Alexander
Calder: The Paris years at the Center Pompidou. Until July 20.
The Pompidou Center in
Paris presents a Calder exhibition, the years between 1926 and 1933,
the father of abstraction born in the United States. For the first
time, Europe may find Circus, probably the most significant Calder,
created in the capital between 1926 and 1931. Since its acquisition by
the Whitney Museum in New York in 1983, this "monument" of some two
hundred figures made of recyclable materials lively and rudimentary
mechanisms controlled by the artist, had never traveled for
conservation reasons . It is therefore a unique opportunity to discover
the culmination of the exhibition at the Pompidou Center on Calder's
years in Paris, bringing together nearly three hundred sculptures,
toys, drawings, photographs and films. The period chosen, seven
fruitful years, from 1926 to 1933, which enabled Calder to form a
personal vocabulary and find its way to abstraction, is deliberately
short. Between the wars, time seems suspended like the son of iron
twisted by the hand of the great artist to float in the air and reflect
their shadows on the white walls of the six rooms. The name is
associated with the Calder mobile, named by Duchamp, but also in
"stable" that adorn the largest urban plazas, Paris in Sydney,
from Toronto to Berlin. Combining monumentality and lightness,
playfulness and abstraction, these totems giants have become emblems of
modern art. But behind these icons is the most hidden face Calder,
where he designed a sculpture of wire, vacuum, linear, mobile, and
above all full of poetry. As part of the exhibition, the gallery of
children in ground floor, offers a workshop around Calder open to young
people. This space awareness based on the theme of the circus where
trailers, games real positions, can experience and discuss various
problems of the plastic language of the artist: balance, movement,
line, l space, using simple materials and industrial. We also
discovered that Calder through documents and films and plays it with
his poetic universe by manipulating colored plants. Animal figures,
characters from daily life inspired by photographs of the press, the
stars of the entertainment and sports (tennis champion Helen Wills,
1927), celebrities (John D. Rockefeller, 1927), all these small
figurative sculptures full of humor is a true journal of popular life.
One of the rooms meet the range of 1926-1928 on the American dancer
Josephine Baker, star of the Negro Magazine, which is divinely soft
silhouette highlighted by breast size and a spiral. After 1930, marked
by the geometric abstraction of Mondrian, Calder tends towards kinetic
sculpture with metal lines, punctuated by pure colors are rhythmic
directions. Mobiles hung in recent years cosmic embody the aspiration
of a radical work, sober and very contemporary.
