Central Library is home to a large mobile by Alexander Calder. Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, PA, which is now Philadelphia. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a sculptor and teacher. His grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, was also a sculptor. Calder received a degree in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1919. After college, Calder learned how to draw and paint in New York and Paris, France. His early work included designing toys and drawing caricatures for various periodicals. He became fascinated by the Circus, and made a mini-wire circus, and showed it off in his travels and at art shows. After 1929, Calder began creating motor-driven wire mobiles, which later he designed to move without the need of a motor. It was Marcel Duchamp in France who came up with the name ‘Mobile.’ Calder said of the name, “In addition to something that moves, in French it also means motive.” According to Gerard-Georges Lemaire in his writing of Calder for the series Great Modern Masters, “Thus was born the idea of the mobile, a manifestation of the dream of the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni: the moving statue.” The concept of the suspended mobile was first developed by Calder in 1934. In describing Calder’s mobiles, such as Mobile sur deux plans, c. 1955 and the mobile in the New York Airport—both remarkably similar to the one that hangs in our library--Lemaire continues, “He made subtle calculations to control his machine-like sculptures. Such manipulation gave his objects free and ever-changing qualities that play on the viewer’s imagination. The Calder mobile at Central Library hangs in front of a giant white wall—so that as it quietly moves and changes shape with the airflow created by the libraries patrons and there is nothing obstructing the mobile as it moves. photo credit: John F. Martin
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:51:57 +0000
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