Calder: The Conquest of Space
The Later Years: 1940-1976
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Publisher Description
The concluding volume to the first biography of one of the most important, influential, and beloved twentieth-century sculptors, and one of the greatest artists in the cultural history of America--is a vividly written, illuminating account of his triumphant later years.
The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened their home to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. In the postwar decades, they divided their time between the United States and France, as Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo '67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Jed Perl makes clear how Calder's radical sculptural imagination shaped the minimalist and kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. And we see, as well, that through everything--their ever-expanding friendships with artists and writers of all stripes; working to end the war in Vietnam; hosting riotous dance parties at their Connecticut home; seeing the "mobile," Calder's essential artistic invention, find its way into Webster's dictionary--Calder and Louisa remained the risk-taking, singularly bohemian couple they had been since first meeting at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The biography ends with Calder's death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight--only weeks after an encyclopedic retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum in New York--but leaves us with a new, clearer understanding of his legacy, both as an artist and a man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art critic Perl (Calder: The Conquest of Time) completes his magisterial biography of sculptor Alexander Calder (1898 1976) with this lavishly illustrated volume, revealing Calder's transformation from playful American master to international figure. First achieving acclaim for his mobiles, Calder later gained notoriety for "monumental objects that celebrate the uprising of the human spirit." Improvising a bohemian life in Connecticut with his wife, Louisa, during WWII, the artist welcomed refugee artists such as Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, and Andre Masson as he sculpted unconventional materials and space into what Calder called "a new form of art." Calder later experimented with art forms in his constellations and sculptures depicting weightlessness (as with The Dancer and On One Knee). The artist gained international acclaim in the 1950s as foreign audiences "saw in his ebullient and sometimes downright idiosyncratic abstractions a bridge between the prewar and the postwar possibilities for abstract art." In the 1960s, Calder received titanic commissions at Spoleto, Montreal's Expo '67, and 1968's Mexico City Olympics for his monumental sculptural pieces. Calder admirers will delight in this exhaustively researched and illuminating retrospective.
