Calder

Starred review from January 27, 2020
Art critic Perl (Calder: The Conquest of Time) completes his magisterial biography of sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976) with this lavishly illustrated volume, revealing Calder’s transformation from playful American master to international figure. First achieving acclaim for his mobiles, Calder later gained notoriety for “monumental objects that celebrate the uprising of the human spirit.” Improvising a bohemian life in Connecticut with his wife, Louisa, during WWII, the artist welcomed refugee artists such as Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, and Andre Masson as he sculpted unconventional materials and space into what Calder called “a new form of art.” Calder later experimented with art forms in his constellations and sculptures depicting weightlessness (as with The Dancer and On One Knee). The artist gained international acclaim in the 1950s as foreign audiences “saw in his ebullient and sometimes downright idiosyncratic abstractions a bridge between the prewar and the postwar possibilities for abstract art.” In the 1960s, Calder received titanic commissions at Spoleto, Montreal’s Expo ’67, and 1968’s Mexico City Olympics for his monumental sculptural pieces. Calder admirers will delight in this exhaustively researched and illuminating retrospective.

February 1, 2020
The monumental conclusion to a two-part biography of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), one of the most important figures in 20th-century sculpture. In this masterfully researched work, art historian Perl, a New York Review of Books contributor who served as the art critic for the New Republic for 20 years, has constructed an impressive monument that should raise the standards for future art biographies. The author celebrates his subject while effortlessly educating his audience; his text is at once erudite and accessible and achieves an exquisite balance between historical and theoretical readings. While the previous volume chronicled the genesis of Calder's formal concepts, this one explores the life of an established artist as Calder was contemplating the permanence of his objects and his legacy. His career was catapulted by a series of outdoor commissions, as "people were beginning to recognize the power of his work to animate contemporary architectural spaces." As Perl writes, "if in the 1930s Calder was conquering time as he made sculptures move, in the 1960s he was conquering space as he created abstract sculptures of a size and an impact seldom seen before." Delicate mobiles evolved into "a new kind of urban landmark," massive artworks that pulsed with "muscular energy." Between Calder's home in Roxbury, Connecticut, and his studio in rural France, Perl traces a steady sequence of major exhibitions and projects, from Calder's MoMA debut in 1943 to his Whitney retrospective in 1976, which was on view the year he died of a heart attack. A rhapsodic historian, Perl presents each sculpture as a masterpiece, but he doesn't shy away from criticism. He acknowledges that some considered Calder's work "too easy" or "chic throwaways," and he details the artist's occasionally awkward commercial collaborations. Cumulatively, these episodes form a complete picture of an exceptional artist and all the significant developments of his oeuvre. Perl finds a vivacity between the artist and his many creations. "No longer were the figures in a painting or a sculpture what really mattered," he writes. "Now what mattered was the life of the work of art itself." A towering achievement.

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April 1, 2020

Art critic Perl concludes his survey of the life of Alexander Calder (1898-1976) with this second and final volume of an exhaustively researched and profusely illustrated biography. This study charts Calder's rise from top-tier American artist, his mobiles a ubiquitous presence in the 1950s, to an international figure of the 1960s and 1970s completing commissions of monumental outdoor sculptures in Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere globally, these works the very sign of postwar modernism and international-style architecture. Perl does a fine job, too, of introducing readers to the lesser-known Calder: paintings, graphic works, jewelry, and collaborations with avant-garde composers, such as Earle Brown. This surprisingly first full-length biography of Calder (an autobiography was published in the mid-1960s) offers a wealth of detail about the artist's family life, social circle, and voluminous production. For casual readers, there may be both too much and also too little detail, making Calder an enigma within his own story, a challenge to any biographer--a bluff, hearty presence whose inner life and aesthetic ideas nevertheless seem hard to discern. VERDICT For readers interested in Calder and postwar modernism, the wealth of facts, anecdotes, and analysis here will be welcome. [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/19.]--Michael Dashkin, New York

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Starred review from April 1, 2020
Perl completes his zestfully expert two-book biography of exuberantly radical sculptor Calder in a volume every bit as scintillating and substantial as the first, linking Calder's early, buoyant creations to his monumental abstract sculptures. Expats Calder; his wife, Louisa, and their two daughters returned to the U.S. at the start of WWII, and their Connecticut farmhouse became headquarters for a passionate community of refugee European artists. As Perl recounts often funny stories of family and friends, he tracks how Calder, an emancipated creative personality and a wizard presiding over a private wonderland, fulfilled his yearning to do enormous and enormously unconventional works of art, ultimately creating large-scale, transformative public commissions which embody a dramatic evolution of the traditional civic sculptures created by his grandfather and father. Perl's unlimited access to primary materials and phenomenal artistic perception and narrative vitality cohere into a luxuriously detailed, photo-rich, and spirited illumination of Calder's complex temperament; diverse influences, from cosmic forces to Bosch to architecture; the place of play in his work; love of language; unnervingly anarchic paintings; world travels, and years in postwar rural France. Remaining superhumanly energetic, even under the strain of Parkinson's disease, Calder, as Perl so incisively and vividly attests, was a soulful and fearless virtuoso who brought wit, surprise, metaphor, movement, and magic to art and to life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)