When Alexander “Sandy” Calder

(1898–1976) arrived in Paris in

1926, he aspired to be a painter;
when he left in 1933, he had evolved
into the artist we know today: an

force in twentieth-century sculpture.

animating drawn line transformed

from two dimensions to three, from
ink and paint to wire, and his
radical innovations included open-
form wire caricature portraits, a
bestiary of wire animals, his beloved
and critically important miniature
Circus (1926–31), abstract and

paradigm-shifting “mobiles.”
Paris: A Family Legacy
Alexander “Sandy” Calder (1898–1976),
just shy of twenty-eight years old, arrived
in Paris in July 1926 by way of England,
making the transatlantic journey by
working on a freighter. Both of his parents
were artists who had studied in Paris. In
the 1890s his mother, Nanette Lederer
(1866–1960), a painter, attended the
Académie Julien and the Sorbonne after
her studies at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts; his father, sculptor
Alexander Stirling Calder (1870–1945),
studied at the Académie Julien and the
École des Beaux Arts, after also training at
the Academy. Following their individual
trips, they met at the Pennsylvania
Academy, where she again was studying
and to which he had returned from Paris
to become an instructor of anatomy.
Calder’s sister Margaret (known as
“Peggy”) wrote, “family legend has it that
Father and Mother met over a cadaver.”1
They married in 1895, and returned to
Paris for a short time. Peggy was born in
Paris in 1896; Sandy was born two years
later in Lawnton, Pennsylvania.
Calder’s paternal grandfather, Alexan-
der Milne Calder (1846–1923), had also
visited and worked in Paris and studied
at the Pennsylvania Academy; he was
celebrated in the 1890s for his colossal
public sculptures, among them a 36-ton,
27-foot-high figure of William Penn,
installed atop Philadelphia’s City Hall in
1894, which remains a landmark today.
Working on sculpture commissions in-
volved frequent travel for Calder’s father,
who at times relocated his family as well,
and intermittently experienced financial
insecurity. His son was not initially drawn
to a life’s work as an artist.
Calder had heard of the profession
of mechanical engineering from a
schoolmate at high school in San
Francisco. After graduating, he attended
the Stevens Institute of Technology
in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he
studied engineering principles that
would have important implications for
his later sculptures. Calder received his
degree in mechanical engineering from
Stevens in 1919 and held numerous
engineering-related and other odd jobs
between then and 1922, but none was
very satisfying. During a hiatus between
jobs in 1922, he took night classes in
drawing in Manhattan. “I became very
enthusiastic—more so than in any other
of my post-college ventures so far—and I
attended consistently,” he later recalled.2
The following year, after the last of these
jobs at a logging camp in Independence,
Washington, Calder returned East to
study at New York’s Art Students League.
New York: Seeing the City
with “Sandy” calder
Between 1923 and 1925 Calder studied
life and pictorial composition with John
Sloan, portrait painting with George
Luks, head and figure painting with
Fig. 1. Untitled (Monkey), 1925. Ink on paper, 5 9/16 x 3 3/4 in. (14.1 x 9.5 cm).
William Pène du Bois, and life drawing Calder Foundation, New York
with Boardman Robinson.3 Calder
credited Robinson for encouraging his
talents in drawing with a single line, a
technique in which the drawing implement
does not leave the paper. His facility at line city views reveal his engineer’s eye and an still recovering from the great loss of
drawing led to his newspaper illustration affinity for movement—ideas he would life and economic devastation of World
work for the National Police Gazette, the develop in new materials and new forms in War I yet it remained the fabled city of
New Yorker, and the New York Times, Paris. There his drawn line, transformed many liberties—social, sexual, political,
among others. Calder’s fluid drawing to lengths of ordinary wire, would become racial, and cultural. By comparison,
enlivened the renderings of animals that what he called “wire sculpture (or three- Calder’s homeland of the United
he made during visits to New York’s dimensional drawing).”4 States was, in the “Roaring Twenties,”
Central Park and Bronx zoos (fig. 1) unharmed by war and experiencing a
and that were published in his teaching buoyant economic upswing, but faced
manual Animal Sketching (1926), for Arrival in Paris increasing isolationism, racial divides,
which he also wrote the texts. and conservatism (indeed Puritanism, as
Like his teachers, Calder took as his Calder gave few reasons for his decision Prohibition came into effect in 1920 and
subjects scenes from everyday life. He to go to Paris; simply put: “Paris was wasn’t rescinded until 1933). Once in
exhibited in group shows in New York, the place to go, on all accounts of Paris, as we know from his letters, Calder
including a painting of a circus sideshow practically everyone who had been there, thought the city a destination for an artist
in an early exhibition at the downtown and I decided I would also like to go.”5 whose ambition was “to arrive,” and
Whitney Studio Club, a precursor to the Paris during the 1920s—“Les Années where he hoped to exhibit, sell, and gain
Whitney Museum of American Art. His Folles” (the crazy years)—was a city critical attention for his work.
 Calder had the encouragement of his
parents, and his mother sent him seventy-
five dollars each month. Living was cheap,
given an exchange rate highly favorable to
dollars, if not always easy. Calder initially
stayed in a hotel in Montparnasse—
finding his first home and studio a month
later. Since arriving in July he had begun
to explore the café life on the boulevards,
especially at the Café du Dôme, where
many artists and writers passed their time.
He met others at the famous art school
L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière,
where he drew from the live model. Later,
through his Circus performances as well
as in artists’ studios and cafés, Calder met
colleagues who would become icons of
twentieth-century art as well as life-long
friends, including Piet Mondrian, Fernand
Léger, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp.
The academic drawings in Calder’s
first sketchbook stand in stark contrast
to the radical qualities of the three-
dimensional “drawing in space” he began
to make in Paris. Wire toys for his own
amusement, life-like wood sculptures and
wire animals, and figures and mechanisms
for his miniature Circus were all in
progress by Fall 1926. By then he had
already begun to study French, with a
“grand old lady,” Calder wrote, “who
taught Mark Twain forty years ago” and
had also coached Whistler.6
Throughout his career, Calder was
responsive to images and events around
him. One of his first wire sculptures
was of Josephine Baker, recalling the
celebrities he had drawn earlier for the
Police Gazette. Baker’s public reception
was tremendous and her image was
ubiquitous in Paris. She had become an
overnight success upon her 1925 debut
in La Revue Nègre at the Théatre des
Champs-Elysées and was celebrated for
her lithe body, minimal costumes, and
Fig. 2. A page from Alexander Calder’s Scrapbook, 1926–32 (detail). fast-paced Charleston, as well as for
Chinese ledger notebook containing newspaper clippings, 11 x 17 in. (27.9 x 43.2 cm). the unbridled sexuality and artificial
Alexander Calder papers, 1926–1967, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
exoticism of a French-invented “African”
danse sauvage duet, which differed
from the revue’s other vaudeville and
jazz numbers.
Though many black American
performers had received acclaim in Paris,
Baker’s celebrity marked the “Jazz Age,”
attracting attention not only there, but
internationally. The response of the French
press was complex and contradictory,
but as historian Tyler Stovall explained,
“These stereotypes were overwhelmingly
positive. However demeaning they may
seem from present-day perspectives, in
the 1920s most black Americans in Paris
welcomed and praised the racial attitudes
of their French hosts. The French seemed
to regard blackness as something of
value, an attitude noticeably absent in
the United States.”7
Baker appeared in kiosk posters and
magazine photographs; dresses and a hair
cream, Bakerfix, were marketed in her
name; and dolls in her likeness were sold.
Man Ray, Henri Laurens, Pablo Picasso,
Kees van Dongen, and Tsuguharu Foujita
paid her homage, and Calder depicted her
in at least five wire sculptures.
Calder’s first Josephine Baker sculpture
is similar in scale to the dolls and toys he
had made earlier and is static on its wood
base. The others are ceiling-suspended.
Three of the larger Baker sculptures
also emphasize spiraling breasts and
belly, while the fourth and latest in date,
Aztec Josephine Baker (c. 1929; Calder
Foundation, New York), presents a
further geometrically abstracted form:
breasts, arms, and a single wire that
defines the torso and legs are suspended
from a single “shoulder” wire. Body parts
move independently of one other as they
are animated by air currents, just as the
elements of his later mobiles would.
The other of his first two wire
sculptures, Struttin’ His Stuff (1926),
Calder referred to as “a boxing Negro in
a top hat.”8 His inspiration might have
been celebrity boxer and champion
Alfonso Teofilo Brown, known as
“Panama” Al Brown, a native of Panama
 who emigrated first to the United States
and then to France, and was a grand
success in Paris. Like Baker, Brown
became renowned for his fast-paced
moves, enormous sums earned, and a
fondness for nightlife and fancy dress.
Calder himself was touched by the
celebrity culture of the 1920s, which
was disseminated through advertising,
gossip columns, and the wire services
that circulated news and photos
internationally. A full-page article in
Les Échos des Industries d’Art showed
the variety of works Calder had made
during his first year in Paris—toys, circus
performers, animal sculptures, and the
figurative wire sculptures Josephine
Baker and Struttin’ His Stuff—and its
Fig. 3. Tight Rope Artists from Calder’s Circus, 1926–31. Wire, cloth, paper, leather, lead, graphite, and thread,
text emphasized the artist’s talent for
dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 83.36.48 and 83.36.50 caricature (fig. 2). This article, annotated
in Calder’s hand, was kept with many
others in different languages, some
gathered by professional clipping services,
in Calder’s scrapbook of his “Paris Years.”
Toys
One could say that Calder’s mobile works
began with a small brass rocking duck he
made at the age of eleven. He also made
armor and weapons, covering an old pair
of his mother’s gloves in tin scales for his
knight’s costume, and fashioned jewelry
for his sister’s dolls from beads and found
bits of copper wire. The toys Calder
made in Paris some twenty years later,
including animated horses and rolling
carts, were for his own amusement. His
toy designs were also a means to become
self-supporting. When he began to be paid
fifty dollars a month from the Gould Toy
Company of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for a
series of colorful, wooden “Action Toys,”
he ceased receiving the monthly stipend
from his mother.
Fig. 4. Agnès Varda (b. 1928), Le pied de Calder et le lion de son Cirque, 1953.
Modern print from the original negative. Agnès Varda Archives © Agnès Varda
Calder’s Circus
Over a period of five years in Paris,
Calder created and performed one of his
most important and beloved works, his
miniature circus—titled in French Cirque
Calder and in English Calder’s Circus
(1926–31) (figs. 3 and 4). His numerous
visits to circuses, including the boisterous
three rings of Ringling Brothers and
Barnum & Bailey in New York and the
quieter spectacle of the one-ring Médrano
circus in Paris inspired the aerial play of
circus figures. These were made of the
most ordinary materials—wire and string,
bits of metal, and cloth.
For as long as there have been circuses,
artists have taken as subjects their
performers and their dazzling, often
suspenseful, acts. Georges Seurat, Edgar
Degas, and Picasso, among others,
depicted circuses in Europe; Edward
Hopper, George Luks, and John Sloan,
did so in the United States. Though
Calder had previously painted and drawn
the circus, his miniature Circus was
something far different: he performed
it. Serving as narrator and puppeteer in
this early example of performance art,
Calder presented his Circus act-by-act
in a precise order. The ringmaster (the
mainly wire-and-cloth Mr. Loyal) opened
the show by welcoming the audience and
blowing his whistle. Calder’s version of
the contemporary circus’s Roman chariot
race served as its finale.
Calder’s audience sat on a low bed
or on crates, munching peanuts while
Calder manipulated his characters with
strings and wires so that trapezists
flew through the air, cowboys lassoed
horses, and acrobats catapulted across
space. His hand-cranked mechanisms
allowed horses and their riders to circle
the ring and a belly dancer to gyrate in
life-like ways. Aerialists, clowns, a knife
thrower, a sword swallower, and others
were all set into motion. The realism of
Calder’s Circus ranged from the life-death
suspense of his trapezist attempting a
mid-air “catch” (which sometimes failed)
to the mundane act of him sweeping with
a tiny shovel the droppings (in the form of
chestnuts) his menagerie had left behind
in the ring.
Throughout his “Paris Years” Calder
supported himself in a variety of ways:
through the sale of his work, illustration
projects, his contract with Gould
Manufacturing, and occasional help from
home. At times Calder used the Circus to
supplement his income. In Paris in 1930,
he performed it for four nights running,
earning one hundred dollars from friends
to pay his rent. He brought his Circus
with him when he traveled in Europe and
on his regular trips to the United States.
After he and Louisa James, whom he had
met on one of his transatlantic crossings,
were married in 1931; her income helped
the couple maintain financial stability, but
they continued to live modestly.
Many friends and colleagues, including
other artists, photographed Calder with
his Circus, among them Brassaï and
André Kertész. Several films of Calder
performing it were also made, including
Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927 by Jean
Painlevé, perhaps the only filmmaker
to have seen Calder perform his Circus
during the “Paris Years” and also film
it. (The year 1927 of the film’s title
reflects the first full year in which Calder
performed the Circus.) Painlevé’s film was
completed in 1955, almost three decades
after he first saw the Circus performed,
and makes its New York–museum debut
in this exhibition. Calder’s Circus was
put on extended loan to the Whitney by
the artist in 1970; in 1983, the Museum
purchased the work as a result of an
extraordinary grassroots fundraising
project by more than 500 corporations,
foundations, and individuals.
In keeping with long-standing
tradition, the circus (and especially its
clowns) continues to fascinate artists;
Bruce Nauman, Ugo Rondinone, Cindy
Sherman, Roni Horn, Paul McCarthy,
and Pierrick Sorin are among those
who have incorporated circus themes in
their work. Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s
Circo de Puglas Cordoso (Cardoso
Flea Circus) (1994–2000), like Calder’s
Circus, features a fabric tent as well as
mechanisms to assist its tiny players in
performance. In contrast to Calder’s
small-scale Circus, Cardoso’s is a
micro-miniature spectacle, designed for,
performed by, and captured in a video of
the fleas of its title.
Bestiary
Calder’s sculptural bestiary is related
to the hundreds of toys he made
from broomstick handles, bits of wire,
and other ordinary materials just prior
Fig. 5. Varèse, 1931. Wire, 13 3/4 x
to leaving for Paris. He also made a 11 5/8 x 14 1/2 in. (34.9 x 29.5 x 36.8 cm).
wire sundial in the form of a rooster Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York; 50th Anniversary gift of Mrs. Louise
(whereabouts unknown), a utilitarian Varèse in honor of Gertrude Vanderbilt
invention Calder recognized as his first Whitney 80.25
wire animal creation. Before leaving
for Paris, Calder made watercolors and
hundreds of pen-and-ink drawings of
animals. As his sister Margaret wrote
about his methods, “[Calder] rigged up a
little device that held bottles of India ink
in a row. With this hung around his neck,
he spent days at the zoo, capturing in a
flowing line the languid cats, the bustling
bantams, the grimacing baboons.”9
Calder would make a variety of animal
sculptures, including cows, birds, and
elephants, throughout his “Paris Years.”
He worked them in a variety of media:
scrap material, sheet metal, wood, wire.
His early animal sketches captured
movement and character and profoundly
influenced his animal sculptures as well
as his illustrations for an edition of
Aesop’s fables, published by Harrison of
Paris in 1931.
Fig. 6. The Arrival of the Bremen or
The Spirit of St. Louis, c. 1928.
Wire, 17 x 24 x 4 in. (43.2 x 61 x 10.2 cm).
Private collection; courtesy Guggenheim,
Asher Associates

Caricatures and portraits
In addition to the sculptures Josephine
Baker and Struttin’ His Stuff, Calder
made small wire figures of other celebri-
ties, including tennis champion Helen
Wills and industrialist John D. Rock-
efeller, who is depicted as a golfer. He also
made caricatures of a spectrum
of society types, such as The Hostess
(1928; The Museum of Modern Art,
New York) and Le Policeman (Bobby)
(c. 1930; Collection of Joyce Klein), and
he made open-form wire portraits, more
than twenty of which are included in the
exhibition. Until 1928, these portraits are
of people he knew in New York: many
are those associated with the Weyhe
Gallery, where he had his first solo show
in 1928. By the following year, fully
integrated in the Parisian art scene, Calder
began to make portraits of friends and
colleagues there too. Among them are
artists Léger, Miró, and Amédée Ozenfant,
composer Edgard Varèse (fig. 5), and
painter, model, muse, and paramour of
many artists, Alice Prin, better known as
Kiki de Montparnasse, who wrote of the
artist: “Mr. Calder, an ingenious Yankee,
is in a class by himself. Instead of squirt-
ing tubes of paint on canvas or mutilating
marble, he twists pieces of iron wire—
with consummate skill—into a likeness of
his model.”10
Abstracted Figures
Calder soon began to abstract and enlarge
the figures for his wire sculptures. The
Arrival of the Bremen or The Spirit of St.
Louis (fig. 6), a wire sculpture of a reclin-
ing nude grabbing a plane from the sky to
her ample breasts, marks both the record-
setting 1927 transatlantic solo flight of
Charles Lindbergh (Calder was at Le
Bourget airport in Paris when the Spirit of
St. Louis landed) and the first successful
transatlantic crossing from East to West
by the Bremen in 1928.
Calder’s ambitions for his wire sculp-
tures took him to new mythological
subjects and what was, by comparison
to his previous works, an extremely
large size. Romulus and Remus (fig. 7),
a 10-foot-long she-wolf, has teats made
of doorstops, while Spring (Printemps)
(1928) is an almost 8-foot-tall sculpture
of a woman holding a flower. After exhib-
iting these two in New York, where they
did not sell, Calder brought them to Paris
where they were again exhibited, again
gained critical recognition, and again did
not sell. He folded them into a bundle
not to be discovered and undone until
preparations for his 1964 retrospective
at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, which subsequently acquired
the two sculptures.
Abstraction-Création
The “shock,” as Calder referred to it, that
turned him towards abstraction and trig-
gered ideas for employing movement in ab-
stract sculptural forms, was a visit to Mon-
drian’s studio.11 Calder went to 26, rue de
Départ in October 1930 with a friend, the
abstract painter William “Binks” Einstein.
He was impressed by the entirety of the
studio (“It was a very exciting room.”)
as much as by the paintings he saw there.
Tacked to the wall were “colored rect-
Fig. 7. Romulus and Remus,
1928. Wire and wood,
30 1/2 x 124 1/2 x 26 in.
(77.5 x 316.2 x 66 cm).
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York
angles of cardboard”; Calder suggested
to Mondrian “that perhaps it would be
fun to make these rectangles oscillate.”
He wrote of Mondrian’s response: “He,
with a very serious countenance, said:
‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is
already very fast.’”
Calder, who was known for his figura-
tive works, turned quickly to modernist
abstraction after the stunning visit to
Mondrian’s studio. “Though I had heard
the word ‘modern’ before, I did not con-
sciously know or feel the term ‘abstract,’”
he recalled. “So now, at thirty-two, I
wanted to paint and work in the abstract.
And for two weeks or so, I painted very
modest abstractions. At the end of this,
I reverted to plastic work which was
still abstract.”12
One of Calder’s abstract sculptures,
Sphérique (1931; Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York), is situated
on a painted base that recalls the black-
and-white geometries of Mondrian’s
paintings (Ever practical, Calder cut such
wood bases for his sculptures from the
same planks he had used, set on crates, as
seating for his Circus). Some of Calder’s
earliest abstract sculptures were based
on orbiting planets; Two Spheres within
a Sphere (1931; Calder Foundation,
New York), the first that moved, was
turned by a small wire crank located
at one corner of its wood base. Others,
such as Pantograph (1931; Moderna
Museet, Stockholm) and Half-circle,
Quarter-circle, and Sphere (fig. 8) were
set in motion by motors. It was Duchamp
who applied the word “mobile” to all of
Calder’s works that moved, whether by
crank, motor, or air currents; Jean Arp
termed the stationary works, by contrast,
“stabiles.” Calder’s abstract sculptures
were well received by his contemporaries
and he became part of the international
artists group Abstraction-Création, whose
membership included Mondrian, Arp,
and Jean Hélion.
Balance, Flight, and
the Birth of the Mobile
Though the idea of movement had been
explored pictorially by the Futurists
and famously painted by Duchamp in
his Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)
(1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and
the concept of incorporating movement
in artworks had been investigated by
the Russian Constructivists, it would be
Calder who consistently integrated physi-
cal movement into his sculpture, creating
a new “category” of art, the “mobile.”
Within a year of completing his Circus
in 1931, Calder explored balance, flight,
and movement in new ways in drawings
and sculptures. In a 1931–33 series of
drawings, organic forms appear weight-
less, suspended in space. Calder’s earliest
documented ceiling-suspended mobile,
Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932–
33; Calder Foundation, New York), is a
percussive instrument that when “played”
creates sounds resonant of the composi-
tions of his friend Varèse, who liked to sit
in Calder’s studio while he worked. As
it is set into motion, one of the spheres
crashes into objects dispersed in a circle
on the floor—wine bottles, a wood crate, a
tin can, and a gong. In Machine Motorisée
(1933; Calder Foundation, New York),
two wood forms appear to “dance” in
duet, the larger abstract figure animated by
a motor secreted within its base.
Calder also explored balance and
changing form with a length of driftwood-
like painted wood, poised to balance at
the tip of its base, called Requin et Baleine
(c. 1933; Centre Pompidou, Paris). And
in Cône d’ébène (fig. 9) we see not only
the elements of Calder’s majestic, isolated,
and fully suspended airborne mobiles,
but also the intuitive template for those
works that would follow in the next four
decades—temporal, performative, always
in flux, a language of form that would
be definitively and singularly his. With
this space-defining yet always changing
work—its suspended geometric forms
as well as a biomorophic abstraction of
a bird’s head—Calder had “arrived,”
defining his own universe, and in so doing
inventing a new kind of sculpture.
Calder and Louisa decided to return
to the United States in 1933. The move
was prompted by the rise of Fascism
in Europe as well as personal reasons,
for Louisa had suffered a miscarriage.
They purchased a farm in Roxbury,
Connecticut, and within a year Calder
exhibited in a group show at the Berkshire
Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
The museum acquired two of the
motorized works, the first Calder works
to enter an American museum collection.
Coda
The Calders returned to Europe in 1937
for an extended stay. While in Paris,
Calder created a work for the Spanish Fig. 8. Half-circle, Quarter-circle, and Sphere, 1932. Metal rod, wire, and painted metal on painted wood base with motor,
76 5/8 x 35 1/2 x 25 in. (194.6 x 90.2 x 63.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
Republican Pavilion at the 1937 World’s purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. 69.258
Fair. His Mercury Fountain, which was
exhibited in a courtyard with Picasso’s
 Guernica, was a gesture of solidarity
with artists opposed to the nationalist
forces of Francisco Franco. Calder’s
fountain flowed with mercury from the
mines of Almadèn and contained a wire
element with the city’s name flagged at is
top. Both the name of the town and the
mercury were symbols of anti-Franco
resistance: Almadèn, the site of one of
the world’s largest deposits of mercury,
was the location of a bloody battle
between the republican resistance and
Franco’s troops, who laid siege in an
attempt to obtain control of the town’s
valuable assets.
Calder exhibited again in Paris
just after the war, in 1946, and again in
1953, when the family took a year-long
sojourn in France. That year the Calders
acquired a home in Saché, near Tours,
and he and Louisa divided their time
between France and the United States for
the rest of their lives. The home with its
studio is now the site of a residency
program for contemporary artists.

Joan Simon
curator-at-large
Whitney Museum of American Art

1. Margaret Calder Hayes, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir (Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Eriksson, 1977), 115.
2. Alexander Calder and Jean Davidson, An Autobiography with Pictures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 51.
3. Alexander S.C. Rower, “Chronology,” Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–1933, exh. cat. (New York and Paris:
Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou, 2008), 267–68.
4. Alexander Calder, letter to Jules Pascin, January-February 1929. Archives, Calder Foundation, New York.
5. Calder, Autobiography, 76.
6. Alexander Calder, letter to his parents, November 12, 1926. Archives, Calder Foundation, New York.
7. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 72.
8. Calder, Autobiography, 80.
9. Hayes, Three Alexander Calders, 78.
10. Alice Prin, “By ‘Kiki’—Queen of the Paris Artists’ Studios.” Undated clipping from unknown publication,
Alexander Calder Scrapbook, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
11. Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures, 113.
12. Ibid.

Photo credits: fig. 1: photograph by Jerry L. Thompson; figs. 3 and 5: photograph by Sheldan C. Collins © Whitney
Museum of American Art; fig. 7: photograph by David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York;
fig 8: photograph by Jerry L. Thompson © Whitney Museum of American Art.

Alexander Calder, Calder’s Circus, 1926–31. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York; purchase, with funds from a public fundraising campaign in May 1982. One half the funds were contributed
by the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Charitable Trust. Additional major donations were given by The Lauder Foundation;
the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc.; the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc.; an anonymous donor; The T.M.
Evans Foundation, Inc.; MacAndrews & Forbes Group, Incorporated; the DeWitt Wallace Fund, Inc.; Martin and
Agneta Gruss; Anne Phillips; Mr. and Mrs. Laurance S. Rockefeller; the Simon Foundation, Inc.; Marylou Whitney;
Bankers Trust Company; Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth N. Dayton; Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz; Irvin and Kenneth Feld; Flora
Whitney Miller. More than five hundred individuals from twenty-six states and abroad also contributed to the campaign.
83.36.1–95

All works by Alexander Calder are © 2008 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 9. Cône d’ébène, 1933. Wood, rod, wire, and paint, 106 x 55 x 24 in. (269.2 x 139.7 x 61 cm). © Whitney Museum of American Art 2008
Calder Foundation, New York
Objective Suspense:
Conceived and performed
by Colin Gee
A Whitney Live Commission
Between October 2008 and
February 2009 Colin Gee will appear
and perform unannounced in the
Calder’s Circus gallery.
In conjunction with Alexander Calder:
The Paris Years, 1926–1933, theater
artist Colin Gee creates intimate
performance experiences inspired by
Calder’s innovative ideas of movement
and love of the space of the circus. With
Calder’s Circus nearby, Gee engages
exhibition visitors one or two at a time,
using eye contact, rhythm, play, and
stillness. Though no one but the artist
could animate Calder’s Circus—an early
example of performance art—Gee’s
surprise interventions, using ordinary
materials of his own devising, charge the
atmosphere of the gallery with parallel
senses of suspense and animation.
Open Studio:
Line Takes Flight
Friday, November 14 at 3 pm
Thursday, January 8 at 2 pm
Friday, January 30 at 3 pm
Hear Colin Gee explain his process,
method, and performance technique.
WhitneyKids at the Circus
Ninth Annual Free Family Day
Saturday, October 25 10 am–2 pm
Kids and families are invited to discover
Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-
1933. March in a circus parade with the
Hungry March Band. Chat with artist
Corin Hewitt as he works on a constantly
evolving installation in the Lobby Gallery.
Marvel as Colin Gee, former Cirque du
Soleil principal clown, performs “Objec-
tive Suspense.” Draw on paper and in
space. And mingle with Big Apple Circus
performers.
Open Studio:
Conserving Calder
Thursday, October 30 at 7 pm
Calder’s Circus (1926–31) is one of the
Whitney’s most beloved artworks and
a seminal piece in Alexander Calder’s
oeuvre. Eleonora Nagy, a conservator
specializing in modern and contemporary
sculpture who is working with the Circus,
speaks about her techniques and approach
to conserving the work.
This exhibition was organized by the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Sponsored by
The exhibition and catalogue are made possible
through a generous grant from the Terra Foundation
for American Art.
Additional support is provided by The Brown
Foundation, Inc., Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen,
Faith and Philip Geier, The Florence Gould Foundation,
The Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation, The Lipman
Family Foundation, Julie and William Obering,
Dathel and Tommy Coleman, and The Philip A. and
Lynn Straus Foundation.
Opening events are sponsored by