I'm grooving on this drawing. An early one, exploratory both of the thing being depicted and in the manner of depiction. This sheet speaks to me. Lines like silhouettes only dimensional, appearing flat but also going within the form and puncturing and punctuating the outline making monkeys with more banana than banal in their personality.
Alexander Calder, better known for his mobiles (which hang in the foyer of nearly every major American museum touting the salt of its Modernist collection), was also a pretty smart draftsman. I don't mean to diminish Calder's mobiles, which are often cool; distaste derives more from the unimaginative way they're most often hung today.
Take the National Gallery of Art's East Wing in Washington, DC as an example. The entryway feels like a omniplex movie theatre and its opens up into a shopping mall like atrium. The hallway is designed to move people and it does so efficiently but at expense of one beauty of a Puryear. Nobody sees it because the environment functions as passage. Predictably, what do we find in the atrium but some hulking piece of art, in this case, its the Calder. Usually our boy is little more reserved and his pieces are silent birds, shifting like slow motion sattelites, overhead and asking us to tilt our heads and take in some sky.
Calder's mobiles, like giraffes, are cool and I totally would be psyched to live near one. On the other hand these iron space pterodactyls seem ubiquitous and curators strangle their potential by consistently headlining their entryways with their presence.
Enough, lets go back, get out of the museums, pre-1940's... before moving to Connecticut when Calder was a hobnobbing Parisian in the business of making circus. This more grounded Calder saved his flights for the pen and paper and this is what I'd like you to gander at now.
If you like that one, check this boxy, gridded one out. Near totally abstract and reorienting the viewer outta their seat and up from the perspective on top of the room...
This last circus one came after moving back to the states. It was done from the memory of the earlier ones and I believe was made to entertain some friends and his daughter. Its a broader statement about the circus but in some ways not quite as quirkily original as the other two. Its still cool but a little too book cover ready or circus poster dependent.
Another part of Calder's ouvre which should not be overlooked is his jewelry. This stuff is awesome and it feels just as much as if it were a drawing in space as it does a body ornament.
Calder also was a conspiracy theorist and is reported to have spotted aliens in Aix...
If you hear me mispronouncing, let me hit you on to this Caldor
RIP, my beloved DariNor Plaza
PS... Shout out to Strega-Cusano, who'll be cooking for the town of Greenfield and all-comers tomarrow from four till six pm
