The Star

Alexander “Sandy” Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture by making movement one of its main components with his invention of the “mobile,” a word coined in 1931 by artist Marcel Duchamp to describe Calder’s kinetic sculpture. The son and grandson of Philadelphia sculptors, Calder had been trained as an engineer but drew the attention of the avant garde in the 1920s with an animated circus built from wire figures and wooden toys (now in the Whitney Museum, New York). He began sculpting with continuous strands of wire, which critics described as “drawings in space” for the way he rendered volume without mass. In time, these led to “paintings in space”—constructions of abstract shapes cut from sheet metal and painted primary colors. When attached to metal rods and suspended in midair, “mobiles” hover and shift with every air current; when fitted together to stand, “stabiles” are monumental forms that squat and rise on the ground. A major contribution to the development of abstract art, Calder’s stabiles and mobiles challenge the notion of sculpture as a static composition of masses and volumes by proposing a new definition based on the ideas of open space and transparency.