Calder's Universe

By ROBERT HUGHES

"The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof." On reading this pompous remark by Alexander Calder, the most internationally celebrated of all living American sculptors, one's hopes rise. Make way for the cosmic perspective! In fact, as the Whitney Museum's new retrospective of the work of this venerable figure testifies, his achievement is more modest and realistic. In the 200-odd works that make up "Calder's Universe," as the show is called, there is little of the real universe, but a pervasive flavor of its metaphors: orreries, planetary clockwork, automata. The Copernican epicycles turn out to be circus rings, and the vast music of the spheres comes down to the delicious noise of appetite rubbing against humor.

Calders have been artists for four generations--his great-great-grandfather, a funeral mason from Aberdeen in Scotland, helped carve the Albert Memorial in London before settling in Philadelphia in 1868. But Alexander Calder, looking at 78 like a rumpled dugong in a red flannel shirt, belongs to a hallowed American type: the bike-shop genius, cousin to Henry Ford or Wilbur Wright. Except for the big commissions of the past 20 years, his sculpture is still mostly improvisation--tin-snips and pliers stuff, made in his studios in Connecticut and the south of France.

Freedom from Earth. It is difficult now to appreciate how trivial Calder's wire constructions must have looked in the '20s and '30s, when the word sculpture meant solidity. But their wit lasted. Time and again, one encounters feats of inspired and self-mocking draftsmanship, traced with wire in air: portraits of Jimmy Durante and the shimmying Josephine Baker, or a farouche she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus through six wooden drawer pulls that serve as her teats. Often there is a prophetic note. Calder's motorized sculptures of the '30s predict the kinetic art of the '60s and are fulfilled in such giant works as Universe (1974), in Chicago's Sears Tower.

Calder's main contribution to the language of modernism, of course, is the mobile. The first to make sculpture move, Calder liked "the idea of an object floating--not supported. The use of a very long thread seems to best approximate this freedom from the earth." The movement, created by touch or air, may be slow or fast, ponderously deliberate or fluttery as an aspen, but it always has the purposed yet unpredictable grace of nature itself.

It is this sense of mutated organic form, emphasized by Calder's reluctance to smooth away the traces of making the sculpture (bolts always show, surfaces are always hand-painted rather than sprayed), that gives such life to his stabiles--Calderese for static sculptures. They are by turns as graceful as plants, as energetic in profile as a jumping tarpon: Calder's sense of edge is unfailing. Partly because they are assembled from sheet steel and do not dislodge great lumps of space, they also have a light, affable air to them. The larger, recent mobiles are rather less exhilarating, at least when hung in a museum: the response to air has gone, and it takes a shove, not a zephyr, to overcome their inertia.

The drawings are less impressive.The early studies for circus figures, drawn in one continuous line--as the sculptures are made with a continuous wire--are skillful but inconsequential. Nevertheless, they are far above the level of his later gouaches. Thousands of these exist, and not a day in Calder's life appears to pass without more being made. But as a painter, Calder is a paragon of boring fecundity. One is put in mind of an ancient Galapagos turtle laying eggs. There are thousands of them, all alike, and few survive. Even Jean Lipman, his friend of 40 years who assembled the show, is forced to reluctantly admit that "inevitably there are a great many below top quality, and it is unfortunate that these have been exhibited and sold." As for Calder's dabbling in the world of business promotions, such as the aircraft he painted up for Braniff Airlines, the less said the better -- even though it takes talent to make a DC-8 look that ugly. No matter: the sculpture is his great achievement, and will be his testament .

Robert Hughes

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