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My sister had quite a few dolls for which we made extraordinary jewelry from beads and very fine copper wire that we found in the street left over by men splicing electric cables.

Peggy once gave me a very nice pair of pliers at Christmas. I made her a little Christmas tree, completely decorated, out of a fallen branch. So she wept because my gift was homemade.

Calder attends Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses, where he experiences the four-horse chariot races.

The Calders move to a new house on 555 Linda Vista Avenue. Calder’s workshop consists of a tent with a wooden floor. Calder attends fourth grade at Garfield School.

The Calders return to Philadelphia. Calder attends Germantown Academy for two or three months while his parents search for a house close to New York City.

The Calders move to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Calder has a cellar for his workshop and attends Croton Public School.

The Calders move to Spuyten Duyvil, New York. The cellar becomes Calder’s workshop. Calder and Peggy attend Yonkers High School. Stirling rents a studio in New York City on 51 West Tenth Street.

The Calders move to San Francisco. Calder has a workshop in the cellar and attends Lowell High School.

Stirling and Nanette move to Berkeley to be near Stirling’s next commission, the Oakland Auditorium. Calder stays with the architect Walter Bliss and his wife to graduate from Lowell High School.

The Calders move back to New York City on Claremont Place.

Calder begins his studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, where he takes courses that include chemistry, mechanical drawing, shop practice, and surveying, among others.

Calder spends five weeks in the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp, New York, drilling with Company H, Fifth Training Regiment.

Calder joins the Student Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens, where he is made guide of the battalion.

Calder graduates from Stevens with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Calder holds jobs with an automotive engineer named Tracy in Rutherford, New Jersey, and with New York Edison Company as a draftsman.

Calder joins the staff of Lumber magazine in St. Louis, Missouri. He stays for nine months.

Calder works for Nicholas Hill, a hydraulics engineer, coloring maps for a water-supply project in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The efficiency engineers—Miller, Franklin, Basset, and Co.—hire Calder to do fieldwork for the Truscon Steel Company in Youngstown, Ohio.

Calder attends night classes in drawing with Clinton Balmer at the New York Public School on Forty-second Street.

Serving on the H.F. Alexander as a fireman in the boiler room, Calder sails from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and

Arriving in San Francisco, Calder takes a lumber schooner to Willapa Harbor, Washington, where he catches the bus for Aberdeen and meets his sister Peggy and her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder finds a job as a timekeeper for a logging camp in Independence, Washington.

Inspired by the logging camp landscape, Calder writes home and asks his mother for paints and brushes.

With the help of Stirling’s introduction, Calder seeks employment with an engineer in Canada. I went to Vancouver and called on him, and we had quite a talk about what career I should follow. He advised me to do what I really wanted to do—he himself often wished he had been an

Calder writes the Kellogg Company and suggests they modify their cereal packaging, putting the wax paper on the inside rather than on the outside of the boxes. The company adopts his suggestion and sends him a note of thanks along with a case of Corn Flakes.

Calder returns to New York and stays with his parents at 119 East Tenth Street.

Calder begins classes at the Art Students League of New York, studying life and pictorial composition with John Sloan and portrait painting with George Luks.

Calder enrolls again at the Art Students League, taking classes in portrait painting with George Luks, head and figure with Guy Pène du Bois, a drawing class with Boardman Robinson, and an etching class.

Calder begins his first job as an artist, illustrating sporting events and city scenes for the National Police Gazette.

Calder moves into his father’s studio, 11 East Fourteenth Street, while his parents are traveling in Europe.

Calder studies life drawing with Boardman Robinson at the Art Students League.

Calder studies life drawing with Boardman Robinson at the Art Students League.

Calder exhibits The Eclipse in the Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York. In the exhibition catalogue he lists his address as 119 East Tenth Street, where he periodically lives with his parents.

Calder takes a lithography class with Charles Locke at the Art Students League.

Artists Gallery, New York, includes an oil painting by Calder in a group exhibition. Murdock Pemberton, the art critic for the New Yorker, comments on the exhibition: A. Calder, too, we think is a good bet.

While renting a room in the apartment of Alexander Brook, assistant director of the Whitney Studio Club, Calder embellishes the Brook children’s “Humpty Dumpty Circus.” He adds movement and articulation to the set of store-bought toys, making an elephant that could “go round

Calder sketches a human dissection at Physicians and Surgeons Hospital. I drew for several hours and subsequently painted The Stiff . . . I went to a party that evening and kept asking if I did not smell of forma(h)ldehide—my hair, particularly. They said “no”—but

Calder exhibits The Stiff in the Tenth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York.

Calder exhibits an oil painting at the Whitney Studio Club Eleventh Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Members of the Club, Anderson Galleries, New York.

Calder moves into a tiny, one-room apartment at 249 West Fourteenth Street. There he makes his first wire sculpture, a sundial in the form of a “rooster on a vertical rod with radiating lines at the foot” to demarcate the hours.

Animal Sketching, a drawing manual written by Calder with reproductions of 141 of his brush drawings, is published by Bridgman Publishers in New York and The Bodley Head in London.

Calder exhibits The Horse Show in an exhibition on the subject of the horse at the Anderson Galleries, New York, curated by Karl Freund.

With the help of his former teacher, Clinton Balmer, Calder signs on to the crew of the Galileo, a British freighter sailing for Hull, England. He works as a laborer, painting the exterior of the ship.

Calder arrives in Hull, spends one night, and takes the noon train to London.

Calder arrives in London and stays four nights with Bob Trube, his fraternity brother from Stevens.

Calder leaves England, taking the 10 a.m. train from Victoria Station to New Haven and the ferry to Ville de Dieppe in France. He arrives in Paris and calls on Trube’s father at the Hôtel de Versailles, 60 boulevard de Montparnasse. [Trube] had written his dad to look out for

At the Café du Dôme, a meeting place for artists and their dealers, Calder recognizes American painter Arthur Frank, an acquaintance from New York, and meets British printmaker Stanley William Hayter, whose wife he knew from the Art Students League.

Calder enrolls in drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Calder establishes a studio at 22 rue Daguerre.

Calder is hired to leave France for a quick round-trip voyage on the SS Volendam Holland America Line; he sketches life on board the ship for the Student Third Cabin Association’s poster and advertising brochure.

Calder arrives in New York on the SS Volendam.

Calder arrives at Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, on the SS Volendam.

Calder travels by train to Paris from Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Calder meets Lloyd Sloane, an advertising executive, who introduces him to staff at Le Boulevardier, including Marc Réal, artistic advisor. Several of Calder’s drawings are published in Le Boulevardier over the next few months.

Calder meets a Serbian toy merchant who encourages him to make mechanical toys for mass production.

Through Hayter, Calder meets José de Creeft, a Spanish sculptor living on rue Broca. De Creeft suggests to Calder that he submit his toys to the “Salon des Humoristes.”

Calder performs Cirque Calder for Mrs. Frances C. L. Robbins, a patron of young artists. On her recommendation, English novelist Mary Butts comes to see it and in turn sends Jean Cocteau to a performance.

Calder exhibits toys in the “Salon des Humoristes” at Galerie de la Boétie, Paris.

Réal brings Guy Selz and the circus critic, Legrand-Chabrier, to see Calder perform Cirque Calder. Legrand-Chabrier admires Calder’s work and writes several articles on the Cirque. Oh, these are stylized silhouettes, but astonishing in their miniature resemblance,

Calder renews his French identity card.

Galleries of Jacques Seligmann and Company, Paris, exhibits animated toys by Calder.

The New York Herald, Paris, publishes an article about Calder and his decision to make toys: I began by futuristic painting in a small studio in the Greenwich Village section of New York. It was a lot different to engineering but I took to my newfound art immediately. But it seemed that

Calder returns to New York and stays with his parents at 9 East Eighth Street.

Calder travels to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to contract with Gould Manufacturing Company. He designs prototypes for a series of plywood animal Action Toys.

Calder returns to New York and rents a room at 46 Charles Street where he gives Cirque Calder performances.

Hawes establishes a couture house at West Fifty-sixth Street in New York. Calder occasionally designs neckpieces and other accessories for her clothing.

The French Consulate, New York, grants Calder a visa.

Calder arrives at Le Havre after a voyage from New York on the De Grasse. He returns to Paris, where he rents a small building behind 7 rue Cels to use as his studio. When I returned to Paris in Nov. 28 I was a “wire sculptor” as I put it, also “le roi du fil de fer.”

At the Café du Dôme, Paris, Calder sees his acquaintance, painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and meets “a small man in a bowler hat,” who he learns is painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Stirling’s.

Calder visits Miró at his Montmartre studio, a sort of metal tunnel, a kind of Quonset hut. Miró has no paintings in the studio, but he shows Calder a collage, a big sheet of heavy gray cardboard with a feather, a cork, and a picture postcard glued to it. There were probably a few

Calder exhibits Romulus and Remus and Spring at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, Paris. The public reaction is a mixture of confusion and delight. One critic remarks, At first, I believed that electricians had forgotten their electrical wire in this room, but

Galerie Billiet-Pierre Vorms, Paris, exhibits “Sculptures bois et fil de fer de Alexandre Calder.” Pascin writes the preface for the exhibition catalogue:
By some miracle, I became a member of a group of Aces of American Art, a Society of very successful painters and

In writing about his own history of wire sculpting, Calder notes a change in his approach to the medium: Before, the wire studies were subjective, portraits, caricatures, stylized representations of beasts and humans. But these recent things have been viewed from a more

In a review of Calder’s solo show at Galerie Billiet-Pierre Vorms, Paris, the phrase “drawing in space” is coined to describe Calder’s wire sculptures. Horses rear up, riders brace themselves, dancers throw to the sky legs more rigid than doorbell wires. It looks like a drawing in space. On

Sacha Stone, a German photographer, sees Calder perform Cirque Calder at the rue Cels studio. He suggests that Calder perform and exhibit in Berlin.

The German Consulate, Paris, stamps Calder’s passport.

Calder leaves Paris with Stone and takes a train to Berlin to make arrangements for an exhibition.

Calder returns to Paris to gather works to exhibit in Berlin.