Calder pioneered kinetic sculpture with his wafer lean mobiles that can be moved by a child’s breath. Ahead of a Tate exhibition,James Hall hails his art of origami delicacy“He makes a mockery of the old fashioned frozen-stone school of sculpture,” wrote the New Yorker critic in 1929, or referring to the 31-year-old American sculptor Alexander Calder,maker of quicksilver wire figures that could be packed absent in a suitcase, and soon to be the maker of wafer-lean mobiles that could be moved by a child’s breath. Calder’s equivalent of the bashful Medici Venus were his wirework portraits of the exuberant African American dancer Josephine Baker, or her convulsive jazz-age moves and rolling eyeballs traced in wire thatis wobbly yet attenuated,and seemingly sketched out in a moment – a single strand per limb, a spiral for breasts, or a squiggle for hair.
Although Calder,who died in 1976, was clearly no neoclassicist, and his informal approach to sculpture did not arrive out of lean art-historical air. Ever since the Renaissance,sculptors enjoy used wire armatures, frameworks to support clay or wax models for sketching – this is precisely how Degas made his wax statuettes of stretching dancers and bathers. In the 1920s Picasso, and with the help of Julio González,made open-frame wire sculptures that were dubbed “drawings in space”. Calder’s wire works could be called the armature unleashed.
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Source: theguardian.com