George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Suspended Animation" @wsj by David Littlejohn
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is mounting the city's first survey of the sometimes air-blown, sometimes monumental sculpture of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), from whom it commissioned a major mobile fountain sculpture when LACMA opened in 1965.
Calder suffers the dubious fate of being too recognizable and—after ordinary viewers of the 1930s and '40s grew accustomed to abstract art—too easy to like. In 1950, critic Clement Greenberg dismissed his work as "racy and chic." The Connecticut erotic-cartoon artist Carroll Dunham scorned a 2009 Calder exhibition at the Whitney as "almost a New Yorker-cartoon version of biomorphic abstract art." Stephanie Barron of LACMA, the curator of this carefully selected display of 50 of his three-dimensional works from 1931 to 1975 (most on loan from the Calder Foundation), hopes to enlarge this narrow vision.
'Three Segments' (above) and 'La Grande Vitesse' (background, below). Calder Foundation/ARS/Fredrik Nilsen
Miniature versions of his slowly moving "mobiles" now hang over a million babies' cribs, hypnotizing them first into alertness, then into sleep. Art lovers know what the familiar steel-and-wire originals look like—fascinating cascades of small, flat, metal shapes (usually white, black or red, geometric or biomorphic: circles, curved triangles, leaves, ovoid blobs) hanging or projected from ever-descending fine wires that hang from (or are looped onto) other bent wires, and so on. The uppermost wire or rod is either suspended from the ceiling or balanced on the sharp peak of a solid-black steel "stabile"—a sturdy, unmoving form, often in the shape of a curved, open pyramid on three or more legs. If you contemplate one of his mobiles patiently, you will witness the branches, wires and all the things attached to them moving in slow, separate arcs of up to 360 degrees, teased by ambient air currents and the warmth of bodies below—and sometimes museum visitors who blow on them to set them going.
My afternoon among the mobiles was divided between waiting patiently for them to start moving, and then watching for a few minutes as they edged around and back, very, very slowly; absorbing the sheer beauty of those I found beautiful; and trying to work out the structural engineering of their hanging and the almost metaphysical physics of Calder's balancing acts. All of the shapes at the ends of the wires—if not circles, more like guitar-picks or paddles than triangles or leaves—seem perfectly chosen, their unhurried movements magical, mysterious, lyrical. But how and where they hang depends on the trial-and-error genius of a mechanical engineer from Pennsylvania who became a world-famous artist.
The wall labels are obscure, and the installation a puzzle, so wander at will. But do look out for "Untitled 1934," a red sun balancing a white moon. "Orange Under Table" (1940) and "Red Disc" (1947) are uncannily balanced by curving rods on the edges of white wood bases. "La Demoiselle" of 1939 (black, red and yellow shapes spiral off an orange wire tripod) is perfect. And you can't miss the 8-foot-tall "Tree" (1941), from whose single topping branch descends a delicate array of fine wire hangers that end in moving, multicolored shapes. Turn off your busy mind, take time to gaze and wonder.
Seven ingenious variations on a theme from 1947-48 stand in a curving white alcove, worthy of close contemplation. In each, a sharp pyramidal base or stand is encircled by a flat oval disk (black, gray, red, yellow, blue), pierced by a round hole. The disk never touches the base—it is hung from one end of a long bent wire that rides atop the tip of the base, then loops in air up to 10 feet across the room, bearing different varieties of extended and descending mobiles of its own. The long looping wires and complex mobiles on one side exactly counterbalance the pierced disk on the other.
Calder's monumental steel stabiles commissioned for public places, mostly in the 1960s and '70s, have become almost as well-known as his mobiles. Seventy-four of his full-size abstract steel sculptures—formed primarily of intersecting triangles, sharp points and voluptuous curves, sometimes with mobiles attached—stand in parks and plazas, universities and sculpture gardens, in front of office buildings and train stations in the U.S.; 80 in other countries. But sculptures weighing 30 to 50 tons don't travel, so the best LACMA could do was borrow an 81/2--foot-tall "intermediate maquette" (an artist's working model) of an impressive red-orange, curving, three-legged sculpture that is now the iconic center and symbol of Grand Rapids, Mich. At home, 1969's "La Grande Vitesse"—fractured French for Grand Rapids—is 43 feet tall. The steel maquette of 1967 can't begin to convey the compelling grandeur of the permanent installation.
Another intermediate maquette, of the spiky, three-legged black "Trois Pics" (1967) at Grenoble, holds up as a sculpture on its own. But five miniature maquettes—of grand public sculptures in Spoleto, Italy (1962); Reims, France (1963); the Hakone Sculpture Garden in Japan (1965); LACMA's own fountain-based commission ("Trois Quintains" or "Hello Girls"), at the other end of the museum complex; and the greatest of all, the 64-foot-tall silver "L'Homme" (or "Trois Disques") designed for Montreal's Expo 67—are here reduced to 2- to 3-foot study-models of works designed to be big.
Major credit for the success of the LACMA show must go to architect Frank Gehry, who designed it. He was so impressed by the 1964 Calder exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, with its curving walls and shifting light, that he was determined to do this display equal justice. He erased the rectangular space of Renzo Piano's Resnik Pavilion, gauzed over its skylit saw-tooth roof and created an irregular series of white-to-gray spaces, many with straight and curving walls opening into one another, so you can see high-hanging mobiles around corners or through three spaces at once. The walls' curves respond sympathetically to Calder's. Hidden spotlights are trained to illumine pieces as they turn and to cast moving shadows. Mr. Gehry's simpatico spaces can be tricky to maneuver. Miss one sharp turn, and you'll never find the mesmerizing, ever-moving "Snow Flurry" (1948)—30 white disks on 30 intricately interconnected wires—at the corridor's end. If you do find it, give it 10 minutes.
Mr. Littlejohn writes about West Coast cultural events for the Journal.