the completion of the artwork with the addition of movement, as well as in their qualities as spatially expansive drawings, which was later taken up by artists like Tom Wesselmann in the 1980s in his steel drawings. “The end result is not much different from pretending you could miraculously pick up a drawing by the lines and hold it in space.”¹ Calder’s wire sculptures could already be carried around literally in space and viewed, marking another aspect of Calder’s radical modernity.

As he did with the “chance materials” used in creating his circus figures, the “king of wire”² here transformed a humble material into an artwork. In addition, Calder experimented with wood carving and its haptic qualities during the late 1920s. Here, he explored the different material qualities, textures, and forms of this natural material. “He allowed the natural form of a lump of wood to guide him.”³ In contrast to the wire sculptures, and like his father he treasured the opportunity “to fondle sculpture.”⁴ The artist linked the choice of various pieces and kinds of wood and their treatment to the natural history inherent in the material, its growth and place of origin.

Calder continued to use “humble”⁵ materials in works during the subsequent decades with stones, shards of glass, porcelain, tin cans, cigar boxes, cords, scraps of wire, and tin.6 The use of “humble” materials bridges the way to Calder’s use of material in general. For not only did he use wire or tin in his sculpture, he also transformed everything around him into artworks, even domestic objects. Using silver wire, he sewed a broken wooden salad spoon back together, elevating the scar to a sculptural element, or transformed spirals into the shapes of grill tools. In this way, he translated his artistic sensitivity for materials, his surroundings into an artistic universe, and converted these literally into a total work of art.

1 - Letter from Tom Wesselmann to Paul Cummings, adjunct curator for drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, December 28, 1985, added in a handwritten postscript. Wesselmann Estates Archive.

2 - Susan Braeuer Dam, “Calder in France,” p. 9.

3 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, p. 22.

4 - Ibid.

5 - Ibid.

6 - Ibid., . The Museum of Modern Art. “Press Release: Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition of Arts in Therapy for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors,” New York, 1943, p. 3. https://www.moma.org/documents/ moma_press-release_325366.pdf, accessed November 7, 2025.

The texture and materiality of the wire and wood works characterize the historicity inherent in the material and its surface in the sense of its memory.¹

“ EINSTEINIAN UNIVERSE ”²: VAGUENESS AND CHANCE IN CALDER’S NON – OBJECTIVE MATERIALS AND SCULPTURES AS REPRESENTATIONS OF MOVEMENT

In 1930, Calder planned to “shut up the [circus]... as it hinders my work.”³ Although the artist actually continued the performance and, according to Jed Perl, occasionally did so for financial reasons⁴ he sought to distance himself from the Cirque, which had “become one of the best known, if not the best known, of his works.”⁵ A visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in October 1930 at 16 rue du Départ in Paris served as a catalyst that led to his non-objective works. Calder describes the studio visit as the moment that “gave me the shock that converted me.”⁶

Although this moment was decisive, the context of the general period seems equally significant. For example, Niels Bohrs “complementarity principle”⁷ and Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle”⁸ not only revolutionized thinking in the early twentieth century⁹ but also lay the foundation for quantum mechanics. If we follow the physicist Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to precisely determine the site and motion of a particle at the same time, every system bears uncertainty in itself, introducing vagueness to a scientific system that relies on objectivation. In contemporary art, the idea of vagueness and uncertainty has become a veritable symbol of postmodernism. In our own era – shaped by transhumanist aspirations, digital hyperconnectivity, and the expanding realities of social media, virtual space, and augmented experience – a new tension emerges between the drive for quantifiable objectivity and the persistence of uncertainty, both in the natural sciences and in art.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the relationship between art and the natural sciences is characterized on the one hand by the inclusion of new materials such as steel, glass, plastic, or synthetic paints and techniques like projection, construction, and abstraction, and at the same time by a generally widespread interest in new scientific theories.

1 - Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst eine andere Geschichte der Moderne, (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), pp.

2 - James Jones, “Letter Home,” Esquire, vol. 61, no. 3 (March 1964).

3 -

4 - James Jones, “Letter Home,” Esquire, vol. 61, no. 3 (March 1964).

5 - Calder to his parents from Paris, May 23, 1930, Calder Foundation archives.

6 - Jed Perl, Calder, The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898-1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), pp. 333.

7 - Ibid.

8 - Alexander Calder, untitled manuscript, Calder Foundation archives, 1956, p. 22.

9 - Donald McKenzie sees the formulation of the complementarity principle as linked to fin-de-siècle life philosophy. See Donald McKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).

We know that Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Kazimir Malevich were familiar with the discoveries of Max Planck in the realm of elementary physics as well as with Einstein’s theory of relativity and that they philosophized and speculated about space and time and non Euclidian geometry.¹ Institutions like the Bauhaus established links between art, technology, and the natural sciences.² References to the natural sciences and technology can be noted particularly in the works of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1915 called for new scientific values in art and a rejection of sentiment. The Large Glass, which Duchamp³ worked on from 1915 to 1923, shows a rigorous engagement with modern science and technology⁴, reflected in the nexus of individual visual elements with the latest illustrations of scientific theories and technologies. In 1920, Naum Gabo created Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave)⁵, a mechanical sculpture where a steel bar is activated by pressing a button that sets a motor hidden in the black wooden base in motion. By way of the rapid vibrations, the steel bar is transformed into a standing wave, a concept from physics. It is this “sensibility with science, the empathic with the engineered,”⁶ which Jed Perl also attributed to Alexander Calder, that describes the relation between art and the natural sciences. Calder’s “Einsteinian view”⁷ is part of his artistic radicality as well as his powerful influence on subsequent generations of artists. His artistic innovations laid the groundwork not only for a generation of kinetic artists such as Jean Tinguely and Jesús Rafael Soto, but also for those who, in the 1990s – freed from stylistic and material constraints – sought to expand the very concept of art toward Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work.”⁸ Accordingly, a relationship can be established between Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and Calder’s work, for it is vagueness – “nothing at all of this is fixed”9 – that makes Calder’s work unique.

The exchange with artists such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and Friedrich Kiesler in 1930 coincided with Calder’s turn toward abstraction and his intensifying interest in energetic activation and movement.

1 - See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: 6 Princeton University Press, 1983).

2 - See Marga I. M. Bijvoet, “Kunst zwischen Wissenschaft und Natur”, Natural Reality: Kunstlerische Positionen zwischen Natur und Kultur, eds. Heike Strelow and Bernd Stephan Baldin, Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kusnt (Stuttgart: DACO-Verlag, 1999), p. 78; Rainer Wick, “Das Bauhaus zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Zum veranderten Verhaltnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft heute, ed. S. D. Sauerbier (Munster: Lit-Verlag, 1984).

3 - See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non- Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art Henderson discusses Marcel Duchamp’s increasing interest in science and technology and links his works from 1911 and 1912 to the invisible reality of X-rays. The relationship of the French-American artist to science and his simulation of scientific facts as “parascience” is discussed extensively by Herbert Molderings, Parawissenschaft, das Ephemere, and der Skeptizismus (Dosseldorf: Richter, 1997), pp. 33ff and 56ff. Beside Duchamp, numerous artists such as Frantisek Kupka engaged with scientific and tech nological innovations like X-rays during this period.

4 - Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, pp. 58ff and 7lf.

5 - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gabo-kinetic-construction-standing-wave-t00827, accessed October 14,2025.

6 - Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science,” Calder and Abstraction. From Avant-Garde to Iconic (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013), p.36.

7 - James Jones, “Letter Home,” p. 34.

8 - Umberto Eco already introduced the concept of the open work to describe the participation of the audience in the emergence of the artwork in the early 1960s. See Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1989). 21

9 - Alexander Calder, “How Can Art Be Realized.”

Calder began this transition with two dozen non-objective paintings that he created in October 1930 within just fourteen days, perhaps as an echo of Mondrian’s response to Calder’s suggestion “that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate” – referring to the cardboard cutouts tacked to the wall for compositional experimentation. Mondrian’s response: “No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.”¹ Now the spatial line, as in Klee, pulls across two-dimensional canvas or a thin black beam disrupts the red, white, and blue color triangles. Calder’s non-objective painting follows this definition: “a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity.”² This in the spirit of Mondrian’s dictum, as Calder noted: “I started making simple forms instead of objects in order to capture the motion.”³

In the fall of 1931, Calder created his first kinetic sculptures, which Marcel Duchamp dubbed “mobiles.”⁴ In exchanges with artists and intellectuals such as van Doesburg, Mondrian, or Duchamp, Calder, “a poet guided by the steady instincts of a scientist,”⁵ could at this point in time have come into contact with the latest theories and debates in the natural sciences, such as the theory of relativity or the uncertainty principle. To that extent, the idea of the vagueness of the location and movement of a particle was part of the intellectual discourse of the years in question. There was also his acquaintance with the composer Edgard Varèse, “whose music corresponds to Sandy’s wire abstractions”⁶ and who was working between 1929 and 1931 on his composition Ionisation, which referred to the physical phenomenon of the ionization of molecules.

Like Gabo, who “tentatively introduced”⁷ movement in his Kinetic Construction, Calder used motors in some of his first mobiles to preprogram a certain sequence of movements for the parts, so that the vagueness was literally staged. In contrast, the mobiles that James Johnson Sweeney calls “wind mobiles” introduce vagueness and chance into Calder’s work, since they can be found in forms of endless constellations, in the sense of “free natural movement” in contrast to a “set pattern.”⁸

1 - Alexander Calder, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, ed. Jean Davidson (New York: Panthean Book, 1966), p.113.

2 - See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/non-objective-art,accessed October 17, 2025.

3 - Edna Warner Allen, memoir, Calder Foundation archives, p. 4.

4 - Alexander Calder, Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, pp.126-27.

5 - Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science,” p.36.

6 - Calder to her mother-in-law, March 15, 1931, quoted in Gryphon Rue Rower-Upjohn, “Calder and Sound,” Alexander Calder: Avant-Garde in Motion (Munich: Hirmer, 2013).

7 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, p. 8. 22

8 - James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder, p.35.

THE FIFTH DIMENSION: BETWEEN EXPECTATION AND EMOTION

Artists such as Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Duchamp, and Varèse share with Calder a sensibility for the natural sciences and the acceptance of vagueness as a fundamental principle of uncertainty. With his wind mobiles, Calder evokes the state of research in the natural sciences, transferring the concept of uncertainty and integrating it as a characteristic of modernity in his work as the “poetry of everyday life as shaped by heretofore invisible principles and laws.”¹ Jean Paul Sartre appositely described Calder’s work in 1946 as follows: “In short, although Calder has not sought to imitate anything – there is no will here, except the will to create scales and harmonies of unknown movements – his mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the tangible symbol of Nature, of that great, vague Nature that squanders pollen and suddenly causes a thousand butterflies to take wing, that Nature of which we shall never know whether it is the blind sequence of causes and effects or the timid, endlessly deferred, rumpled and ruffled unfolding of an Idea.”² Calder’s “Einsteinian-Universe,”³ as James Jones called it, is especially reflected in the trajectory from motorized sculptures to suspended mobiles. Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/33) was Calder’s first hanging mobile that was activated by the beholders, thus completing the work – in this case by first composing the objects then rushing to the red iron ball, activating the open-form program.⁴ Like a pendulum, the potential energy of the heavy sphere acts on the smaller wooden sphere to swing between the various objects: the bottles, the tin can, the wooden box, and the gong. The participation of the viewer is fundamental to create the work and to actually experience and complete it. Here, the psychological momentum of generating the beholders’ expectations is of particular importance. Accordingly, Calder’s Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere generates manifold constellations, whereby the work is transforming constantly in the moment the system is activated in relation to the arrangement of the surrounding objects. In self-observation, one realizes that the swinging of the pendulum evokes a hope that the small sphere might touch – or even violently strike – one of the objects, that the impact might produce a redemptive sound, an audible clash or a harmonic resonance of the glass bottles. This dependence on chance builds up an emotional tension, a hope for a climax that, whether fulfilled or not, points to the fifth dimension in Calder’s artistic universe in two ways. Firstly, the fifth dimension in physics and mathematics refers to the addition of another dimension to familiar four-dimensional continuum of space and time, that as a rule is introduced for various theoretical purposes. The fifth dimension is used in theories that go beyond classical relativity theory, especially the Kaluza Klein theory, which in the 1920s sought to unite gravitation and electro-magnetism with an “extra compact spatial dimension.”⁵

1 - Jed Perl, “Sensibility and Science.”

2 - Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les mobiles de Calder,” pp. 18-19.

3 - James Jones, “Letter Home,” p. 30.

4 - See Anna Karina Hafbauer,”Participation and Perception in Calder’s Open Artworks,” in this volume. 5 - Theodor Kaluza, “Zum Unitatsproblem der Physik,” Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, Mathematisch-Physikalische Klasse (1921), pp. 966-72. Oskar Klein, “Quantum Theory and Five- Dimensional Theory of Relativity, Zeitschrift fur Physik 37 (1926), pp. 895-906. See also James M Overduin and Paul S. Wesson, “Kaluza-Klein Gravity,” Physics Reports, 283 (5-6) (1997), pp. 203-378.

You may click below link to read whole essay of Dieter Buchhart ‘’Calder’s Vague Multidimensional Universe” and more essays from exhibition catalogue ….

https://librairie.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/product/2363-catalogue-calder-dreaming-in-equilibrium.html

BLACK WIDOW, 1948
Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint
Dimension: 325.1 x 251.5 cm
Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil – Departamento de São Paulo
On deposit From the Artist, 1948
© 2026 Calder Foundation, New York /ADAGP, Paris

FRANGE, 1976

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 41" × 36" × 3"

DEVIL FISH, 1937

Sheet Metal, Bolts and Paint

Dimension: 171.7 x 162.6 x 119.4 cm

New York / ADAGP, Paris

UNTITLED, 1972

Ink and Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 29 ½” × 43 ¼”

UNTITLED, 1964

Gouache and Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 29 1⁄2" × 42 1⁄2"

BLACK SPIAL, 1971

Media

Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 29 3⁄8" × 43 1⁄8"

CRITTER INNOMMABLE, 1974

Sheet Metal and Paint

Dimension: 194.3 x 95.3 x 74.9 cm

New York / ADAGP, Paris

CRITTER DIABLE (MAQUETTE), 1974

Sheet Metal and Paint

Dimensions: 49 ⅝” × 37 ¾” × 42”

CRITTER WITHOUT ARMS, 1974

Sheet Metal and Paint

Dimensions: 75" × 30" × 28"

CRAG, 1974

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 78 1⁄2" × 96" × 38"

UNTITLED, 1973

Media

Gouache and Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 29 1⁄2" × 43"

THE FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

The Fondation Louis Vuitton grounds its commitment to the contemporary arts within an historical perspective. The LVMH Group and its companies opened a new chapter in their history of patronage with the creation of the Fondation. The building itself was inaugurated on 24 October 2014, the result of nearly 25 years of commitment to the arts, culture and heritage.

Driven by its mission to serve the public, the Fondation is committed to making art and culture accessible to all. To promote the arts both nationally and internationally, it hosts temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, presents works held in its collection, commissions artists to create site-specific pieces, and stages events across the cultural spectrum (concerts, performances, conferences, film screenings, dance and more).

“A new space that opens up a dialogue with a wide public and offers artists and intellectuals a platform for debate and reflection".

Bernard Arnault

TO PROMOTE CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL ART

Alongside major modern art exhibitions (“Keys to a passion”, “Icons of Modern Art, the Shchukin Collection”, “The Courtauld Collection: a Vision for Impressionism”, “Icons of Modern Art, The Morozov Collection”), it proposes exhibitions devoted to great figures of art ("Inventing a new world : Charlotte Perriand", "Simon Hantaï. The Centenary exhibition") and offers a vision of art in France and around the world (“Chinese Artists at the Fondation Louis Vuitton”, “Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier”, “In Tune with the World”, "Crossing Views" and more).

In addition, the Open Space programme, initiated in 2018, invites young national and international artists to create a site-specific piece for the Fondation in response to Frank Gehry’s building.

Meanwhile, in the Auditorium, musicians and artists of all disciplines offer a classical and contemporary repertoire of recitals and performances.

The Fondation invites artists and intellectuals to participate in cultural events that tie in with its exhibitions. These conferences, debates and talks are held at the Fondation and offer a fresh perspective on the artwork exhibited.

THE BUILDING, A DARING AND INNOVATIVE MASTERPIECE

Starting with a pencil sketch on a blank sheet of paper, Frank Gehry designed “a magnificent vessel for Paris that symbolises France’s profound cultural vocation”. The architectural journey retraces the different stages in the creation of this edifice, which has become an iconic landmark of the French capital.

https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/fondation

You may visit Louis Vuitton Fondation news design by Frank Gehry to click below link from my blog.

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/louis-vuitton-fondation-design-by-frank.html

THE FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

MUSEUM EDUCATION

THE FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

LE FRANK RESTAURANT

THE FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

MUSEUM EDUCATION

THE FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

DESIGN BY FRANK GEHRY

THE FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON

UNTITLED, 1930

Media

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 24" × 15"

UNTITLED, 1930

Media

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 39 1⁄4" × 25 1⁄2"

UNTITLED, 1930

Media

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 32" × 23 5⁄8"

Calder Foundation, New York; Gift of Sandra

Calder Davidson, 2021

UNTITLED, 1930

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 28 3⁄4" × 23 3⁄4"

@ Calder Foundation, New York

UNTITLED, 1930

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 21 1⁄8" × 32"

@ Calder Foundation, New York; Mary Calder Rower Bequest, 2011

UNTITLED, 1930

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 24" × 24"

@ Calder Foundation, New York

PANTOGRAPH, 1931

Media

Sheet Metal, Wood, Wire, and Paint, With Motor

Dimensions: 35 1⁄2" × 44 1⁄2" × 22"

Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Gift of the Artist & Louisa Calder, 1961

DANCERS AND SPHERE (MAQUETTE FOR 1939 NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR), 1938

Sheet Metal, Wood, Wire, String, and Paint, With Motor

Dimensions: 24 1⁄4" × 18" × 31 1⁄4"

UNTITLED (MAQUETTE FOR 1939 NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR), 1938

Sheet Metal, Wood, Wire, String, and Paint

Dimensions: 14 3⁄4" × 19 3⁄4" × 9 3⁄4"

UNTITLED (MAQUETTE FOR 1939 NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR ), 1938

Sheet Metal, Wood, Wire, String, and Paint

Dimensions: 15 3⁄4" × 9 7⁄8" × 9 7⁄8"

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

BLUE PANEL, 1936

Media

Plywood, Sheet Metal, Rod, Wire, String, and Paint

Dimensions: 65 7⁄8" × 36 1⁄4" × 37"

WHITE PANEL, 1936

Plywood, Sheet Metal, Tubing, Wood, Rod, Wire, String, and Paint

Dimensions: 84 1⁄2" × 47" × 51"

Calder Foundation, New York; Mary Calder Rower Bequest, 2011

UNTITLED, 1937

Plywood, Wood, Rod, Wire, String, and Paint

Dimensions: 64 1⁄2" × 36" × 29"

UNTITLED, 1933

Wood

Dimensions: 35 1⁄2" × 17" × 7 1⁄2"

REQUIN ET BALEINE, C. 1933

Wood, Rod, and Paint

Dimensions: 34" × 40 1⁄8" × 6 1⁄4"

Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris;

Gift of the Estate of the Artist, 1983

MACHINE MOTORISÉE, 1933

Wood, Wire, and Paint, With Motor

Dimensions: 37 1⁄2" × 19 3⁄4" × 19 1⁄4"

THE CIRQUE CALDER

“[Calder’s] circus was a natural outburst into the particular situation of life we call the circus,” said sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who was occasionally in charge of the crank-up phonograph for performances of Cirque Calder.

When he arrived in Paris in 1926, Calder began making a miniature circus, continuing to add new acts until 1931. According to him, “In all there are about twenty acts with an intermission, peanuts, and exotic gramophone music played by my wife, who is an excellent conductor, and with the sounds of a tambourine, cymbals and a cardboard pipe for making the lion roar.”

Photographs and films show us even more. The inventory of the Whitney Museum, where most of the elements are held, has 69 characters and animals, 8 mechanical systems, and around 90 props (fabrics, rugs, lamps, and so on), as well as items for its maintenance, musical instruments, records, elements used for sound effects, and five suitcases for transport. They are only traces of the original performance, just like the film that was made decades later.

Cirque Calder was one of the earliest forms of performance as art. Every presentation featured a unique series of interactions between Calder, his props, and the audience—with choreographed failures and fulfillments, and moments of suspense in between. The Cirque “only comes to life under the powerful, caressing hand of Alexander Calder, and only if genuine contact is made, between him and you,” wrote circus critic Legrand-Chabrier in 1929.

At the intersection of sculpture and theater, before what would come to be called happenings or performance, echoing Dada cabarets, and contemporary with the music-hall acts of Montparnasse, the Cirque Calder cannot be categorized. By 1930, it was the focus of avant-garde attention, a thrilling event experienced by Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Théo Van Doesburg, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian, among others. Uniting the effects of scale, formal and technical innovation, interactivity, and movement, it was the matrix for the work to come.

MORNING STAR, 1943

Sheet Metal, Wire, Wood, and Paint

Dimensions: 80" × 40" × 40"

The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of the Artist

HI!, C. 1928

Wire, Wood, and Paint

Dimensions: 37 11⁄16" × 27" × 6 1⁄8"

Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; Gift of Mrs. Theodore A. Cooke,

Mrs. Philip E. Spalding and Mrs. Walter F. Dillingham, 1937

JOSEPHINE BAKER IV, c. 1928

Wire

Dimension: 100.5 x 84 x 21 cm

Gift of the artist in 1966 Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou Paris

THE BRASS FAMILY, 1929

Brass Wire and Painted Wood

Dimension: 170.2 x 104.5 x 22.5 cm

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Gift of the artist 69.255

CONSTELLATION, 1943

Wood, Wire, and Paint

Dimension: 72.4 x 45.7 x 27.9 cm

New York / ADAGP, Paris

BERNARD ARNAULT PRESIDENT,

FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON FOREWORD (EXCERPT FROM THE EXHIBITIN CATALOGUE)

Alexander Calder’s work holds a unique place in the history of 20th-century art. It is part of one of the most radical avantgarde movements ever, yet at the same time remains extraordinarily appealing and instantly familiar. His sculptures are abstract – they do not imitate nature, rather they act like nature. They grow, they move, they possess their own rhythm. A perfect example is Lily of Force (1945), one of the masterpieces in the Fondation Louis Vuitton Collection. Both the title and the form evoke a water lily. But this sculpture is much more, a creature of steel and colors whose growth seems bound to an imaginary sun. It is not easy to describe. A line from Apollinaire’s poem Le Voyageur (1913) springs to mind: “Waves fish arches submarine flowers.”

Born in 1898, Alexander Calder as a child served as a model for both his painter mother and his sculptor father, who himself was the son of a sculptor. “I wasn’t brought up,” he quipped, “I was framed.” Calder studied mechanical engineering as a young adult, holding a series of jobs before embarking with a passion on the path predestined by his artistic genealogy. After a couple of years at the Art Students League in New York, in 1926 he set out for Paris, the international art capital and the city his parents called home before he was born. A century later, in 2026, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is delighted to celebrate the centenary of Calder’s arrival in France, because Calder today appears more contemporary and more future-facing than ever. He created a body of work in a realm of its own, where life takes flight and where dreams converse with space and time. He is an artist whom I find both fascinating and captivating. During the construction of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, my adviser Jean-Paul Claverie and I often talked about how it would be incredible to one day see the spaces conceived by Frank Gehry welcome and dialogue with the sculptures of Calder, one of the artists evoked by Suzanne Pagé in her reflections on the artistic direction of the future Foundation. This dream comes true with the magnificent and poetic exhibition of Alexander Calder’s works this spring.

In 1926, Calder arrived in France at the height of the Roaring Twenties to discover the unbridled energy and modernity sweeping across Paris, from Montparnasse to Montmartre. Fernand Léger, Hans Arp, Jean Hélion, Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian all welcomed him into their studios – and we have welcomed them to help celebrate this anniversary. Amidst this creative fervor, the Cirque Calder, a miniature circus he created in his studio on rue Daguerre, became a tremendous success. Presiding over his diminutive big top, Calder was at the same time ringmaster, stage manager, puppeteer, sound effects engineer and, above all, artist. His performances both amazed and challenged artistic conventions. “It shall move,” he wrote. In his quest for “a new possibility of beauty,” he was already inventing something entirely novel.

Marcel Duchamp, another restless traveler, proposed a bilingual word to put a name on these pioneering creations: “mobile.” Initially motorized, Calder’s mobiles subsequently came to life and sprang into motion with the slightest breeze. “They feed on the air, breathe it and take their life from the indistinct life of the atmosphere,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in 1946.

Returning to the United States in 1933, Calder spent the war surrounded by exiled artists. From 1945 onward he regularly returned to Paris and again exhibited in the city in 1946. In the mid-1950s he traveled back and forth continually. Like his close friend Ellsworth Kelly, and Joan Mitchell, to whom we have devoted major retrospectives, Calder is one of the great transatlantic figures in the history of 20th-century art. He split his time between his studios in Roxbury, Connecticut, Saché in the Loire Valley, and the wider world.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the close partnership nurtured with the Calder Foundation and its president, Alexander S. C. Rower, to whom I extend my gratitude and my admiration for his commitment to sharing the work of his grandfather with such remarkable intellectual and emotional sensibility. This magnificent exhibition took shape thanks to numerous exchanges between Sandy Rower and Jean-Paul Claverie, as well as Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and guest curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer. A host of prestigious institutions in France and other countries have generously loaned major works for our exhibition. I thank them, and I would like to especially salute our collaboration with the Whitney Museum, which made it possible to orchestrate an exceptional return of the Cirque to Europe. Our close relationship with the Centre Pompidou will also enable our exhibition to contribute to a veritable “Calder year” in France, first at the Fondation and then in the Centre-Loire Valley and at the Centre Pompidou Metz. We would also once again like to warmly thank prominent private collectors for their confidence. Suzanne Pagé’s intimate knowledge of Calder’s work has played an absolutely essential role in this exhibition. She accompanied our guest curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, alongside Olivier Michelon, curator at the Fondation. I congratulate them on this achievement. The project has been executed thanks to teams led by Sophie Durrleman, Executive Director of the Fondation. Their professionalism has proved indispensable to bring a monographic exhibition of such unprecedented scope to fruition.

For the first time, an exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton extends beyond the galleries with the display of two monumental “stabile” works – Black Flag and Five Swords – creating a compelling dialogue with Frank Gehry’s building. “Nothing at all of this is fixed,” Calder stated in 1932. His phrase resonates this spring as an open invitation to an avid public ready to be enchanted as they discover the most French of American artists.

Bernard Arnault President,

Fondation Louis Vuitton

SOUTHERN CROSS, 1963

Sheet Metal, Rod, Bolts, and Paint

Dimensions: 20'3" × 27' × 17'7"

New York / ADAGP, Paris

LE 31 JANVIER, 1950

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 147 5⁄8" × 236 1⁄4"

Collection

Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1950

LA GRANDE VITESSE (1:5 INTERMEDIATE MAQUETTE ), 1969

Sheet Metal, Bolts, and Paint

Dimension: 259.1 x 342.9 x 236.2 cm

New York /ADAGP, Paris

RED MAZE III, 1954

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimension: 142.2 x 182.9 cm

New York / ADAGP, Paris

AHAB, 1953

Sheet Metal, Wire, and Paint

Dimensions: 14' 9" × 18' 10"

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Gift of Bruce B. Dayton and

Mr. and Mrs. Gerald A. Erickson, by Exchange, 1983

ALEXANDER CALDER

Alexander Calder was born in 1898, the second child of artist parents—his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter (figs. 1–2). Because his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, received public commissions, the family traversed the country throughout Calder’s childhood. Calder was encouraged to create, and from the age of eight he always had his own workshop wherever the family lived. For Christmas in 1909,

Calder presented his parents with two of his ﬁrst sculptures, a tiny dog and duck cut from a brass sheet and bent into formation (figs. 3–4). The duck is kinetic—it rocks back and forth when tapped. Even at age eleven, his facility in handling materials was apparent. Alexander Calder was born in 1898, the second child of artist parents—his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter (figs. 1–2). Because his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, received public commissions, the family traversed the country throughout Calder’s childhood. Calder was encouraged to create, and from the age of eight he always had his own workshop wherever the family lived. For Christmas in 1909,

Despite his talents, Calder followed a friend’s idea after high school and enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology (fig. 5). It was not long after graduating in 1919 that he turned back to the family profession. He later discounted the notion that his engineering studies at Stevens played any role in the development of the mobile. In 1923, he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in New York, where his teachers included John Sloan and Boardman Robinson. Calder committed to becoming an artist shortly thereafter, and in 1923 he moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League. He also took a job illustrating for the National Police Gazette, which sent him to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to sketch circus scenes for two weeks in 1925 (fig. 6).

The circus became a lifelong interest of Calder’s, and after moving to Paris in 1926, he created his Cirque Calder, a complex and unique body of art (figs. 7–8). The assemblage included diminutive performers, animals, and props he had observed at the Ringling Bros. Circus. Fashioned from wire, leather, cloth, and other found materials, Cirque Calder was designed to be manipulated manually by Calder. Every piece was small enough to be packed into a large trunk, enabling the artist to carry it with him and hold performances anywhere. Its first performance was held in Paris for an audience of friends and peers, and soon Calder was presenting the circus in both Paris and New York to much success. Calder’s renderings of his circus often lasted about two hours and were quite elaborate. Indeed, the Cirque Calder predated performance art by forty years.

Calder soon began to sculpt from wire many portraits of his friends and public figures of the day (fig. 9). Word traveled about the inventive artist, and in 1928 Calder was given his first solo gallery show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. This exhibition was soon followed by others in New York, Paris, and Berlin; as a result, Calder spent much time crossing the ocean by boat. He met Louisa James (a grandniece of writer Henry James) on one of these steamer journeys and the two were married in January 1931 (figs. 10–11). He also became friendly with many prominent artists and intellectuals of the early twentieth century at this time, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, James Johnson Sweeney, and Marcel Duchamp. In October of 1930, Calder visited the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris and was deeply impressed by a wall of colored cardboard rectangles that Mondrian continually repositioned for compositional experiments. He recalled later in life that this experience “shocked” him toward total abstraction. For two weeks following this visit, he created solely abstract paintings, only to discover that he did indeed prefer sculpture to painting (fig. 12). Soon after, he was invited to join Abstraction-Création, an influential group of artists (including Jean Arp, Mondrian, and Jean Hélion) with whom he had become friendly.

In the fall of 1931, a significant turning point in Calder’s artistic career occurred when he created his first truly kinetic sculpture and gave form to an entirely new type of art. Many of these early objects moved by motors and were dubbed “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp—in French mobile refers to both “motion” and “motive” (fig. 13). Calder soon abandoned the mechanical aspects of these works when he realized he could fashion mobiles that would undulate on their own with the air’s currents. Arp, in order to differentiate Calder’s non-kinetic works from his kinetic works, named Calder’s stationary objects “stabiles” (fig. 14).

In 1933, Calder and Louisa left France and returned to the United States, where they purchased an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. Calder converted an icehouse attached to the main house into a studio (figs. 15–16). Their first daughter, Sandra, was born in 1935, and a second daughter, Mary, followed in 1939 (fig. 17). He began his association with the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York with his first show in 1934. James Johnson Sweeney, who had become a close friend, wrote the catalogue’s preface. Calder also constructed sets for ballets by both Martha Graham and Erik Satie during the 1930s, and continued to give Cirque Calder performances..

Calder’s earliest attempts at large, outdoor sculptures were constructed in this decade (fig. 18). These predecessors of his later imposing public works were much smaller and more delicate; the first attempts made for his garden were easily bent in strong winds. And yet, they are indicative of his early intentions to work on a grand scale. In 1937, Calder created his first large bolted stabile fashioned entirely from sheet metal, which he entitled Devil Fish (fig. 19). Enlarged from an earlier and smaller stabile, the work was exhibited in a Pierre Matisse Gallery show, Calder: Stabiles & Mobiles. This show also included Big Bird, another large work based on a maquette (fig. 20). Soon after, Calder received commissions to make both Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the Parisian World Fair (a work that symbolized Spanish Republican resistance to fascism) and Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a sizable mobile installed in the main stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (figs. 21–22).

When the United States entered World War II, Calder applied for entry to the Marine Corps but was ultimately rejected. He continued to create: because metal was in short supply during the war years, Calder turned increasingly to wood as a sculptural medium. Working in wood resulted in yet another original form of sculpture, works called “Constellations” by Sweeney and Duchamp (fig. 23). With their carved wood elements anchored by wire, the Constellations were so-called because they suggested the cosmos, though Calder did not intend that they represent anything in particular. The Pierre Matisse Gallery held an exhibition of these works in the spring of 1943, Calder’s last solo show at that gallery. His association with Matisse ended shortly thereafter, and he took up with the Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin as his New York representation (fig. 24).

The forties and fifties were a remarkably productive period for Calder, which was launched in 1938 with the first retrospective of his work at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts (fig. 25). A second, major retrospective was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York just a few years later, in 1943 (fig. 26). In keeping with his economy, Calder made a series of small-scale works in 1945 primarily from scraps of metal trimmed while making larger pieces. Duchamp saw them during a visit to Calder’s studio and organized a show at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris. Given their size, he proposed sending the objects to Europe by mail. Intrigued by the limitations on parcel size imposed by the U.S. Postal Service, Calder created larger works for the exhibition that could be easily dismantled, mailed overseas, and re-assembled upon arrival (fig. 27). This important show was held the following year, and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his famous essay on Calder’s mobiles for the exhibition catalogue. In 1949, Calder constructed his largest mobile to date, International Mobile, for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Third International Exhibition of Sculpture (fig. 28). He designed sets for Happy as Larry, a play directed by Burgess Meredith, and for Nucléa, a dance performance directed by Jean Vilar (figs. 29–30). Galerie Maeght in Paris also held a Calder show in 1950 and subsequently became Calder’s exclusive Parisian dealer. His association with Galerie Maeght lasted twenty-six years, until his death in 1976. After his New York dealer Curt Valentin died unexpectedly in 1954, Calder selected Perls Galleries in New York as his new American dealer, and this alliance also lasted until the end of his life.

Calder concentrated his efforts primarily on large-scale commissioned works in his later years. Some of these major monumental sculpture commissions include .125, a mobile for the New York Port Authority that was hung in Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport (1957); Spirale, for UNESCO, in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Trois disques, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); El Sol Rojo, installed outside the Aztec Stadium for the Olympic Games in Mexico City; La Grande vitesse, the first public art work to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, a stabile for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973) (figs. 31–37).

As the range and breadth of his various projects and commissions indicate, Calder’s artistic talents were renowned worldwide by the 1960s. A retrospective of his work opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964 (fig. 38). Five years later, the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, held its own Calder retrospective (fig. 39). In 1966, Calder, together with his son-in-law Jean Davidson, published a well-received autobiography. Additionally, both of Calder’s dealers, Galerie Maeght in Paris and Perls Galleries in New York, averaged about one Calder show each per year.

In 1976, he attended the opening of yet another retrospective of his work, Calder’s Universe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (fig. 40). Just a few weeks later, Calder died at the age of seventy-eight, ending the most prolific and innovative artistic career of the twentieth century.

https://calder.org/introduction/

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May 30, 2026

ALEXANDER CALDER: DREAMING EQUILIBRIUM AT FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON