Sandy, how did the increase in scale start?
Well, in 1954 I’d done the Water Ballet for Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technological Center in Detroit. The concept there was a large one, I’d say. Jets of water. Lines of water can be monumental too. I took one hundred feet and had one jet at each end rising and falling at different speeds, and then that comes to a halt. There were seven smaller jets that were almost vertical; I called them the seven sisters because they were slender jets, and some rotated one way and some the other way and they made a rotating pattern against the sky. Then there is a bathtubful of water shot into the air to make a big boom when it hits. Then a bar rotating makes a fishtail—that’s rather fine. They wanted the ballet, but now they are afraid to run it because the stockholders have complained that it costs money to run—probably waters their stock down—so it’s only turned on for VIPs. I’m afraid I probably won’t ever see it.
I did see it once when it was turned on, and it has tremendous fragile size to it, and a magnificence such as the Lincoln Center waterworks lack.
They probably haven’t got the pressure there.
When did the large metal constructions begin?
It was when Eliot Noyes asked me to remake an object I’d made earlier to show at Pierre Matisse—The Black Beast—only make it of thicker metal. Before this I’d done Kennedy, which was heavy enough to flatten an ox if it fell. I’ll tell you about that later—and I’d already done the one in 1958 for UNESCO in Paris and that was a pretty good size, but now I had the impulse and the means (two thousand dollars) to make things at a larger scale of one-quarter-inch iron plate. So, I decided to have a show of fairly large stabiles at Perls in the winter of 1958. We sold three of these, and in the winter of 1959 I sent the remainder of the Perls show to Paris with a number of other objects, about ten large stabiles I’d constructed for a show at Maeght’s. Mrs. Maeght said, “You must have really had to scratch your brains to produce these things.” But the night before the show opened they phoned me that they’d bought the whole show. This was the first time this had ever happened to me. So now I wanted to repeat my “triumph,” and this time I had in mind something which could stand in that central inner court of the Louvre—you know the one.
The one that’s closed on four sides?
Yes, but the French Government wasn’t interested. They said they couldn’t do it because it would disturb the flat beds of flowers.
They will be interested, have no fear. Give them time. The bureaucrats always lope up late.
It’s getting late. Well anyway, Maeght was going to do over his gallery, lower the ceiling in order to put in a fancy new lighting system. I said, “Shit, that won’t do at all.” In order to show the big objects I had to have the full height of the gallery, and in order to make them I needed a show like those in Waterbury. Jean Davidson—he’s my son-in-law—and I had discovered ironworks in Tours, the biggest one in France, so we went to ask if they’d make some big stabiles. A nice guy in a tweed jacket said no but kindly gave us the name of Biémont. They are just on the edge of Tours. I brought them eight models in the early fall of ’62 and left for America. When I got back to France they had them all done. All eight pieces. They were standing there! The biggest one was six and a half meters high. They pleased me. I could begin to see the possibilities.
Tell me about the Biémont ironworks. How many men are employed there?
Between sixty and eighty work in the plant, but only three or four work on one piece.
Have certain men become specialists and therefore improved in doing your things?
Yes, but now they are all becoming “art critics.”
But I should think it would be handy to be able now to just produce the model and then know that they can enlarge it without loss of power.
Yes, it’s almost ideal now. But I always like to have a finger in the pie.
While we’re on it, talk about the enlarging process.
I used to make a small model, then cut out full-sized parts in paper. Then the ironworks in Waterbury would translate these paper templates into metal pieces. Now the Biémont people are so trained that they make the templates themselves. Even Waterbury can do this now. The guy in Tours has a real mechanical department. They do real calculating. They can tell beforehand where to place the ring to hold it up, and they can tell which hole to hoist it up by so all the holes will line up with the holes in the plates which are already up.
What about the treatment of edges—because I should think so much force and beauty could be lost there. How much do you have to do with the final contours?
In France, they are very good—very careful. I look at the pieces every once in awhile. Sometimes I throw my hands up and say “Shit!” Then they grind down the mistakes. Sometimes the final line is a little different. Maybe it lends a little variant.
I’m always amazed how your studies stand enlargement with no loss of vitality. In fact, the carefully conceived ribbing often increases the essential force. Tell me about the evolution of the bracing.
I try something new each time. With the model at three meters you can wobble it and see where it gives, where the vibrations occur, and then put your reinforcement there. If a plate seems flimsy, I put a rib on it, and if the relation between the two plates is not rigid, I put a gusset between them—that’s the triangular piece—and butt it to both surfaces. How to construct them changes with each piece; you invent the bracing as you go, depending on the form of each object.
This must account for the fact that the ribbing with its shadows has by now acquired an esthetic of its own which is there to be enjoyed along with the strength of the engineering.
I crossed the Atlantic once on the “Bremen.” The partitions were all going “Baaroop, baaroo, baaroop, baaroo.” That’s what you have to avoid.
Incidentally, Sandy, think of trying to increase a splendid Maillol figure to forty or fifty feet—the lymph would be going out of it foot by foot.
The lymph goes out of the nymph!
But your six-inch concept is so solidly related that it can go up like a Corbusier building, simply gaining magnificence as it increases in scale and massiveness.
One key to this great sculptor is the fact that both of his parents were artists—as was his grandfather—and good ones too, and then he, the obstreperous bounce-out, turned into an engineer, and then, as he says, bounced back to become artist and engineer combined. It is this fortunate union, this rare combination, which is producing the latest beauty and gigantic vitality in Calder’s work. As one thinks of it now, the word which comes to mind most often is magnificent. Calder will probably finally get to the stars, single-handed, propelled there no doubt by some circus rig of his own, flinging him end over end into space—his natural possessed element.
