Title: Untitled (Spanish Refugee Aid C) D

60 × 80 cm

Original poster from an American museum

Original poster

Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, in 1898 and is widely recognized as a pioneer of kinetic art, an art movement that emerged around 1920–1970 and used motion in artistic creation. Both of his parents were artists, but he initially studied mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

After graduating in 1922, Calder continued his studies in painting at the Art Students League of New York. In 1926, he moved to Paris and began making his first wire sculptures, which became prototypes for his later suspended works.

Calder visited Piet Mondrian’s studio in 1930 and was deeply moved, prompting his shift from figurative to abstract art. In a letter to Marcel Duchamp, he said he wanted to create a “Mondrian that moves.” Over the next few years, Calder began making abstract moving works, which Duchamp called “mobiles.” Artist Jean Arp consequently called Calder’s stationary works “stabiles.” Calder experimented with purely abstract shapes and bright, contrasting colors, developing a distinctive artistic vocabulary. In 1952, he won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. He was subsequently invited to create numerous large-scale public commissions until his death in 1976. Today, Calder’s works are in the permanent collections of many leading museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, whose Calder collection is among the finest in the world.