Alexander Calder: A sculptor's indifference to medium

Vassily Kandinsky was hip to jazz. Titling various works as improvisations and affixing a number to each is ample proof of that. The arts, visual and otherwise, can't help but influence folks in disparate fields. Frank Zappa, an Edgard Varèse enthusiast, was also a tremendous fan of Alexander Calder's work, again serving to link any type of creative output to the next.

Digression aside, wading through Calder's oeuvre viewers get the hint that after moving on from Cirque Calder [slide #2] there was a concerted effort to work in a singular style.

Examining any of Calder's output, one could easily discern an overt Joan Miró influence. Widely credited with inventing the mobile—those dangly things one might be familiar with from infancy—Calder moved on to work in any number of art practices: large scale, public sculpture as well as jewelery and paintings, in which Miró's work most obviously served as a basis.

Calder's cultural import, though, moves beyond just the physical and marks an historically significant shift in the promulgation of public art. La Grande Vitesse [slide #14] was "the first public sculpture to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts through their Works of Art in Public Places Program."

There's got to be a Chicago connection, apart from Flamingo [slide #16], you might be thinking. And there is.

After hopping back and forth between Paris and sundry American cities, Calder scored his first solo exhibition at the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society in 1928. It's obviously been a while since then, but the MCA is in the process of readying Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy, an exhibition examining Calder's works in addition to several other artists plying the field of sculpture.

Running through October, the exhibition opens Saturday, June 26th.
More Alexander Calder at the MCA