Calder: Sculpting Time

Calder. Sculpting Time explores the profound and transformative impact of one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary artists through a focused lens. Alexander Calder (1898–1976) changed the way we perceive and interact with sculpture by introducing the fourth dimension of time into art with his legendary mobiles — a term coined by Marcel Duchamp that refers to both “motion” and “motive” in French — and by exploring volumes and voids in his stabiles, christened by Jean Arp for his stationary objects.

This catalogue includes over 30 masterworks made between 1930 and 1960 — Calder’s most innovative, prolific years — from his early abstractions or sphériques to a magnificent selection of mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles of various scales. It also features a large body of Calder’s Constellations, a term proposed by Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney for the artist’s beloved objects made from wood and wire in 1943, a time when sheet metal was in short supply due to World War II.