On July 22nd, 128 years ago, he was born Alexander Calderthe artist engineer who made the world famousKinetic Artor art in motion. This art movement, born after the Second World War with the decline of geometric abstraction, had a dynamic and interactive approach, using mechanics to create works in motion.
The aim was to create works that would perceptively and visually involve the viewer, who, when observing them, would perceive himself as part of aimmersive visual experience. A mix of art and engineering that is sometimes forgotten in art history school books, but that deserves to be remembered. And what is more representative of kinetic art than the works mobiles of Calder?
What is Kinetic Art?
The roots of kinetic art lie in Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus, but kinetic artists aimed to take it a step further, freeing the works from the frames and pedestals and “throwing” them into the world of human beings. Lkinetic art in fact, it has as its main object the plastic works (3D or 2D) in movement (kinetic works), conceived in such a way that they move through changes in the air or wind, and by moving in space they offer the spectator new points of view. Thanks to this dynamism the work is free from constraints and can be observed in multiple ways, becoming a creation in the round. These objects can be mechanical devices that produce a cyclical movement programmed by the artist, or they give life to a free movement that generates unpredictable forms a priori.
The aim of the artists of this movement was to overcome the conception of art as a mere form of expression observed in a passive manner, but of engage viewers in his work both visually (observing the works from multiple points of view) and psychologically.
But kinetic art was not immediately seen as avant-garde movementFor that the artists had to wait until 1955, the year in which the exhibition was held in Paris The Movement, whose central theme was precisely movement, and which put before everyone’s eyes the works of famous artists such as Calder, Duchamp and other European and international contemporaries. It was there that the turning point occurred: that exhibition highlighted both their research and experiments in the field of optical illusionsboth those of the pure movement.
Five years later, in Zurich, this art “took shape” and recognition with the name by which we know it today thanks to the exhibition Kinetic Art (in German “kinetic art”), and throughout the 1960s became famous in Europe and America thanks to a series of exhibitions.
Calder’s Journey to Art in Motion
Calder was born into an artistic family, and lived every day of his childhood and adolescence in contact with art. His parents, however, hoped “that he would find a serious job that would give him food”, and advised him to undertake studies that would guarantee him a future. Alexander opted for mechanical engineeringwhich seemed to him the closest thing to art.
After graduation he worked briefly as a hydraulic engineer, but was deeply dissatisfied, feeling that his creative flair was trapped. To earn money he decided to take a job as a stoker on a ship, and while he was on a voyage from San Francisco to New York, saw the sun rise near the coast of Guatemalajust as the moon was disappearing on the other side:
It was early morning and the sea was calm off Guatemala, when above my bed I saw the beginning of a fiery dawn on one side and the moon like a silver coin on the other.
This vision left a deep mark on his mind, and years later he created the “Red Mobile”, one of his most famous works. Mobiles, movable constructions made of wire, metal parts and other moving materials, would soon become the artist’s trademark.
However, once he landed in Philadelphia the young Calder found work in a sawmilland even this brief parenthesis in his life influenced his future: it was right there that he decided to return to New York and become an artist.
Kinetic Art from Another Perspective: Calder’s “Mobiles”
Calder soon moved to Pariswhere in 1926 he created a project that was much sought after in the city, the “Cirque Calder“, a small portable theater made entirely by his own hands: from the tiny artists to the animals, and even the props. All the figures were made of wire, leather and cloth, and were manipulated manually by Calder, who was the director of that lively stage that fit all in a trunk.
By dint of shows, in many corners of the French capital Calder met many artists of the time who influenced his way of seeing art. He then began his first works of kinetic art by creating the “stabiles”, abstract geometric configurations made with pieces of metal, rope and wood placed on the ground, but soon the idea matured in him that art should no longer be anchored to the ground, but float or almost. And so in his mind the aforementioned took shape mobiles (which as the name suggests were mobile), a key symbol of Calder’s kinetic art. Those wonderful colored structures that hung from the ceilings finally they released the painting and the forms into space and transported them into the fourth dimensionthat of reality.
Initially, mobiles moved through the air in a programmed manner (thanks to some engines and precise calculations that allowed the variation of shape and color of the figural sequences, according to a certain temporal order) by the artist, but later – when Calder came into contact with Surrealism – they began to be free, waving in the air. Moving in multiple directions and having a “unstable balance“, this type of furniture gave life to a work that could always change, even if only imperceptibly, and which was (and is) a source of infinite points of observation.
Fascinated by the beauty of nature, the forms of Calder’s mobiles were increasingly similar to delicate sea creaturesflowers waving on stems, small twigs of dancing leaves moved by the wind.
The famous philosopher Paul Sartre He was so struck by this ingenious invention that he wrote an essay about it, in which he defined it as follows:
Mobiles mean nothing but themselves; they “are,” that’s all; they are absolutes, they are perfect just as they are.
Calder’s mobiles, which in the 1940s were worth only a thousand dollars in the United States, sold for thousands of dollars after his death. The very famous “Flying fish” (1957) broke all records at Christie’s when it went for $25.9 million. Testimony of a success that ranges from one sector to another, between art, engineering and design… but always in the name of nature which was so dear to the artist.
