All posts tagged: Alexander Calder

Who Was Alexander Calder and Why Was He So Important?

Who Was Alexander Calder and Why Was He So Important?

Published by José Betancourt

In 1937 Calder returned to Paris, where he set up a studio in a garage outfitted with an automotive turntable, likely to facilitate the viewing and adjusting of his sculptures. That same year, he was commissioned to create Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris. The work included mercury mined in Almadén, Spain, a material that symbolized Republican resistance during the Spanish Civil War. It was shown alongside Picasso’s Guernica and Miró’s The Reaper, reflecting the political engagement of these artists. Back in New York in 1938, Calder began construction of a large studio on the foundations of an old dairy barn in Roxbury and shortly afterward converted the adjoining icehouse studio into a living space known as the “Big Room.” That same year, his first retrospective, “Calder Mobiles,” was presented at the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. The show included 61 pieces of jewelry, and among the guests at the opening were designer Alvar Aalto and painter Fernand Léger. A year later, Calder was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art …

Calder Sculpture in D.C. to Be Restored a Decade After Dismantling

Calder Sculpture in D.C. to Be Restored a Decade After Dismantling

Published by Jenni Sidey

A partially dismantled sculpture by Alexander Calder in Washington, D.C. is, at long last, in the process of being restored, according to Roll Call, a publication that focuses on Capitol Hill-based news. The sculpture in question, Mountains and Clouds, fills the 90-foot-high, skylit atrium of the Hill’s Hart Senate Office Building, which was constructed in the 1970s and first occupied in 1982. Calder’s proposal was chosen from a group of five sculptors who were tasked with designing “a work that would harmonize with the atrium’s surrounding white marble architecture and yet stand apart from the cluttering distraction of adjacent doors, windows, and balconies,” according to the Senate website.  Related Articles Calder made the final adjustments to his sheet-metal maquette on November 10, 1976; he died the following day in New York City. Construction on Mountains and Clouds began a decade later, in 1986, and the monumental sculpture, made out of black-painted aircraft aluminum, was dedicated the following year. It is—or, rather, was—51 feet tall overall. In 2016, the 75-foot-wide “clouds” portion of the sculpture, which …