Treasure hunt
at the Art Museum

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

The name Calder represents many things to many people.
To art historians, it perhaps stands most for Alexander Calder, the third-generation Philadelphia artist who in the early 20th century developed hanging kinetic sculptures that contemporary Frenchman Marcel Duchamp dubbed "mobiles."
Nowhere more so, perhaps, than In Philadelphia are the achievements of Calder’s father, Alexander Sterling Calder, and grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, held in equal esteem.
The eldest Calder, a native of Scotland, spent the prime of his career creating the 250 sculptures that adorn Philadelphia’s City Hall, inside and out, including the trademark 37-foot bronze statue of William Penn atop its tower.
As a youth, Alexander Calder assisted his father on the City Hall project and, like his dad, stamped his own vision on Philadelphia in the form of many prominent public sculptures.
But a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focuses on none of these widely recognized Calder credits. Rather, it examines the youngest Calder’s prolific and very personal jewelry-making.
Using "found" materials and limited only by his own vast imagination, Calder fashioned more than 1,800 necklaces, bracelets, belts, pins, rings, earrings and tiaras in his lifetime, often as gifts for family and friends.
Whereas Calder, who died in 1976 at age 78, was best known for his large-scale abstract sculpture, Calder Jewelry shows what organizers call "a more intimate dimension of his monumental art."
Philadelphia is the first stop for the exhibition, which features about 100 pieces. It will remain on display through Nov. 2 in the museum’s Perelman Building before traveling to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from Dec. 8 to March 1, then on to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
The materials used by the artist were far from precious. Mostly, the creations were cut, hammered, bent and shaped from sheet metal, wire, string, and even shards of glass and ceramic. But the sum proved greater than the value of the parts.
"He was using what was at hand," said Elisabeth Agro, the museum’s associate curator of modern and contemporary crafts and decorative arts. "And he was using what was in his mind."
Calder, whose mother was a professional portrait painter, displayed his creative potential at a young age when he used scraps of wire that he found in the street to create embellishments for the costumes worn by his older sister’s dolls.
Soon, he began crafting small sheet-metal animal sculptures as gifts for his parents. Animals remained frequent subjects for him into the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, when most of the examples in the exhibition were produced. The assembled fauna includes fish, birds, butterflies, rabbits and at least one pig.
Many of the more elaborate pieces evoke his more celebrated mobiles, comprised of numerous free-moving pieces that rely on gravity and capitalize on their dynamic environment to achieve their full effect.
In the case of mobiles, air currents and mechanical propulsion often create the kinetic energy. With pieces of jewelry, such as his draping necklaces and pendant pins, the wearer provides the motion.
"When a mobile by Alexander Calder is seen packed in a crate, it is a flat, lifeless object," wrote curator Mark Rosenthal in the exhibition’s catalog. "Picked up by its highest element, all of the components take their assigned positions and the mobile will become animated, three-dimensional, and imbued with motion.
"A necklace by Calder lives in the same way — inside and outside a crate. The only real difference between the two is that the structure of the mobile, with its rigid metal spokes, creates the breadth of the work of art, whereas the necklace usually depends on the body of the wearer to expand from a static state to fullness."
Though some of the larger examples in the exhibition may seem impractical to wear, many are surprisingly compact and are ideal casual or semi-formal accessories. Much of their appeal is in their creative simplicity.
"People can relate to these pieces," Agro said. "This is sculpture you can understand. It’s basic wire. It’s not beyond our person."
Many of the pieces in the exhibition were borrowed from the Calder Foundation of New York, an organization founded after the artist’s death by his family in an effort to collect, catalog and archive his work. Though Calder sold much of his jewelry during his career, producing the objects was more a playful and personal endeavor than a professional one for the artist.
"He was serious about what he was doing, but he was always having fun," Agro said. "He was always at play when he was thinking about his work." ••
Visit www.philamuseum.org or call 215-763-8100 for information.
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com