Master of form and movement

The truth of Alexander Calder’s sculptures belie their apparent simplicity.

Detail from Alexander Calder’s Molluscs (1955) Calder Foundation, New York.

The American painters who dominated the international art world in the decades after World War II have not aged well; it is hard to believe today we took so many bland abstractions so seriously or we believed the claims about conceptual complexity and metaphysical depth, let alone the assurances that this was the culmination of the history of painting. In striking contrast, the art of Alexander Calder (1898-1976) remains as fresh and beautiful as ever.

The first work we encounter on entering the exhibition epitomises his art: an exquisite construction of fine wires and coloured discs, suspended in perfect equilibrium, doubled by its shadow cast on the wall behind.

The merest hint of motion or mobility animates it while making tangible its stillness, like the leaves of a tree on a windless day; but its materials and colours, and perhaps above all the absolutely clear distinction between horizontal and vertical clusters of discs, belong to the domain of artifice.

Poised between nature and art, Calder’s art achieves what abstract painting could not do. For all art is a way of giving shape to the world, and painting’s principal means of reference to the world is mimesis, and stripped of that it is a shadow of itself; but Calder refers to the world by re-creating it as an artificial analog, different in form and substance but obeying the same rules of gravity and balance. Calder’s finest works evoke the mysterious stillness of Yeats’s poem Long-Legged Fly:

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

Installation view of Calder’s Snow Flurry III (1948). Calder Foundation, New York.

Yet, as this exhibition reveals, that stillness was underpinned by a fascination with motion and energy: perhaps less surprisingly when we think about it, he was particularly drawn to the circus arts of the acrobat and the trapezist, for in each of these motion and mass must be perfectly calibrated and must resolve into harmonious sequence or stasis.

Calder was also a compulsive maker of things from the age of eight or nine. He was what the French call a bricoleur, a term that in common usage means an amateur handyman, someone who makes do with bits of whatever materials are available; the concept of bricolage was given a broader anthropological and cultural sense by Claude Levi-Strauss in his study of pre-civilised thought, La Pensee sauvage (1962; The Savage mind 1966).

The exhibition thus includes several pieces from his childhood, as well as a collection of practical household objects, such as a handmade toaster with a warming rack above.

But the most remarkable examples of his compulsive brico­lage are the many little figures he produced for the Cirque Calder, the miniature circus of toy figures he began to make and then to present in performances after his move to Paris in 1926.

There are no contemporary film records of these early performances but fortunately there is footage from three decades later of Calder taking his mechanical figures through their paces.

Calder’s The Brass Family (1929). Calder Foundation, New York.

The wire puppet weightlifter is a good example of the aesthetic, at once overtly homemade yet ingenious in its mechanical operation, as he picks up the barbells and lifts them in stages above his head.

There are animals, such as a horse that walks around a disk, operated by a counterweight, or a kangaroo that appears to hop although running on wheels. The movement is clunky, awkward, not fluid, but this is part of the peculiar humour and pathos of these figures: they are clever like the work of a very clever child, touching in the way they illustrate resourcefulness with the materials to hand.

One of the cleverest is a little metal figure that successfully leaps from one trapeze to the next; this was, incidentally, a circus act introduced in Paris in 1859 by Jules Leotard, after whom the garment is also named; the circus, with its exotica, its freaks, its dangerous spectacles and its eroticism, although it had its origins 100 years earlier in London, flourished in the expanding urban world of the 19th century.

Calder drew and even painted the circus but, above all, made a series of remarkable wire sculptures on the same themes, and here there is a contemporary clip of him at work, a rather middle-aged looking young man, considering he is probably in his early 30s, with a bushy moustache and wearing a jacket and tie. We watch him first sketch the design for a pair of acrobats; then, with only a pair of pliers, bend a heavy-gauge wire into shape.

Around the corner we can see the result, together with a group of other wire figures. A woman is doing a handstand while her male companion stands beside her, ready to catch her or pick her up for the next trick. Each figure, of course, has to be made of a single continuous line of wire, bent and twisted as needed to form the limbs, and the delight of the pieces is in the combination of economy and fluency Calder brings to the shapes of torsos, legs and other parts of the body.

Calder with Cirque Calder (1926–31), Paris 1930. George Hoyningen-Huene/Getty Images)

There is also a kind of quasi-cubist transparency in which, for example, one arm or one buttock can be seen through the other, and from different viewing angles appears more or less literally plausible. Using the same logic, Calder also made portraits in wire at this time, of which a couple of examples are included in the exhibition. The subjects of these wire circus subjects is always balance: a handstand, a trapezist, a strongman holding up female acrobats on his outstretched arms. But balance is also the structural principle of these works, since they must be able to stand up; so the subject turns out to be in a sense self-referential.

All sculpture has to be able to stand on its own feet, which is why there is a deep continuity between the kouros figures, the classical nude, the baroque and the various incarnations of modernist sculpture, even including constructed and welded sculpture: there is a structural quality of sculpture that is in some sense even more fundamental than the question of figuration and abstraction, and this is, again, why abstract sculpture can be more successful that abstract painting.

This is also why a would-be sculpture that does not stand on its own feet but stays up only because it has an iron rod up the middle of it, like the kitsch figures of sportsmen that are put up around public sports buildings, are ugly and fake.

Turning a sports photo into a three-dimensional object, even in bronze, is not making a sculpture. The constraints of each particular art form are not merely limitations: they are what enable the transformation of shapeless experience into something fin­ite, formed, artificial and meaningful.

One can, of course, see this principle in the wire figures, too: it is because the single continuous wire line is so artificial, so foreign to the objective reality of the bodies it attempts to evoke, that the evocation of meaningful shape is rendered so surprising and delightful.

A final film, in the middle of the exhibition, shows Calder at work in his studio, discovered by a little boy who becomes the perfect subject to experience the wonder of this magic of transformation. Immediately next to this film, and in deliberate contrast to its movement, noise, clutter and animation, is one of Calder’s most beautiful mobiles, representing the culmination of his art and the stillness and peace he finally achieves: Snow Flurry III (1948), a monochrome composition of white and grey discs, floating in space, and lit obliquely to cast a shadow version of itself on the wall behind.

The subsequent rooms are filled with an extraordinary abundance of ideas, each akin to but unlike the other, like the abundant and constantly varied compositions of 18th-century baroque composers. Some are suspended from the ceiling, others from stands set on the ground, but all are variations on the theme of equivalence in difference. The fundamental elements from which all mobiles are made are the same as for a set of scales: that is a beam, a fulcrum and two weights. If the beam is of equal length on either side of the fulcrum — if, that is, the fulcrum is in the centre of the beam — the weights on each side will need to be identical to produce balance. If the beam is longer on one side, a smaller weight will be capable of counterbalancing a larger, by virtue of the lever principle.

Both of these rules are used in Calder’s mobiles, but the complexity of the calculation of respective weights is extraordinary.

In one work, for example, the weight of a single form on the right side is equivalent to the total weight of multiple complex forms on the left, which in turn is subdivided into dozens of smaller equivalences.

The only way most of us could even imagine building a mobile such as this would be to start with the smallest element, which is two tiny bodies in balance, and then set this element in balance with a larger one equivalent in weight. This whole ensemble would then be matched by another single piece heavy enough to match the combined weight of the first pair and its matching counterweight, plus the beams.

Apart from the complexity of the task, we would be faced by endless trial and error in finding pieces that matched the weight, in each case, of all the preceding pieces. And this is before we even begin to consider the grace and elegance, the lightness and poetry of Calder’s inventions.

In many works he uses discs of metal, but in others shapes that evoke leaves or other natural forms. No doubt his approach was methodical, and presumably he did work from the smallest elements to the largest, since this is the only way that one could be sure of a progressively and continuously graduated scale.

But even so, after years of experience his sense of the relative weight of pieces must have become extremely acute, so that a process that for any of us would be one of interminable trial and error must have been far smoother and more intuitive, similar to an acrobat’s finely calibrated sense of his own weight and of the position of his body in space.

And it is more than merely a physical sense of weight and balance. If Calder’s works have such a strong effect on the viewer, inducing, as we can see in fellow visitors, a state of contemplative calm, it is because underlying all his constructions is a symbolic form that has held profound symbolic associations since antiquity: the balance is the image of justice, and the equilibrium of multiple and diverse bodies is an image of peace and harmony.

Alexander Calder: Radical inventor

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until August 4