Calder

Starred review from June 5, 2017
Perl (New Art City) delivers a hulking and exhaustively researched biography of American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976), focusing on the first four decades of his life. Calder was born in Philadelphia into a dynasty of artists (his father and paternal grandfather were both sculptors with public works and his mother was a portrait painter). It was only after studying engineering and a stint working in the boiler room of a ship that Calder decided to seriously pursue art. He began as a painter but turned to creating playful kinetic wire sculptures. After a life-changing visit to painter Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in 1930, Calder began making completely abstract sculptures, which caught the attention of art-world heavyweights on both sides of the Atlantic. For the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, his subtly political Mercury Fountain was given prominent placement alongside Picasso’s Guernica, showing the world that Calder was more than modernism’s playful jester. The biography ends when Calder has entered his “classical style,” characterized by large-scale mobiles of arresting complexity. Perl throughout emphasizes Calder’s debt to the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in his ability to blend fine art with everyday objects such as children’s toys. Generously illustrated and delivered in vibrant writing (he describes one of Calder’s tabletop standing mobiles as “the spiderweb strength and delicacy of an Emily Dickinson poem”), Perl offers what will be without question the authoritative source on the man whom the French affectionately nicknamed le roi du fil de fer—“the wire king.” 400 illus.

September 1, 2017
A meticulously researched biography of one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.New York Review of Books contributor and former New Republic art critic Perl (Art History/New School for Social Research; Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture, 2012, etc.) chronicles how Alexander Calder (1898-1976) grew from a crafty boy into a master sculptor who, along with Picasso and Miro, pushed the world of art toward the frontiers of modernism. Calder wrote of "trying to get at 'evolution' [from] toys to sculpture," and Perl divines exactly this thread amid a tremendous amount of source material and shows the progression from Calder's tinkering childhood to the celebrated, clowning Cirque Calder of the 1920s, all the way to Calder's inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's epochal exhibitions "Cubism and Abstract Art" and "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" of the mid-1930s. The author unveils a network of Calder's influences. "Artistic inspiration," he writes, "involves instincts, apprehensions, and revelations ranging from the subliminal to the nearly spiritual, and the zigzagging, even ricocheting connections need to be mapped in ways that defy strict rules of evidence." Calder's parents were both artists, and although they encouraged him to pursue a degree in engineering, they also exposed him to art that would later shape his career. Duchamp's 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, for example, possessed a kineticism that would eventually contribute to Calder's understanding of the vast conceptual capabilities of art. With wire fashioned into spirals and mobiles gently spinning through the air, Calder's lines would later adopt a sense of movement over time, a fourth-dimensional change through a three-dimensional space. Most triumphant is the way in which Perl explains how to read Calder's challenging forms; he clearly discusses the "difference between a volume and a void" and "the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement." "Sculpture could be a matter of lines," he explains, capable of synthesizing "science with sensibility, the engineered with the empathetic." Not only an essential record of the first 40 years of Calder's life, but an exceptional chronicle of the genesis of modernism.

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Starred review from October 15, 2017
Art critic Perl (Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, 2008) joins the select ranks of multivolume arts biographers, among them Hilary Spurling on Matisse and John Richardson on Picasso, with the first in a foundational two-book inquiry into the unusually sunny life and exuberantly radical work of sculptor Alexander Calder. The grandson, nephew, and son of artists, Calder tried to thwart his destiny by studying engineering, a fortunate detour, given the technical finesse of his future constructions. Perl incisively portrays Calder's impressive and intriguing family while tracking the bohemian, coast-to-coast upbringing of this precocious smiling Buddha of a boy, marking the genesis of his signature playful ingenuity in his youthful passions for birds and animals, toys, tools, and tinkering, skating, dancing, puns, math, science, and theater. Starting out in New York as a magazine and newspaper illustrator, Calder developed his command of line and caricature, a perfect vehicle for his sardonic, ironic, and comic spirit. In 1920s Paris, this perpetual experimentalist created a remarkably vital miniature circus and powerfully expressive calligraphic wire works, then catalyzed a kinetic revolution, creating sculptures-in-motion that inspired Marcel Duchamp to coin the word mobile to describe them. Graced with 400 photographs, Perl's dynamic and illuminating biography, as buoyant and evocative as Calder's sculptures, concludes with the ebullient and cosmic artist poised for ever more creative adventures and renown.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2017

Former art critic for the New Republic, Perl draws on letters and papers not previously accessed, plus dozens of interviews, to show how groundbreaking, crowd-pleasing artist Alexander Calder started out. His peregrinations from Roaring Twenties Greenwich Village to interwar Paris, his collaboration with dance and theater artists--all are covered here.

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