Cirque Calder

Currently housed in a vitrine at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Cirque Calder can no longer communicate what it once did in those fabled performances of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Paris. The idiosyncratic tools needed to activate the Cirque in present time are now, curiously, themselves understood to be the art. Just as with music or dance, activation before an audience is the only way to truly experience the work, or for it to exist, for that matter. It blooms into creation—and then withers until its next performance. The question of ephemerality underscores Cirque Calder; with the performer gone, the art exists only anecdotally, through archival materials (articles, photographs, and letters) and through films made decades after the premiere performances.

We have a view now of Cirque Calder as complete from conception, yet it was developed and expanded upon continuously over a period of five years. As it evolved, Calder also devised another completely new art form: wire sculpture, or a line drawn in space with wire. My grandfather eventually harnessed articulation, motion, and time sequence, using wire as his essential medium. He produced, contemporaneously, paintings, wood sculptures, drawings, toys, jewelry, and textiles, all attesting to the sheer range of his explorations. He did not prioritize between vocabularies during these fertile years.

As Calder shifted toward abstraction in 1929, the presentation of action and gesture sculpted in wire developed into the most minimal of lines, suggesting energetic interplay. In works such as Circus Scene, Calder pushed beyond figuration by expressing the dynamic forces of his figures rather than specific details of the characters. Here, an acrobat, caught in midtranscendence in a hand-to-hand act, quivering in the tension of the moment, is represented merely by two curved wires. A near-palpable vector of energy shoots from his brother’s foot—an arced trajectory propelled through space. The use of thick and thin gauges of wire emphasizes my grandfather’s reliance on his materials as indications of gesture rather than as a means of literal description. Additionally, the base of Circus Scene is painted with forms, precipitating my grandfather’s devotion to an abstract vocabulary, which began in October 1930 after his now-famous visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio. Calder’s revelation in Mondrian’s studio, where the environment-as-installation “shocked” him fully into abstraction, was an extension of his focus years earlier on the spatial relationships of the circus tent, with its complex rigging systems in place, ready to be called into action.

In 1931, Calder premiered a group of his earliest abstract wire objects at Galerie Percier, Paris, in a show titled Alexandre Calder: Volumes—Vecteurs—Densités/Dessins—Portraits. The works in the show, described by the artist as Sphériques, Arcs, Densités, and Mouvements Arrêtés, conjured the radiating immensity of a line held in suspended animation, much like a trapezist at the apex of a trajectory. In Croisière, Calder once again used thick and thin wires to describe the dynamic forces at work. Five years later, he brought this cross-fertilization of the circus world and abstraction to a theatrical climax in Tightrope, in which four wire forms are delicately perched atop a steel line. At either end is an exotic ebony post, keeping the dramatically long, horizontal line in tension.

“Why not plastic forms in motion? Not a simple translatory or rotary motion but several motions of different types, speeds and amplitudes composing to make a resultant whole. Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”[5] The activations of the Cirque and the vibratory gestures defining the figurative wire sculptures themselves became the subjects within Calder’s abstract work and the innovations that would follow. Wire was the attenuated antenna that divined unseen and immeasurable forces. Through it, the search for universal truths about matter and the immaterial became Calder’s lifelong obsession.

1. [1] Alexander Calder, quoted in Cleve Gray, “Calder’s Circus,” Art in America 52, no. 5 (October 1964), p. 23.
2. [2] Alexander Calder, quoted in Legrand-Chabrier, “Un petit cirque à domicile,” Candide, no. 171, June 23, 1927, p. 7.
3. [3] “Legrand-Chabrier” was the pen name of the cultural journalist André Legrand. He began using it in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he and Marcel Chabrier were collaborators.
4. [4] James Johnson Sweeney, “Introduction,” Alexander Calder, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1943, p. 16.
5. [5] Alexander Calder, Modern Painting and Sculpture, exh. cat., Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.,1933, pp. 2–3.