Calder: The Conquest of Space, the Later Years, 1940–1976

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.[em] (Apr.) [/em]