Alexander calder mini biography template

Near the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated with the class of Alexander Calder's parents did not want him to be an artist, so he decided to study mechanical engineering. An intuitive engineer since childhood, Calder did not even know what mechanical engineering was.

When asked why he decided to study mechanical engineering instead of art Calder said, "I wanted to be an engineer because some guy I rather liked was a mechanical engineer, that's all". He was well-liked and the class yearbook contained the following description, "Sandy is evidently always happy, or perhaps up to some joke, for his face is always wrapped up in that same mischievous, juvenile grin.

This is certainly the index to the man's character in this case, for he is one of the best natured fellows there is. Calder received a degree from Stevens in He held a variety of jobs including hydraulic engineer and draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. In June , Calder took a mechanic position on the passenger ship H. While sailing from San Francisco to New York City, Calder slept on deck and awoke one early morning off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the full moon setting on opposite horizons.

He described in his autobiography, "It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. The H. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled to Aberdeen, Washington , where his sister and her husband, Kenneth Hayes resided.

Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in , one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros.

Calder became fascinated with the circus action, a theme that would reappear in his later work. They married in Leger wrote a preface for the catalogue of Calder's first exhibition of abstract constructions held at the Galerie Percier in Calder and Louisa returned to America in to a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut , where they raised a family Sandra born , Mary born In he and Louisa traveled through India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry.

He donated to the town a sculpture, which since has been situated in the town square. Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display. In , Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson. Calder died unexpectedly in November of a heart attack , shortly after the opening of a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.

In Paris in , Calder began to create his Cirque Calder , a miniature circus fashioned from wire, cloth, string, rubber, cork, and other found objects. Designed to be transportable it grew to fill five large suitcases , the circus was presented on both sides of the Atlantic. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space", and in had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet.

The painter Jules Pascin , a friend from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian 's studio in , where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art , toward which he had already been tending. It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, actuated by motors, that would become his signature artworks.

Calder's kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors. Dating from , Calder's abstract sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp , a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive".

However, Calder found that the motorized works sometimes became monotonous in their prescribed movements. His solution, arrived at by , was hanging sculptures that derived their motion from touch or air currents. The earliest of these were made of wire, found objects, and wood, a material that Calder used since the s. The hanging mobiles were followed in by outdoor standing mobiles in industrial materials, which were set in motion by the open air.

The wind mobiles featured abstract shapes delicately balanced on pivoting rods that moved with the slightest current of air, allowing for a natural shifting play of forms and spatial relationships. Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in to differentiate them from mobiles.

During World War II , Calder continued to sculpt, adapting to a scarcity of aluminum during the war by returning to carved wood in a new open form of sculpture called "constellations". Postwar, Calder began to cut shapes from sheet metal into evocative forms and hand-paint them in his characteristically bold hues. Alexander Calder is considered one of the greatest modern artists of this age.

Alexander Calder by Art with Mrs. This video is a brief introduction to the Sculpture Artist Alexander Calder. For each session, a guided presentation has already been prepared! Just open it up in Google Slides or PowerPoint and go! The presentation seamlessly navigates you and your kiddos through the instructional content, the studio project, and follow-up activities.

This document is just jam-packed with relevant usable resources. Check out these printables:. These are currently available only to members of the Kids Art Projects program. Learn more about becoming a member here. Use these to connect art and literacy! Sculptures are usually still as people walk around them, but Calder's sculptures move. The mobiles might also move because of touch or movement around them.

Watch: make a mobile sculpture. Video Transcript Video Transcript. I'm going to try some moving art, also known as kinetic art. Why not join me in making a mobile. Did you know? Art that moves is sometimes called kinetic art. Alexander Calder's grandfather and both his parents were artists. His father was a sculptor and his mother was a painter.

Calder's work is in many permanent collections across the world. From the second floor window on the east side of the Great Stair Hall on the opposite side from the armor collection there is behind the viewer Calder's own Ghost mobile, [ 66 ] ahead on the street is the Swann Memorial Fountain by his father, A. Calder Gardens , a 1.

In the late s and early s, Calder's works were not highly sought after, and when they sold, it was often for relatively little money. A copy of a Pierre Matisse sales ledger in the foundation's files shows that only a few pieces in the show found buyers, one of whom, Solomon R. Beginning in , winners of the National Magazine Awards are awarded an "Ellie", a copper-colored stabile resembling an elephant, which was designed by Calder.

Two months after his death, the artist was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford. However, representatives of the Calder family boycotted the January 10, , ceremony "to make a statement favoring amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters ". In , the Calder Foundation was established by Calder's family, "dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and interpreting the art and archives of Alexander Calder and [is] charged with an unmatched collection of his works".

The art includes more than sculptures including mobiles, stabiles, standing mobiles, and wire sculptures, and 22 monumental outdoor works, as well as thousands of oil paintings, works on paper, toys, pieces of jewelry, and domestic objects. The Calder Foundation does not authenticate artworks; rather, owners can submit their works for registration in the Foundation's archive and for examination.

In , the owners of Rio Nero , a sheet-metal and steel-wire mobile ostensibly by Calder, went to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia charging that it was not by Alexander Calder, as claimed by its seller. The judge recognized the problem at the time, noting that Perls' pronouncement would make Rio Nero unsellable. Referring to the Rio Nero case, the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court in rejected the appeal of an art collector who wished to sell a couple of stage sets that Calder had designed but did not live to see completed, which had been unsuccessfully submitted to the Calder Foundation for authentication.

In , questions arose about another purported Calder, Two White Dots not to be confused with the similarly named piece, Two White Dots in the Air , which Calder created in In , Calder had created a 1-foot 0. Each piece no matter how many copies were made would be initialed personally by Calder in white chalk, after which a welder would follow the chalk marks to burn the initials into the work.

Calder died in , without a full-size version of Two White Dots having been made. Segetario's documentation claimed that the work had been fabricated around "under the supervision and direction of Artist". The suit was settled out of court in the late s. Two White Dots now resides outdoors on a farm near a river outside the small town of Washington, Connecticut.

In the Calder Estate filed a lawsuit against the estate of his former dealer, Klaus Perls , alleging that Perls had sold fake Calders as well as concealing the ownership of works by the artist. Calder and his wife, Louisa, were the parents of two daughters, Sandra — [ 92 ] and Mary He has four children, including Gryphon Rower-Upjohn, a sound experimentalist, composer-performer, and curator in the field of audiovisual culture, who is also known as Gryphon Rue.

Sandra was an illustrator of children's books. The Calder family has a long-standing connection with the Putney School , a progressive co-ed boarding school in Vermont. Calder's daughters attended the school as did several of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A foot mobile hangs in Calder Hall in the Michael S. Currier Center on campus.

Perl, Jed New York: Alfred A. ISBN Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. American sculptor — For other people named Alexander Calder, see Alexander Calder disambiguation. Alexander Calder, by Carl Van Vechten , Lawnton, Pennsylvania , U.

Early life [ edit ]. Life and career [ edit ]. Artistic work [ edit ]. Sculpture [ edit ]. Monumental sculptures [ edit ]. Theatrical productions [ edit ]. Painting and printmaking [ edit ]. Painted aircraft and automobile [ edit ]. Jewelry [ edit ]. Exhibitions [ edit ]. Collections [ edit ]. Calder Gardens [ edit ]. Recognition and awards [ edit ].

Barr, Jr. Art market [ edit ]. Legacy [ edit ]. Calder Foundation [ edit ]. Authenticity issues [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Gallery [ edit ]. The Four Elements , Moderna Museet , installation at the museum entrance. Le tamanoir The Anteater , Rotterdam , Netherlands.

Alexander calder mini biography template

Feuille d'arbre Tree leaf , Tel Aviv , Israel. Flying Dragon , Art Institute of Chicago. Selected works [ edit ]. Dog , folded brass sheet, made as a present for Calder's parents The Flying Trapeze , oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in. Elephant c. Aztec Josephine Baker , wire, 53" x 10" x 9". It stands 40 feet 12 m tall, on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge , Massachusetts.

Moved for conservation and donated to Detroit Institute of Arts , currently on display at exterior of museum at John R. Notes [ edit ]. Calder Foundation.