Author Description

This study, now published in paperback, provides the most complete scholarly account yet published of the life and work of Alexander Calder. The son and grandson of acclaimed public sculptors, Calder was trained as an engineer. Working in Europe during the 1920s, he was exposed to a range of avant-garde art, including Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, Constructivism, and works created at the Bauhaus. These sources, together with Calder's abiding interest in American folk art, were fundamental to the evolution of his wood and wire sculptures, which fundamentally challenged the principles of Western sculpture established in antiquity. Calder's creation of the mobile and stabile, two forms of sculpture that are synonymous with modernism, is also analysed in detail. Including a new plate section and 170 halftones, many published here for the first time, Marter's book is an absorbing study of Calder's special contribution to twentieth-century art and culture.