STEREOSKOP
MOBILE AND STABLE by Michel Ragon
Michel Ragon: Started life with minimal formal education and became one of France’s most influential art and architecture critics. Served as journalist and critic for reviews such as Arts, Neuf, Cimaise, Arts‑Loisirs, and Les Échos. He curated exhibitions in São Paulo (1967) and Venice (1968), and wrote for the World Health Organization. Despite only having basic schooling, he taught at prestigious institutions including the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, and was a visiting professor at the University of Montréal from 1970 onwards.
2025
In 1926, there arrived in Paris a twenty-year old American engineer, who considered himself a humorist and exhibited his work the following year at the Salon des Humoristes. His name was Alexander Calder.
In no time, he made a name for himself among artistic circles in Paris with his outline wire portraits, including Josephine Baker's, and especially with the shows he gave of his Circus.
This Circus was a marvellous toy for adults, composed of acrobats, clowns, lions and various vehicles, all made of movable wires set in motion by their inventor, who produced appropriate sound-effects.
But the engineer-humorist met some artists in Paris who were to change his life. He made friends, in fact, with Miró, Arp, Léger and Mondrian. The humour he met with Miró and Arp was quite different from the kind displayed at the Salon des Humoristes; it was the humour described by the surrealists as a "terrorist of the mind", which was in a direct line with the dadaist paradoxes. Léger showed him how the modern world and its own peculiar mythology could transform painting. Last of all, Mondrian, that ascetic at the antipodes of all humour, the Calvinist who lived a solitary existence in a studio decorated with squares and rectangles of pure colour, where everything looked like his painting, even the furniture, Mondrian gave him such a shock that Calder staggered out of his flat saying: "I should like to make Mondrians that move."
His father was an academic sculptor of Philadelphia and Calder became an engineer almost as a protest against all the bronze and marble that cluttered up his childhood, but the engineer who eventually created an art "to make you laugh" with his Circus, discovered there might be another art that would combine the science of the engineer with the smile of the humorist. He forgot the humour at first in the stern discipline of fashioning abstract sculptures, but they were still strange and might be described as the sculptures of a mechanic. Arp called them stabiles because of their firm seating on the ground and their rather disturbing stability, like idle machines that one expects to see set in motion any moment.
Calder, the engineer-mechanic, was in fact thinking of movement. He gave life to his abstract sculptures by equipping them with motors, which the visitors could start them-selves, and exhibited them at the Galerie Vignon in 1932. The same year, he made the great discovery that was to make him famous: aerial sculptures, so light that a breath of air moved them, which Marcel Duchamp called mobiles.
The mobile is an original creation that has broken away today from its creator. Calder is one of those rare artists, like Picasso and Le Corbusier, who reach the archetype and, beyond that, the myth. Any strange painting is called a Picasso, every ultra-modern building a Corbusier, any mobile sculpture a Calder.
Sculptors have wanted to make sculpture move for a long time. From Rude and Carpeaux to Rodin, sculpture was so vital that it did almost stir into life. The futurists, especially Bocchioni, decomposed movement to accentuate even further this impression of sculpture in action.
But it was Calder who achieved the miracle of giving sculpture autonomous movement and a form that was the expression of this movement. Salvador Dali's ironical quip, "The least one can expect of a sculpture is that it should stay still", is pointless because Calder might reply that the most one could expect of a sculpture was that it should move.
The breath of life itself stirs these mobiles. They seem to take flight gracefully like birds. They swing rhythmically with the wind like frail branches. In 1946, the mobiles inspired some memorable writing from Jean-Paul Sartre:
"Their hesitations, recovery, fingering, blundering, abrupt starts and above all their wonderful swanlike nobility make Calder's mobiles into strange beings, half way between matter and life...”
In short, although Calder has not tried to imitate anything - because he has not tried to create anything except series and harmonies of unknown movements - they are at the same time imaginative inventions, tech-nical, almost mathematical combinations, and also the concrete symbol of Nature, of that great vague Nature, who wastes her pollen and suddenly produces a cloud of a thousand butterflies, and who one never knows is the blind sequence of cause and effect, or the timid development of an Idea, ceaselessly interrupted and unsettled.
Calder's astonishing inventiveness matured rapidly from the motorised sculptures exhibited in 1932, followed by the mobiles of 1933, set in motion with only a breath of wind, to the first open-air mobile of 1934 (Steel Fish).
Although he was only thirty-five years old, when he returned to the United States in 1933 and settled on a ranch in Connecticut, his work was almost set in its final mould. He had already produced his Circus, his wire sculptures (Romulus and Remus), which were more transparent than the most open of open sculptures, and machine-driven constructions that anticipated Tinguely's metamechanics (Gold-fish Bowl with a Crank) twenty-five years later.
All these early works of Calder, in addition to his neo-plastic paintings, and more traditional bronzes and wood carvings, prompted Léger's remark: "They are serious without appearing so."
True enough. And after the arrival of the stabiles and mobiles it was evidentally becoming more and more serious without appearing so. The mobiles have become so famous that the stabiles tend to be overlooked in Calder's work.
Yet the stabiles and mobiles are reciprocal; they are the obverse and reverse of the same medal.
There are as many slender, light and charming mobiles as there are aggressive stabiles, like disquieting insects or melancholy birds whose "gigantic wings prevent them from walking".
They have a certain affinity, too, with the world of machines, scrapers, bulldozers and dragline dredges, dismantled tractors and agricultural implements. But this may be wrong because Calder himself calls them names like Dog, Cactus, Widow and Charcoal-seller. While they make us think of mechanics, Calder is classifying them as living creatures.
Another characteristic of Calder's work, which seems less unusual today when sculptors have become so fond of using scrap-iron and other kinds of rubbish, is the break his works made at the time with the well-established tradition that sculpture should be immortalised with "noble" materials. Nobility was understood to mean marble, bronze and wood. Calder proved that the cheapest and commonest materials, like sheet-iron and the steel used for ordinary tools, also had their nobility. When an art collector asked him to do a mobile in gold, his reply implied a whole attitude to art: "All right, but I'll paint it black".
In black, like most of his mobiles and stabiles, sometimes just heightened with pure red and yellow, in other words, the colours of contemporary architecture and the favourite colours of Mondrian, Miró and Leger.
Just before the Second World War, Alexander Calder returned to Paris for the Exposition Universelle of 1937, where he had been commissioned to do the Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion. When the war ended, other commissions brought him back again to France.
The Théâtre National Populaire asked him to design the sets for Nuclea by Henri Pichette in 1952 and UNESCO commissioned a huge mobile, whih sways its black silhouette against the axis of the Eiffel Tower.
Calder is the complete artist; he has wrestled with the problem of integrating sculpture with architecture as well as designing for the theatre.
An immense coloured Calder swings in the hall of the central building at Kennedy Airport, New York, and the Aula Magna of University City, Caracas, is decorated with a vast acoustic ceiling by Calder. At Detroit, in the Research Centre of General Motors, he created a jet dance for the fountains.
He had already experimented with immaterial, ephemeral sculpture when he created an aquatic ballet with fourteen water-jets, fifty feet high, at the New York world Fair in 1939.
His varied activities do not end here. Calder makes jewellery, everyday objects like spoons, forks, and chandeliers. He is a prolific draughtsman and has illustrated the Ancient Mariner and La Fontaine's Fables. Tapestries have been woven from his cartoons. Painting has been a parallel activity to his culture and consists mainly of gouaches.
They are spirited, dynamic and brightly coloured, with lunar and serpentine forms as a constantly recurring motif.
In 1953, he bought an old farm at Saché, in Touraine. And since then has spent his time between his Roxbury ranch in the United States and his Touraine farm.
Alone in his studios, Calder has matured a work that acquired its final manner more than thirty years ago. Matured and enlarged.
His stabiles have reached architectonic dimensions and are sometimes so immense that he has had to erect a special building at Saché to house them, which is as large as a station. James Jones, the author of From here to Eternity, has described a visit he made to this strange, lonely building set among the vineyards:
“In that lumbering way of his, Calder bent over slowly with the key and unlocked and threw open the big steel door, designed to let trucks enter. Then we stepped inside where the stuff was.”
“In the gloom and moonlight I had the impression the future was finally falling in on me, as I have often dreamed it will someday. Behind me I heard my wife gasp. Soaring, looming black shapes and streaks circled and dived on me from above and on all sides ... Big as the big stone-barn building was, the new stabiles-the stuff-more than filled it up. So two of them had been mounted out on the ski-jump patio, and we descended to look at these in the moonlight.”
Monumentality in the stabiles; preciousness in the mobiles.
These two qualities have been a counterpoint in Calder's mode of expression all through his work. The quivering vanes of Calder's most recent mobiles are so fragile that they seem diaphanous, and their shapes have a perfection and enchantment that make them like a dream of constellations or immortelles.
(1) Michel Ragon, Mobiles and Stabiles, Paris, Fernand Hazan, 1967, p. 5
(2) Alexander CalderArc of Petals, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/745
(3) Jean Lipman, Calder’s Universe, exh. cat. (New York: Viking Press in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976), p. 33
(4) Calder Foundation, Steel Fish, https://calder.org/works/monumental-sculpture/steel-fish-1934/
(5) Architectural Digest, Dans l’atelier du sculpteur Alexander Calder, au domaine du Carroi à Saché, https://www.admagazine.fr/adinspiration/article/atelier-sculpteur-alexander-calder-domaine-carroi-sache