Yale Alumni Magazine 在 The Daily Snap 相簿中新增了 1 張相片。
Alexander Calder’s sculpture "Gallows and Lollipops" on Hewitt Quadrangle is temporarily upstaged by the fall foliage.
亞歷山大 · 考爾德的雕塑"絞架和棒棒糖"上休伊特四邊形暫時搶的秋天的落葉。
Alexander Calder’s sculpture "Gallows and Lollipops" on Hewitt Quadrangle is temporarily upstaged by the fall foliage.
亞歷山大 · 考爾德的雕塑"絞架和棒棒糖"上休伊特四邊形暫時搶的秋天的落葉。
In 1972, when the Gallery’s East Building was under construction, Alexander Calder was commissioned by the Collectors Committee to create a large mobile that would complement the monumental atrium of the building.
Originally planned in steel, the sculpture would have been too heavy when enlarged to function as the artist intended. At Calder’s request, Paul Matisse (grandson of the French artist Henri Matisse) transformed the design into an aluminum construction that retained the look and dynamism of the steel construction with a more employable weight. In this photo, Alexander Calder and Paul Matisse examine one of the mobile’s red plates.
When asked to title the Gallery’s mobile, Calder replied “You don’t name a baby until it is born.” Calder died one year before the finished mobile was hoisted up to the space-frame roof on Friday, November 18, 1977. Thus, he never witnessed the “birth” of his last major commission.
The Collectors Committee was formed in 1975 to help select and finance commissions to fill the public spaces of the East Building. The Committee has continued to acquire major 20th- and 21st-century paintings and sculpture for the Gallery and has established a curatorial discretionary fund for acquiring prints, drawings, and photographs. For a full list of acquisitions made possible by the Collectors Committee, visit: http://1.usa.gov/1Lu0hna. And you can read about the Collectors Committee’s most recent gifts here:
http://1.usa.gov/1LKUojk
http://1.usa.gov/1LKUojk
Calder Mobile Inspection with Alexander Calder and Paul Matisse, November 3, 1976, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives
The unofficial icon of the East Building, Alexander Calder's mobile consists of 13 panels and 12 arms. Rather than use welded steel--Calder's customary choice of material--for this mobile, Paul Matisse employed aluminum, strengthening its stress points with molybdenum.
The buoyant panels appear solid but are actually hollow honeycomb-type sculptures covered with paper-thin aluminum skins. Although the sculpture's wingspan is just over 85 feet across, it weighs only 920 pound s--two tons less than if it were made of ponderous steel. #ArtAtoZ # Modernism
Alexander Calder, "Untitled," 1976, aluminum and steel
Alexander Calder, Mobile, 1955, Sheet metal, National Museum of Modern Art - Georges Pompidou Center, Paris
http://bit.ly/1odnbVV
Alexander Calder, Mobile, 1955, Sheet metal, National Museum of Modern Art - Georges Pompidou Center, Paris
http://bit.ly/1odnbVV
http://bit.ly/1odnbVV
Relics of a Sculptor’s Bronze Age
‘Calder: The Complete Bronzes’ at L&M Arts
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Calder: The Complete Bronzes, at L&M Arts in Manhattan, includes the artist's bronze “Dancer” (1944). More Photos »
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: November 8, 2012
The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was blessed with
several kinds of genius. He was brilliant at the hands-on part, able to
think incisively in several materials. He was innately cosmopolitan, a
natural stylist and a bit of a sponge, swift to absorb and make his own
the best of both the past and the present. He was an entertainer who
aimed to please without pandering, to reconcile modernism and popular
art, with assists from folk and what was then called primitive art.
Multimedia
Calder’s favored materials were wire, sheet metal and wood, which he
bent, cut and carved into attenuated, levitating forms that banished
sculpture’s ages-old weight and bulk. He used bright, flat colors in new
ways and invented at least two genres: his hanging mobiles and his
equally pared-down stabiles, as well as works that combined aspects of
both.
He didn’t have much use for the dark, inert tradition-bound sculptural
staple of bronze; he had just two brief encounters with it, in 1930 and
in 1943-44. Still, it is quite amazing to see nearly all his forays into
bronze brought together in one place, as they are by “Calder: The
Complete Bronzes” at L&M Arts.
A collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the show doesn’t quite live
up to its title, since a loan or two fell through at the last minute,
but it is the first exhibition to concentrate almost exclusively on
these works. There were just six in the National Gallery of Art’s sprawling 1998 Calder retrospective and only one in the Whitney’s
recent examination of his Paris years (1926-33). L&M is presenting
35 bronzes as well as plaster models for 13, and one cast-aluminum work.
While not quite as original as his mobiles or stabiles, Calder’s bronzes
are shot through with his irrepressible spirit and talent for
insouciant distillation. The ancient medium enabled him to move deeper
into art history; to keep pace with and borrow from other more
traditional strands of modernist sculpture and to use his hands and
amazing tactile sense in a different way. The exhibition sheds new light
on his complex sensibility while also showing him pursuing some of his
characteristic interests — like levitation — in an unlikely material. In
addition the play between the white plasters, which are so responsive
to light, and their nearly identical twins in the dark, more matte
bronze is fascinating.
In 1930, when he made his first bronzes, Calder was 32. He had a degree
in engineering, had studied painting for three years at the Art Students League
and was living in Paris. The son and grandson of sculptors, he had
dabbled precociously in the medium in his youth but had returned to it
only in 1926, when he started to make his famous miniaturized “Circus,”
the teeming rendition of life under the big top executed in wire, wood,
paint and bits of fabric that became a hit in avant-garde circles on
both sides of the Atlantic.
The show opens with a dozen bronzes (and plasters for six of them) that
Calder made, possibly in the summer of 1930, working with a foundry not
far from his studio. Arranged on three shelves, they are toy size and to
some extent toylike. A weight lifter and a pair of acrobats — one
balanced above the other in a one-hand stand — recall figures from the
“Circus.” A host of wonderfully lumpy animals includes a swaybacked cow,
a slinky cat, a perky horse and a perturbed elephant. Calder challenged
himself by modeling in fast-drying plaster rather than wax; the pieces
are all so emphatically squeezed, prodded and gouged that they seem to
be nothing but surface, to have no interior volumes. They combine the
energy of small, ancient figurines with that of the modern cartoon.
At one end of the bottom shelf two female nudes strike a different note.
One lies on her side, seeming to cleave to the earth; the other sits,
leaning back on her hands. Their subtle distortions and quieter surfaces
may indicate attention to Matisse’s bronzes from two decades earlier,
but their everyday poses seem more typical of Degas. They are sentient
beings.
Calder returned to bronze in 1943, partly to disrupt his facility with
his more habitual materials and partly in response to a suggestion by
the architect Wallace K. Harrison that he try to make some abstract works that could be greatly enlarged in concrete, since metal was in short supply during World War II.
The bronzes of this second stint are all over the place, in a good way.
They reflect a restless urge to see what a given material can do,
wobbling from figurative to abstract to Surrealistic combinations of the
two. As with Calder’s stabiles and mobiles, several pieces borrow from
the plant and insect worlds, which can become a bit macabre in bronze.
Tools are used as much a fingers and thumbs. Some forms and surfaces
feel spiked and dangerous, others are quite smooth. Here you may find
your mind swerving all over the place: archaic sculpture to 1950s
biomorphism to Edward Gorey (as with a scrawny three-legged,
three-pronged form called “Three Fingers” and its witchlike digits).
Sometimes several suggestions coalesce in a single piece. One of the
best works in the show is “Still Life (The Chicken),” which suggests a
modern chair, again three-legged, sprouting delicate mushrooms, with a
perforated back that also implies the head of an alert, if not alarmed,
chicken in profile.
There are more pairs of acrobats, but this time the two bodies are
separate sculptures that actually balance one atop the other, sometimes
in fairly suggestive ways. These combinations seem to lead to even
odder, more inventive feats of engineering in which single figures are
broken down into several separate pieces hinged together with hooks or
little posts that fit into holes. Calder acknowledges this unusual
structure with the title of a seated nude made from five separate
pieces, “A Detached Person (Seated Woman).”
It is hard to know if the frequent figurative distortions or
abbreviations are a matter of balance or aesthetics, but a precarious,
lurching body language results, along with distinctive spatial effects.
The standing leg and foot of “Dancer” — a four-part figure that seems
more like a skater — is much larger than the one she lifts and points
behind her. Her head and arms and the wishbone form that connote her
breast are small again. She seems to loom over an immense space,
starting out and ending up small, like one of the nudes in Bill Brandt’s
photographs.
“Dancer,” “A Detached Person” and the subtly desperate cast-aluminum “On
One Knee” — a figure that seems to be pleading — are all credible
elaborations on Giacometti’s “Woman With Her Throat Cut”
of 1932. Like the small nudes from 1930, only more extreme, they have
an inner complexity and emotional delicacy that is uncommon to Calder’s
figures.
Part of this may be the literal balancing acts performed by the
sculptures’ combined parts. They are visibly precarious, structurally
Existentialist you might say, which seems appropriate to the time in
which they were made.
“Calder: The Complete Bronzes” is on view through Dec. 8 at L&M
Arts, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan, (212) 861-0200, lmgallery.com.
This 1944 children's book from the Guggenheim Library & Archives is filled with illustrations by Alexander Calder. Do you notice the wire-like similarity of these drawings with the artist's mobiles? http://gu.gg/G7hjI
沒有留言:
張貼留言