SFMOMA, Floor 5 · Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form.

The Calder gallery is the only room on Floor 5 where the art moves. Black leaves turn slowly overhead; brass plates touch now and then and ring; a motor on a timer swings four colored disks when you least expect it. "The next step in sculpture is motion," Calder wrote in 1932. Seventeen works trace how he got there, from a wire fishbowl of 1929 to a red-and-yellow Big Fat Banana forty years later.

A Family of Sculptors, a Degree in Engineering (1898–1926)

Alexander Calder was born in the Lawnton section of Philadelphia on July 22, 1898 (his mother always said August 22). His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, were sculptors; his mother, Nanette, was a portrait painter. At three he posed nude for one of his father's sculptures. At four he made a clay elephant.

He didn't train as an artist first. He studied mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology and graduated in 1919, then worked odd jobs: hydraulic engineer, draftsman, and in June 1922 a mechanic on the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. Off the coast of Guatemala, early one morning, he saw "the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other." He never forgot it.

Back in New York he enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan and George Luks, and drew for the National Police Gazette, which sent him to sketch the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1925.

Drawing in Wire (Paris, 1926–1930)

In 1926 Calder moved to Paris and set up a studio on rue Daguerre. That fall he began the Cirque Calder, a miniature circus of wire, cloth, string, and found objects that he performed for audiences of friends; by 1927 it filled five suitcases. He also began making sculpture out of wire, bending a single line into a figure.

Aquarium (1929). Wire and paint, about sixteen inches tall. Coiled wire outlines a fishbowl, with a fish, a snail, and looping plant forms inside, and a hand lever that makes the fish move. Calder called his wire figures "three-dimensional line drawing." SFMOMA's label notes that he made a similar sculpture for his mother about two weeks after this one. And there's already a moving part.

Dr. Hans Cürlis (1929) and Drawing for Dr. Hans Cürlis. A wire portrait of a man in round glasses, on a base reading "Calder," next to a front-facing graphite drawing of the same face. In April 1929 Calder had a show in Berlin, and Dr. Hans Cürlis directed a short film of him making a wire sculpture, Two Acrobats, for a series called Artists at Work. Calder made the wire portrait of Cürlis in the same period. Side by side, the drawing and the wire show what Calder meant: the wire is a pencil line lifted off the page.

In June 1929, on a ship to New York, he met Louisa James. They married in 1931.

From Mondrian to the Mobile (1930–1932)

In October 1930 Calder visited Piet Mondrian's studio in Paris, with its white walls hung with rectangles of red, yellow, and blue. He said the visit "shocked" him into abstraction. Soon he was making abstract constructions, some driven by small motors. When Marcel Duchamp saw them in the early 1930s, he gave them a name: mobile, French for both "movable" and "motive." A year later Jean Arp named the ones that stood still: stabiles. By 1932 Calder had begun hanging mobiles moved only by touch or air.

In 1933 the Calders bought a farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he built a studio in 1938.

The Room: The 1940s

Constellation (1943) and Quattro Pendulati (1943). Both from the war years. Constellation, about four feet tall, is a wall piece of carved and painted wood forms connected by wire, radiating from a red wooden ball. Calder collected antique astronomical devices, globes and mechanical models of the solar system, and he wanted the Constellations to look as if they floated without visible support. Joan Miró and Jean Arp made their own Constellations around the same time. Quattro Pendulati ("four pendulums") is a motorized wall panel: a timer sets four colored disks swinging on rods at unpredictable moments. SFMOMA's audio guide puts the point simply: Calder didn't depict motion, he used it.

23 feuilles à l'écart (23 Spreading Leaves) (1945). Black metal and wire, nearly ten feet across. Twenty-three leaf shapes hang from arching wires and move with the air like branches. The French title nods to his years in France, but SFMOMA's label points out he made it in his Roxbury studio. The best view is from directly below.

Moths II (1948). About four feet tall: white metal shapes on wire, standing on a V-shaped base. A standing mobile, half stabile, half mobile.

Untitled (1949). Cotton, metal, and paint, about five and a half feet tall and six and a half wide. One of two untitled works in the room.

The Room: The 1950s and After

Tower with Painting (1951). Metal, wood, and a painted panel, projecting from the wall: a structure that holds a painting, carved wood forms, and a hanging disc mobile. Calder's grandson Sandy Rower points out that many of the objects hung inside date from earlier periods, making it "a little Calder art history lesson all in itself."

Eighteen Numbered Black (1953). Metal and paint, more than nine feet tall and almost twelve feet across. Eighteen matte-black elements, slowly turning. Rower compares its effect to sound waves and frequencies, and says it looks different from every angle. Walk around it.

Double Gong (1953). Sheet metal, brass, and wire, about eleven feet across. Colored plates hang alongside brass ones that occasionally touch and ring. So the work moves, and makes sound, between your glances.

Double Mushroom (1957). Painted steel, about eight feet tall. Three black interlocking planes standing on three points. It doesn't move. This is a stabile, and next to the mobiles it shows the other half of Calder: weight and balance with no motion at all.

Fishy (1962). Metal and paint, about five feet tall, mounted on the wall. Blue, yellow, and red forms, with a small black mobile hanging from them and a red wire pushing two metal panels out toward you. SFMOMA's label connects the primary colors back to Mondrian's studio in 1930. It isn't a fish, but it moves like one. Bill Fisher says in the audio that it hung in his parents' dining room.

Big Fat Banana (1969). Red and yellow forms on a black triangular base, about two feet tall. Late, small, and funny.

Also in the room: Fish, a hanging mobile of painted wire and pieces of colored glass that throw colored shadows on the wall; Star and Crescent, a small mobile with a face, a crescent moon, and a star; and a second untitled work, an S-shaped black rod balanced on a white platform with a mobile of black leaves at the top. SFMOMA's online collection doesn't list dates for these three.

What the Room Shows

Calder's training was in engineering, and every mobile is a solved problem in balance: each arm weighted so the whole hangs level and still turns freely. But the room doesn't feel like engineering. It feels like weather. Wind, a passing visitor, or a timer sets things moving, and no two moments are the same. The sunrise and moon he saw off Guatemala in 1922, red on one side and silver on the other, is a fair description of what he made for the next fifty years.

In 1963 Calder moved into a new workshop in Saché, France. His large public sculptures went up from New York's JFK airport to UNESCO in Paris and the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. He died in New York on November 11, 1976, at seventy-eight, shortly after a major retrospective opened at the Whitney. 🌁

Timeline — Alexander Calder

• July 22, 1898 — Born in Lawnton, Philadelphia.

• 1919 — Degree in mechanical engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology.

• June 1922 — Works on the H. F. Alexander; sees sunrise and moon off Guatemala.

• 1925 — Sketches the circus for the National Police Gazette.

• 1926 — Moves to Paris; begins the Cirque Calder and wire sculpture.

• April 1929 — Berlin show; Hans Cürlis films him at work.

• 1929 — Aquarium; Dr. Hans Cürlis; meets Louisa James in June.

• October 1930 — Visits Mondrian's studio.

• 1931 — Marries Louisa James.

• Early 1930s — Duchamp names the mobiles; Arp names the stabiles.

• 1932 — Writes "The next step in sculpture is motion."

• 1933 — Buys a farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut.

• 1938 — Builds the Roxbury studio.

• 1943 — Constellation; Quattro Pendulati.

• 1945 — 23 feuilles à l'écart.

• 1948 — Moths II.

• 1949 — Untitled.

• 1951 — Tower with Painting.

• 1953 — Eighteen Numbered Black; Double Gong.

• 1957 — Double Mushroom.

• 1962 — Fishy.

• 1963 — New workshop in Saché, France.

• 1969 — Big Fat Banana.

• November 11, 1976 — Dies in New York.