Alexander Calder's name is synonymous with the word "mobile", and he is said to have introduced the element of time to sculpture, for the unpredictability of air currents means his kinetic works move gracefully and at random. But you may not know that he produced more than 1,800 pieces of jewellery in his lifetime.
A new book, Calder Jewelry, presents hundreds of examples of these handcrafted objects – many personalised for friends and family – demonstrating that the qualities distinguishing his airborne sculptures are very much present in more intimate pieces.
Talking to his grandson, Alexander "Sandy" Rower, director of the New York-based Calder Foundation, I learn that his forebear's impulse to create was bred in the bone. The artist's grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, was also a sculptor. He was born in Aberdeen, the son of a tombstone carver. After an apprenticeship with John Rhind while attending Edinburgh's Royal Academy, he moved to London where he worked on the Albert Memorial, and later, in the United States, made carvings for Philadelphia City Hall. Alexander Stirling Calder, his father, also contributed sculptures to public installations around Philadelphia, while his mother, Nanette Lederer, was a Paris-educated portraitist.
Thus, says Rower, "the studio environment was very much a part of his life. Bits of materials always intrigued him. Once, when workers were splicing cable along the road, he took the butt ends of the copper wire they'd left in a ditch and started making things, including stringing it with beads to make jewellery for his big sisters' dolls."
Years later, Calder sent his mother a present crafted while travelling in Corsica. "I meant to write you in a birthday letter two days (ago] but I made a necklace instead – having brought along pliers and wires, and found bits of things along the parapets of the citadel to put into it ... I have been making a lot more wire jewelry (sic] – and think I'll really do something with it, eventually."
Yet despite setting aside studio space in every home for their industrious, creative son, Calder's parents initially discouraged him from taking up art professionally, knowing first-hand how precarious the livelihood could be. Instead, he trained as a mechanical engineer. But a visit to another Aberdeen – in Washington State – convinced him that art was his real passion. Working part-time in a logging camp, he was so inspired by his surroundings that he sent home for artists' materials. Soon he headed to New York, then to Paris, pursuing his muse.
Along the way he fell in love with Louisa James, the grandniece of Henry and William James. "My grandfather was walking along the deck of the DeGrasse, coming back from Europe," says Rower. "He saw her from the back and was very impressed, so he decided he ought to meet her from the front, and ran all the way around the deck to say 'good day'. Amusingly, she was with her father. The real story is that her dad wasn't very happy with who Louisa had been meeting and hanging out with in Boston.
"Edward Holton James was a very exotic character, but very proper in many ways. He had spent time in jail as a political activist and played a Stradivarius violin whose neck he had cut down because he didn't like the length of it – imagine! But he was a James, and so he had money and was an intellectual."
Having taken Louisa to Europe to meet a suitable suitor, he was terribly discouraged on the return trip – until, that is, Calder bounded into view, prompting him to declare: "Look, here comes one now."
Shortly after meeting, Calder made his bride-to-be a bracelet spelling the word Medusa (a reference to her flowing locks), hammered out of a single piece of brass wire. And throughout their long marriage he made countless one-of-a-kind pieces, including her engagement and wedding rings. He also made a silver "OK" pin for Georgia O'Keefe, and many pieces for exotic art collector Peggy Guggenheim who, Rower deadpans, "wasn't afraid to wear giant earrings".
Nor was she the only woman to discover that Calder's jewellery wasn't always designed with comfort in mind. According to one report in the book, "Mary Rockefeller required a little elbow room at modern art exhibits when she put on her brass Calder necklace with heart and harp motifs that flared at her sides".
"He and Joan Miró were best friends," says Rower, "so there's a gold P brooch for his wife Pilar, and a little Dolores spelled in silver script for their daughter. There's a magnificent little collar he made for Bella Chagall (wife of Marc] that says, 'A Belshka Chagall'."
The jewellery was not only a way to "bestow gifts on his wife, relatives and friends, but central to how Calder made art in every way on a daily basis", writes Mark Rosenthal, adjunct curator of contemporary art at Norton Museum of Art, in an essay for this luscious tome. "Each day he hammered and chiselled small metal objects, then assembled these to create three-dimensional entities, whether for a mobile or a bracelet. His chief artistic concern, he explained, was 'a plastic quality ... sinuosity ... the contrast of lightness to mass ... of sombreness to colour ... movement'."
Maddeningly, for curators, much of Calder's jewellery was undated – they are forever combing archival notebooks and old photos, searching for clues. More maddeningly for those of us who covet the stuff, exquisite pieces that once sold for modest sums – 20 to 40 for a pair of earrings – are now priceless museum pieces. But until those lottery numbers pay out, there's always this fantasy-inspiring book.
• Calder Jewelry is published by Yale University Press, priced £35.
The full article contains 957 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
