Experiencing Calder’s mobiles firsthand is the only way to fully comprehend their multisensory brilliance, but this footage of Black Mobile with Hole in motion is an apt substitute. Unlike a photograph, the clip reveals how the sculpture carves new forms by way of its movements. As Sartre wrote in 1946, “These hesitations and resumptions, gropings and fumblings, sudden decisions, and, most especially, marvellous swan-like nobility make Calder’s mobiles strange creatures, mid-way between matter a

In the early 1930s, Alexander Calder’s mobiles provided a dynamic, new experience of sculpture that incorporated movement, activating their architectural settings and inviting viewers’ engagement. French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, once wrote that a Calder mobile is “a pure stream of movement in the same way as there are pure streams of light.” In this video, the High’s Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art, Claudia Einecke, talks about this amazing work of art and gives a

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is celebrated today as the American artist who made sculpture move. Although best known for his invention of the mobile‚ he worked in astonishingly varied media‚ including drawing‚ painting and sculpture‚ as well as set design for dance and music performances. Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor now open, NGV International. #NGV #NGVCalder • © 2019 Calder Foundation, New York / Copyright Agency, Australia. | National Gallery of Victoria

While most of Calder’s outdoor sculptures are stabiles, the artist also made standing mobiles such as Five Empties, captured here in gentle motion. The siting of these sculptures requires a particular delicacy, as heavy winds can cause them damage. At over twenty-three feet high and completed just three years before the artist's death in 1976, Five Empties is an example par excellence of the monumental sculpture that dominated the artist’s late career. For more information: https://tinyurl.com/2

Alone in a tower filled with the world’s largest display of sculptures by Alexander Calder. ✨ In this room filled with moving sculptures by Calder, giant mobiles are suspended in the sky. They turn and dance as you cohabit their space. One of the most extraordinary things about these deceptively gravity-defying objects is that they are supported by a force the size of your thumbnail: a tiny hook. In the mid-1930s, in addition to developing his classic mobiles, Calder began to explore the concept

Calder’s oeuvre features spectacular shifts in scale; there are standing mobiles less than two inches high and stabiles over eighty feet high. Jed Perl writes, “[Calder] had a preternatural sensitivity to matters of size and scale, whether the relation of the part to the whole within a single sculpture or the relation of the sculpture to the men and women who looked at it, touched it, and walked around it and sometimes even through it.” The standing mobile seen here in action, Toadstool with Fea

Alone in a tower filled with the world’s largest display of sculptures by Alexander Calder... In this room filled with moving sculptures by Calder, giant mobiles are suspended in the sky. In the mid-1930s, in addition to developing his classic mobiles, Calder began to explore the concept of creating three-dimensional paintings in motion. The movement of these sculptures results in flashes of forms and colors, a complex choreography of elements that blurs the line between circumstance and permane

The Calder Sidewalk The Legendary Sculptor’s Immobile Creation in Rustic Terrazzo Alexander Calder is best known for his abstract mobiles. There are also his stabiles (as his nonmoving sculptures came to be known). Then there’s his sidewalk. The 75-foot piece of permanent sidewalk art is always on view, where it was first installed in 1970, stretched out in front of three avant-garde art galleries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The sidewalk, with its abstract design, was created late in Calder’