Alexander Calder

Art Encyclopedia: Alexander Calder

(b Philadelphia, PA, 22 July 1898; d New York, 11 Nov 1976). Sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker and designer, son of (2) Alexander Stirling Calder. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919. In 1923 he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, where he was inspired by his teacher, John Sloan, to produce oil paintings. He became a freelance artist for the National Police Gazette in 1924, sketching sporting events and circus performances. His first illustrated book, Animal Sketching (New York, 1926), was based on studies made at the Bronx and Central Park Zoos in New York. The illustrations are brush and ink studies of animals in motion, with an accompanying text by the artist.

Part of the Calder family

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Biography: Alexander Calder

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American sculptor, painter, and illustrator Alexander Calder (1898-1976), through his construction of wire mobiles, pioneered kinetic sculpture.

Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia, the son of a well-known sculptor and educator and his wife, a talented painter. Calder's grandfather, also a sculptor, executed the figure of William Penn that graces the dome of the city hall in Philadelphia. Though he was brought up in an artistic atmosphere, Calder's own inclinations were mechanical. He trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, studying such things as descriptive geometry, mechanical drawing, and applied kinetics - the branch of science that deals with the effects of force on free-moving bodies - in preparation for receiving his degree in 1919.

After working at a number of jobs that allowed him time for travel and reflection over the next few years, Calder decided to explore his growing interest in art. In 1923, two years after beginning his study of drawing in night school, he enrolled fulltime at the Art Students League in New York City. There he attended classes given by George Luks, Guy Pène Du Bois, and John Sloan, all important American painters of that period. Calder also did freelance work as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette for about two years. In 1926 he had his first one-man exhibition of paintings at the Artist's Gallery in New York City. While concentrating on painting, Calder also worked on wood sculpture, and when he visited Paris in 1926 he continued to carve.

Circus Brought Lasting Fame

Calder's first significant recognition as an artist came when he exhibited his now-famous miniature circus with its animated wire performers at Paris's Salon des Humoristes in 1927. The idea for the toy figures can be traced back to sketches he made in 1925 while reporting on the circus for the Police Gazette. Made from wire, rubber, cork, buttons, bottle caps, wood, and other small "found" objects, Calder's circus includes lions, acrobats, trapeze artists, elephants, a ringmaster, and numerous other figures. Unlike many art works of the period, the unusual creation drew crowds from outside the artistic community as well as within, and the thirty-year-old artist found himself suddenly widely known.

Calder's first wire sculpture, Josephine Baker (1926), a witty linear representation of the famous American-born chanteuse, was exhibited to the Paris art community during the same period that his circus was drawing attention. He decided to return to New York City late in 1927, where he gave a one-man show that included Josephine Baker, as well as several of his other wire portraits. Those portraits would grow increasingly three dimensional as the artist refined his technique.

Influenced by Modernists

In November 1928 Calder was again in Paris, supporting himself with performances of his miniature circus, one of which was attended by Spanish surrealist Joan Miró. Calder had his first one-man shows in Paris at the Galérie Billiet and in Berlin in 1929. In Paris he met a number of important modernists, including Fernand Léger, Theo Van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian, the latter whose work particularly impressed him. By 1930 Calder was making large-scale abstract wire sculptures using flat metal ovals painted black or bright colors, as well as small balls or other shapes suspended by long wires. Many of these work suggested the solar system in their design. From these beginnings he developed motor-driven sculptures, which featured objects hanging from large bases, although the artist had no fondness for the regular, predictable motion provided by motors. An exhibition of Calder's kinetic sculptures was seen by Marcel Duchamp, who referred to them as "mobiles" - a term which became associated with this work. He made a number of sculptures during the thirties which employed the same forms as the mobiles but were static, and known as "stabiles."

Meanwhile, in 1931 Calder was married to Louisa James, who he had met on a voyage to New York City; that same year he illustrated an edition of Aesop's Fables. Two years later Calder made his first draft-propelled mobiles. Rather than following a monotonous path of motion as did his motor-driven sculptures, these pieces create myriad patterns once they are set in action by a breeze or gentle push. Their shapes, largely ovoid and biomorphic, may have been inspired by the art of Miró. In 1933 Calder and his wife bought a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he established his studio. In 1935 and again in 1936 he designed stage sets for the dancer Martha Graham.

Commissioned Works Prompted Travel

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City gave a comprehensive exhibition of Calder's work in 1943, during which the artist gave performances of his famous circus; the show's catalog was the first extensive study on the artist. The following year he made sculptures out of plaster to be cast in bronze. These pieces moved at a slow, measured pace. During this period he illustrated Three Young Rats (1944), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with Robert Penn Warren's essay on Coleridge (1945), and The Fables of LaFontaine (1946). At this time Calder's international reputation was reinforced by exhibitions in New York, Amsterdam, Berne, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Boston, and Richmond, Virginia. In 1952 he designed the acoustical ceiling for the Aula Magna at the university in Caracas and received the first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Commissions for his designs continued to pour in as he created everything from jewelry to costume and stage-set designs for dance and theatrical performances. In the 1970s, at the height of Calder's fame, Braniff Airlines commissioned him to paint some of their jet planes with his unique, boldly colorful designs.

Calder's works are featured in permanent installations around the world. In 1955 he travelled to India to execute 11 mobiles for public buildings in Ahmadabad. He designed many monumental pieces, including those for Lincoln Center in New York City, for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, for the gardens of UNESCO in Paris, and for Expo '67 at Montreal. In 1964, when the artist was in his late seventies, he was honored with a comprehensive retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; a smaller one was given at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. At his death in 1976, Calder was eulogized by Minneapolis, Minnesota, curator Marvin Friedman as "one of the greatest form-givers America has ever produced."

Childhood

Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898, Calder came from a family of artists. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in Philadelphia. Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. He is best-known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia's City Hall tower. Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.^[1] Calder’s parents were married on 22 February 1895. His older sister, Margaret "Peggy" Calder, was born in 1896. Her married name was Margaret Calder Hayes, and she was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.^[2]

In 1902, at the age of four, Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub, which is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In that same year, he completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.^[3]

Three years later, when Calder was seven and his sister was nine, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis and Calder’s parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year.^[4] The children were reunited with their parents in late March, 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.^[5]

After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sister’s dolls. On January 1, 1907, Calder’s mother took him to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder’s wire circus shows.^[6]

In 1909, when Calder was in the fourth grade, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as Christmas gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped. These sculptures are frequently cited as early examples of Calder’s skill.^[7]

In 1910, Stirling Calder’s rehabilitation was complete and the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Alexander briefly attended the Germantown Academy, and then to Croton-on-Hudson in New York State.^[8] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by the painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. As Calder described:

We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights.^[9]

After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in Bronx, New York, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended Yonkers High.

In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.^[10] He began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915. During Alexander Calder’s high school years between 1912 and 1915, the Calder family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location Calder’s parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated in the class of 1915.

Early years

Although Calder’s parents encouraged his creativity as a child, they discouraged their children from becoming artists, knowing that it was an uncertain and financially difficult career. In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering after learning about the discipline from a classmate at Lowell High School named Hyde Lewis. Stirling Calder arranged for his son's enrollment at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Calder joined the football team during his freshman year at Stevens and practiced with the team all four years, but he never played in a game. He also played lacrosse, at which he was more successful. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He excelled in the subject of mathematics.

In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1917, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.

Red Mobile, 1956. Painted sheet metal and metal rods, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

I learned to talk out of the side of my mouth and have never been quite able to correct it since.^[11]

Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919. For the next several years, he worked a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulics engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company, but he was not content in any of the roles.

In June 1922, Calder started work as a fireman in the boiler room of the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder worked on deck of the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. As he described in his autobiography:

It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch — a coil of rope — I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other.

The H.F. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled up to Aberdeen, Washington where his sister lived with her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.

Art career

Having decided to become an artist, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work.

In 1926, Calder moved to Paris where he established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. At the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant, he began to create toys with articulation. He never found the toy merchant again, but, at the urging of fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft, he submitted his toys to the Salon des Humoristes. Later that fall, Calder began to create his Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other found objects. Designed to fit into suitcases (it eventually grew to fill five), the circus was portable, and allowed Calder to hold performances on both sides of the Atlantic. He gave elaborately improvised shows, recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his "Cirque Calder"[1][2] (usually on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. Some months Calder would charge an entrance fee to pay his rent.[3][4]

Man, a "stabile" by Alexander Calder; Terre des Hommes (Expo 67 fairground), Saint Helen's Island, Montreal.

In 1927, Calder returned to the United States. He designed several kinetic wooden push and pull toys for children, which he had mass-produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, in Oshkosh, WI. His originals, as well as playable replicas, are on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

In 1928, Calder held his first solo show at a commercial gallery at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. In 1934, he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

In 1929, Calder had his first solo show of wire sculpture in Paris at Galerie Billiet. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface.

In June 1929, while traveling from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James, grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931.

While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.

The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures Duchamp would ultimately dub as "mobiles," a French pun meaning both "mobile" and "motive." He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. However, it was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys.

By the end of 1931, he had quickly moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room. From this, Calder's true "mobiles" were born. At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Arp to differentiate them from mobiles.

Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). Calder continued to give "Cirque Calder" performances but also worked with Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrate in 1936.

His first public commission was a pair of mobiles designed for the theater opened in 1937 in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

During World War II, Calder attempted to join the Marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. Instead, he continued to sculpt, but a scarcity of metal led to him producing work in carved wood.

Calder's first retrospective was held in 1938 at George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a well-received Calder retrospective, curated by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp.

Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. His mobile, International Mobile was the centerpiece of the exhibition and hangs in 2007 where it was placed in 1949.

In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Notable examples are ".125" for JFK Airport in 1957, "La Spirale" for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and "L'Homme" ("Man") for Expo '67 in Montreal. Calder's largest sculpture, at 20.5 m high, was "El Sol Rojo", constructed for the Olympic games in Mexico City.

Alexander Calder, The Crab, painted steel, 1962, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In 1962, he settled into his new workshop Carroi, a very futuristic design and overlooking the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobile to his friends in the country, he even donated to the town of a stabile trônant since 1974 in front of the church: an anti-sculpture free from gravity.

He did make the most of its stabiles and mobiles at factory Biémont Tours (France), including "the Man", all stainless steel 24 meters tall, commissioned by Canada's International Nickel (Inco) for the Exposition Universelle de Montréal in 1967. All products are made from a model made by Calder, by the research department (headed by M. Porcheron, with Alain Roy, François Lopez, Michel Juigner ...) to design to 'scale, then by workers qualified boilermakers for manufacturing, Calder overseeing all operations, and if necessary amending the work. All stabiles will be manufactured in carbon steel, then painted for a major part in black, except the man who will be raw stainless steel , the mobiles are made of aluminum and made of duralumin.

In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.

In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile “La Grande Vitesse” located in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first public work of art in the United States to be funded with federal monies; acquired with funds granted from the then new National Endowment for the Arts under its “Art for Public Places” program.

Calder created a sculpture called WTC Stabile (also known as Bent Propeller), which in 1971 was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets.^[12] It stood in front of 7 World Trade Center when it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.^[13]

In 1973, Calder was commissioned by Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size DC-8-62 as a "flying canvas," In 1975, Calder completed a second plane, this time a Boeing 727-227, as a tribute to the U.S. Bicentennial.

In 1975, Calder was commissioned by BMW to paint the a BMW 3.0 CSL which would come to be the first vehicle in the BMW Art Car Project.

Calder died on 11 November 1976, shortly following the opening of another major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Calder had been working on a third plane, entitled Tribute to Mexico, when he died.

Legacy

Two months after his death, Calder was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford. However, representatives of the Calder family boycotted the 10 January 1977 ceremony "to make a statement favoring amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters".^[14]

In 1987, the Calder Foundation was founded by Calder's family. The Foundation not only serves as his official Estate, but also "runs its own programs, collaborates on exhibitions and publications, and gives advice on matters such as the history, assembly, and restoration of works by Calder."^[15] The U.S. copyright representative for the Calder Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.^[16] Calder's work is in many permanent collections across the world.

In 2003, nearly 30 years after his death, an untitled work of his sold for $5.2 million at Christie's New York.^[17]

Quotes

"How can art be realized?

Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe.

Out of different masses, tight, heavy, middling--indicated by variations of size or color--directional line--vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc. . . .--these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many.

Spaces, volumes, suggested by the smallest means in contrast to their mass, or even including them, juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds.

Nothing at all of this is fixed.

Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe.

It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life.

Not extractions,

But abstractions

Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting."^[18]

- From Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932.

Gallery

Le Halebardier (1971), Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany	Le Tamanoir (1963), Rotterdam, The Netherlands	Crinkly avec disc rouge (1973), Schlossplatz in Stuttgart, Germany	Têtes et Queue (1965), Berlin, Germany
Shiva (1965), Crown Center, Kansas City, Missouri	Feuille d'arbre (1974), Tel Aviv, Israel	Aula Magna, Las Nubes Universidad Central de Venezuela	Untitled, (1967), gouache on paper, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Selected works

Dog (1909), folded brass sheet; this was made as a present for Calder's parents
The Flying Trapeze (1925), oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in.
Elephant (c. 1928), wire and wood, 11 1/2 x 5 3/4 x 29.2 in.
Two Acrobats (ca. 1928), Brass wire, painted wood base, Honolulu Academy of Arts
Aztec Josephine Baker (c. 1929), wire, 53" x 10" x 9". A representation of Josephine Baker, the exuberant lead dancer from La Révue Nègre at the Folies Bergère.
Untitled (1931), wire, wood and motor; one of the first kinetic mobiles.
Feathers (1931), wire, wood and paint; first true mobile, although designed to stand on a desktop
Cone d'ebene (1933), ebony, metal bar and wire; early suspended mobile (first was made in 1932).
Form Against Yellow (1936), sheet metal, wire, plywood, string and paint; wall- supported mobile.
Object with Yellow Background (1936), Painted wood, metal, string, Honolulu Academy of Arts
Mercury Fountain (1937), sheet metal and mercury
Devil Fish (1937), sheet metal, bolts and paint; first piece made from a model.
1939 New York World's Fair (maquette) (1938), sheet metal, wire, wood, string and paint
Necklace (c. 1938), brass wire, glass and mirror
Sphere Pierced by Cylinders (1939), wire and paint; the first of many floor standing, life size stabiles (predating Anthony Caro's plinthless sculptures by two decades)
Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile); design for the stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Black Beast (1940), sheet metal, bolts and paint; freestanding plinthless stabile)
S-Shaped Vine (1946), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile)
Sword Plant (1947) sheet metal, wire and paint (Standing Mobile)
Snow Flurry (1948), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile)
.125 (1957), steel plate, rods and paint
La Spirale (1958), steel plate, rod and paint, 360" high; public monumental mobile for Maison de l'U.N.E.S.C.O., Paris
Teodelapio (1962), steel plate and paint, monumental stabile, Spoleto, Italy
Man (1967) stainless steel plate, bolts and paint, 65' x 83' x 53', monumental stabile, Montreal Canada
La Grande Vitesse (1969), steel plate, bolts and paint, 43' x 55' x 25', Grand Rapids, Michigan
Eagle (1971), steel plate, bolts and paint, 38'9" x 32'8" x 32'8", Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington
White and Red Boomerang (1971), Painted metal, wire, Honolulu Academy of Arts
Stegosaurus (1973), steel plate, bolts and paint, 50' tall, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Cheval Rouge (Red Horse)[5] (1974), red painted sheet metal, at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Flamingo (1974), red painted steel, at the Federal Plaza, Chicago, Illinois
The Red Feather (1975), black and red painted steel, 11' x 6'3" x 11'2", The Kentucky Center
Untitled (1976), aluminum honeycomb, tubing and paint, 358 1/2 x 912", National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.
Mountains and Clouds (1976), painted aluminum and steel, 612 inches x 900 inches, Hart Senate Office Building

Bibliography

Calder, Alexander. An Autobiography With Pictures. Pantheon Books, 1966, ISBN 9780394421421
Guerrero, Pedro E. Calder at Home. The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York, 1998, ISBN 1556706553
Prather, Marla. Alexander Calder 1898 - 1976. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1998, ISBN 0894682288, ISBN 0300075189
Rosenthal, Mark, and Alexander S. C. Rower. The Surreal Calder. The Menil Collection, Houston, 2005, ISBN 0-939594-60-9
Rower, Alexander S. C. Calder Sculpture. Universe Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0-7893-0134-2

References

^ Herbert Palmer Gallery - Nanette Calder
^ Hayes, Margaret Calder, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir. Middlebury, VT: Paul S Eriksson, 1977.
^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 13.
^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 15.
^ Calder Foundation
^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, pp. 21-22.
^ Hayes, Margaret Calder, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir. Middlebury, VT: Paul S Eriksson, 1977, p. 41.
^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, pp. 28-29.
^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 31.
^ Calder Foundation
^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 47.
^ Wenegrat, Saul (2002-02-28). "Public Art at the World Trade Center". International Foundation for Art Research. http://www.ifar.org/911_public2.htm. Retrieved 2007-07-27.
^ Lives and Treasures Taken, The Library of Congress Retrieved 27 July, 2007.
^ Presidential Medal of Freedom website: Frequently Asked Questions page
^ Calder Foundation website: Trustees page
^ Calder Foundation website: Copyright and Disclaimers page
^ Auction Results: Alexander Calder's Untitled
^ Alexander Calder, "Comment réaliser l'art?" from Abstraction-Création, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1, 1932

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Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder in his New York City storefront studio, winter 1936
Birth name	Alexander Calder
Born	July 22, 1898(1898-07-22) Lawnton, Pennsylvania
Died	November 11, 1976 (aged 78) New York, NY
Nationality	United States
Field	Artist
Training	Stevens Institute of Technology, Art Students League of New York
Movement	Surrealism
Works	Cirque Calder (1926-1931), Aztec Josephine Baker (c. 1929), International Mobile (1949), Flamingo (Chicago, 1973)