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Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976
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About This Book
The concluding volume to the first biography of one of the most important, influential, and beloved twentieth-century sculptors, and one of the greatest artists in the cultural history of America--is a vividly written, illuminating account of his triumphant later years. The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened their home to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. In the postwar decades, they divided their time between the United States and France, as Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo '67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Jed Perl makes clear how Calder's radical sculptural imagination shaped the minimalist and kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. And we see, as well, that through everything--their ever-expanding friendships with artists and writers of all stripes; working to end the war in Vietnam; hosting riotous dance parties at their Connecticut home; seeing the "mobile," Calder's essential artistic invention, find its way into Webster's dictionary--Calder and Louisa remained the risk-taking, singularly bohemian couple they had been since first meeting at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The biography ends with Calder's death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight--only weeks after an encyclopedic retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum in New York--but leaves us with a new, clearer understanding of his legacy, both as an artist and a man.
Reviews
"Cumulatively, these episodes form a complete picture of an exceptional artist and all the significant developments of his oeuvre."
"Instead, he allows the lavish illustrations to speak for themselves while he charts Calder's life through a well-researched and engaging narrative rich in anecdotes."
"Perl also addresses Calder's skills as a draftsman and printmaker – two aspects of his oeuvre that are easily overlooked ..."
"Alexander Calder has found a perfect match in Jed Perl ..."
"Then it dawns on us: This is going to take a while to get through ..."
"For casual readers, there may be both too much and also too little detail, making Calder an enigma within his own story, a challenge to any biographer—a bluff, hearty presence whose inner life and aesthetic ideas nevertheless seem hard to discern ..."
"Calder admirers will delight in this exhaustively researched and illuminating retrospective."
"Perl keeps his eye on the ambition and intellectual rigor beneath the image of Calder the naïf stumbling upon success and beauty, though some of the artist's contemporaries, at least initially, were more amused than impressed ..."
"Perl's unlimited access to primary materials and phenomenal artistic perception and narrative vitality cohere into a luxuriously detailed, photo-rich, and spirited illumination of Calder's complex temperament."
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