Calder recalls in his autobiography how enamored he was of the three-story structure with its loft-like open spaces, which Jean had acquired along with some unspecified number of adjacent houses in the village. But it was another abandoned structure that particularly caught his eye. When he first entered François Premier (so named by the locals for its Renaissance details), it was coup de foudre—Calder’s relationship to his real estate was always love at first sight. He would later recall that it had a “fantastic cellarlike room with a dirt floor and wine press set in a cavity in the hillside rock.” No doubt it reminded him of the cellars of his family’s homes, which had been assigned to him as his own workshops when he was younger. Calder’s immediate reaction to this troglodytic paradise: “I will make mobiles of cobwebs and propel them with bats.”[3]
He bartered his artwork for the property. Jean already owed him money for some pieces he had purchased, so Calder just threw a few more on the pile and they called it all square. Since Jean hadn’t even understood that the house Calder wanted had come with the mill, it was an easy deal all around. Calder would make two small studios within a few steps of the house: an atelier des maquettes and the gouacherie. Calder continued to use both on a daily basis even after the new structure up the hill was completed. And Jean would eventually marry Calder’s daughter in a simple ceremony in Saché.
In reading Calder’s autobiography—which is in fact a series of recollections recorded by Jean—I was struck by his permanent state of enchantment with found and recovered objects. Sometimes his reaction was to take these objects and turn them into art, while preferring to call them something else. Sometimes it was to make useful stuff for his personal environments, like kitchen utensils or furniture. Sometimes that useful stuff rises to the level of what we could call architecture. After all, architecture, like art, exists less in a clearly bounded, sacral domain than on a continuum with, or as an insertion into or a riff on, the fabric of life itself. An important aspect of Calder’s modernity lies in his intuitive understanding of this, and also in his resistance to the critical taxonomies by which we pigeonhole things for our own mental safety and convenience. His friend Jean Prouvé once famously said that there is no difference between a chair and a building. Calder took that line of thinking one step further: There is no difference between a chair and a grill.
The big Saché studio had its origins in an emotion not normally associated with Calder: envy. He had visited the painter Pierre Tal-Coat’s studio in Normandy—an old priory with a newer “very large and high” barn: “The size of the studio gnawed at me the moment I saw it, and I became very jealous.”[4] He wrote Jean in Saché to get going on a big new studio ASAP. It would occupy a hillside Calder had encountered while accompanying Jean on a rabbit hunt. The site was prepared: The hill was hollowed out and the excavated fill bulldozed into a promontory. The project required the agglomeration of fourteen separate parcels of land. One in particular preoccupied Calder, as its inclusion would improve the feasible slope of the promontory: “Is possible to be plus en pente,” he asked Jean in his typical correspondent’s franglais.[5]
Lovely illustrated letters from Calder to Jean survive in the archives of the Calder Foundation. These, in Calder’s words, describe “what it would be nice to achieve.”[6] The intimacy of the two obviated the need for anything resembling construction drawings. Even so, the lo-fi manner in which Calder mused and Jean executed is hard to imagine happening today, in the highly regulated Europe of the twenty-first century, even in the village of Balzac. At one point Calder’s daughter Sandra, by then married to Jean, wrote to get clarification on the number of arches on the ground floor and submitted two different drawings with instructions for “Pop” to circle one. Another one from Calder: “I will think more about the dimensions while you are flitting about.” Presumably this means Jean’s haggling with the fourteen local landowners in a peasant opera, which must have resembled a scene from Marcel Pagnol’s Manon des Sources. Something in the way of “a bigger drawing” was eventually submitted to the local authorities, but by then the construction was well under way. Better to apologize than ask permission, as the saying goes.
The building took eighteen months to complete, and its finished form deviates in only minor ways from Calder’s expressed wishes. At some point the separation between the north-lit painting area and the studio, which Calder had originally envisioned as some kind of wall with large doors but “not a cloison,” was dropped. I imagine he decided that the demarcation of the two spaces by what he called the “up” of the windows (meaning the extra height of the glass in the painting area) was enough. Overall, Calder’s preoccupations as architect of what he referred to as “my new shop” were straightforward and consistent with what interested him in his previous artmaking spaces: site, light, and ventilation. He created a well-tempered environment, anchored in the local vernacular but tweaked à la Calder. As his work became more monumental, his space requirements increased. Indeed, his most imposing works were fabricated off-site, in a foundry in Tours. Saché was engineered as a space not so much for making art as for considering it. It was never itself a monument, even if aspects of it seem monumental in scale. Like Calder’s art, it is the size it wants to be.
If Calder had been an architect, he might have been part of what Bruno Reichlin has called “poetic functionalism.” This would put him with his friends Jean Prouvé, Oscar Nitzchke, and Paul Nelson. (They are sometimes referred to as the School of Paris as a way of distinguishing them from Le Corbusier, who presided over the other principal line of thinking in twentieth-century French architecture.) Like theirs, Calder’s buildings have no a priori “style” as Corbusier’s aestheticized machines for living do. Rather, they invent programmatic solutions to architecture which, if they are the most effective, are also instrinsically attractive. Like Prouvé, who hated to be told his work was beau (beautiful) and much preferred to pronounce it bien (good), Calder dealt imaginatively with the tasks and materials at hand. With his grilled steak à la chaise in mind, perhaps we should consider him a “ludic functionalist” with a flair for recycling. The cobblestones of the studio promontory overlooking the Indre valley were obtained by Calder from the city authorities of Tours who, he had heard, recently decided to blacktop its streets. He laid them out in a pattern that appears to have been there forever, predating the building itself. The only giveaway is the signature “AC” in the stonework.
In constructing Saché, Calder worked primarily within local architectural norms, and his signature moves do not stick out. The ossature of the roof is lighter and freer than the traditional construction usually seen in the region, but the form and volume of the roof are local. Calder provided for the building’s structural needs with lumber rather than hewn beams, but he effectively replicated the latter by twinning planks and then reinforcing them, using his intuitive engineer’s knowledge—plus the experience he had gained putting ribs and gussets on his monumental sculptures. The ground floor has simple Romanesque arches. Perhaps they represent Calder’s traveler’s idea of old France, a personal preference rather than a reference. Louis Kahn would have approved. They also evoke the nineteenth-century American industrial buildings that young Calder, like Kahn, would have seen in Philadephia, as much as they do the prevailing architectural style of the turn of the first millenium.
Saché is a long way from Roxbury. The evolution of Calder’s art over a quarter century can be understood in the respective architectures and constructive histories of the two studios. Roxbury was acquired, in the grand American tradition, with 100 percent leverage. The down payment was provided by an old friend from college. On top of that, Calder gleefully borrowed against his whole life insurance policy and took care of the balance by taking out a mortgage. It was the first place Calder owned. In addition to building on the preexisting foundation of the ruined barn, he conserved its stone silo. The barn’s understated and lovely functionality recalls Robert Motherwell’s studio in Amagansett—designed by another poetic functionalist, Pierre Chareau—which consisted of a World War II surplus Quonset hut and a greenhouse. For Calder, the materials at hand were a barn ruin, cinder blocks, and prefabricated greenhouse windows. Here he first rigged up his famous system of screw eyes in the rafters (“My sky is studded with … screw eyes”[7]) so he could hoist and suspend mobiles using a purpose-built pole with a hooking apparatus rigged on its end.
Roxbury was built at the tail end of the Depression and the eve of war. Whatever magpie habits Calder had already developed as an artist were reinforced by the material penury that prevailed. He recalls cutting up his aluminum boat (itself a homemade object for puttering around the pond) around 1942 to use the scrap metal in artworks (and around the house). Later in life, when his cash flow improved, he bought a contiguous parcel of land in Roxbury rather than upgrading or expanding the existing studio. He needed a change of venue in order to revise his work space.
Calder logged much more seat time in Roxbury than in any other studio in his lifetime. It shows. Today the studio looks as if its occupant of nearly four decades went out for a pack of cigarettes sometime in the 1970s and never came back. Unopened paint tubes whose manufacture was discontinued fifty years ago sit in their original mailers from Paris. The only overt evidence of subsequent human intervention is a table with orphaned bits and pieces of Calder works that the Calder Foundation has been trying to identify over the years—forensics at a crime scene. Kenneth Frampton once described Chareau’s elaborate interiors as technosurrealist. With a nod to Frampton, I would call Calder a gizmo-surrealist. For example, the wooden worktable with the old radiator hanging off it to stabilize its surface is coming at the question “What is art?” from a different direction than Rauschenberg. While Rauschenberg’s Combines had objects culled from junk piles that appeared to be falling into the room from the art on the wall, Calder used those same sorts of objects to make functional furniture while taking the same spatial liberties.
The bulk of the Roxbury studio space today consists of careful piles and accretions of various materials and found objects: glass, wire, ebony, aluminum. At first one is enchanted by its seeming nonchalance, but its clarity of purpose reveals itself soon enough: Every last bit of this stuff was on its way to becoming a Calder! It reminds me more of a rural tinkerer’s shop—someplace you take your Bugatti carburetor to be rejetted—than an artist’s studio. As the value of Calder’s art continues to skyrocket, and the conversations about art are overwhelmed by talk of money, it is useful to spend even a few minutes in this modest little “shop.” Few ateliers of departed artists are in such a state of preservation, and among those none evince such powerful connections between place, existence, and art.
The distinction between found and created spaces is a useful one here. Roxbury is primarily a found space, within which Calder created his own spaces of habitation and production. The house was already there, and until 1938 part of it served as his studio. When he built the studio, he used what was there (the foundation and silo) or readymade (cinder blocks and windows). The program was likewise simple: an easy walk to the house, light for making, a fireplace for warmth.
Saché, on the other hand, is created. The landscape is changed. Earth is moved. A promontory is made from part of a hill. Trees are planted. The stonemasonry is a big step up from cinder blocks, and the roof structure is seriously custom. Whereas Roxbury nestles comfortably in an existing landscape, the Saché studio dominates the area. After the studio there was completed, Calder would build a house from scratch. He strikes me as someone who liked to be able to pop home for lunch or even just a cup of tea. There are no bathrooms or kitchens in his studios.
By the time Calder built Saché, his financial situation had improved considerably. He was almost cavalier about the budget in correspondence with Jean, telling him to get some money from his Paris dealer, or else he could send a check from a Credit Suisse account. Not that he was being extravagant. Neither the studio nor the house are by any means bourgeois. But I imagine it was complicated enough patching together the needed parcels without asking for owner financing or working out a mortgage with some bank in Tours. At this stage in his life, Calder could pay cash on the barrelhead and get on with more important things.
By this time, Calder was focused primarily on monumental works executed by a foundry in Tours. There is a “north light” space for painting, but it was not often used. So the studio became a place to display and contemplate the works as they emerged from the foundry. The conception of the building and the site reflects this. One can spend hours in the studio itself studying the works from various angles and directions as the light evolves throughout the day. Works could also be sited on the cobblestone promontory below the studio and looked at from above, with the valley as backdrop, or walked around as if in an urban context, with the studio itself behind. Another site, behind and above the studio, in a clearing before the woods, provided a natural backdrop for large works. I imagine that from the panoptic vantage point of the studio Calder could study the reactions visitors had to exterior works as they approached.
Saché is today called Atelier Calder and has hosted artists-in-residence for the past twenty-five years. During my visit, the studio was occupied by maquettes made by Monika Sosnowska, with whom I briefly crossed paths at the house. Like the artists who have preceded her, she has the privilege of living in Calder’s personal space, among his gizmos, and of making art in his studio. François Premier and the other family residences, including the original Moulin Vert with which Jean started the whole stampede, have long since passed into other hands. This adaptive reuse of the Saché studio is sufficient, however, to allow the spirit of Calder to keep watch on its habitat.
