Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start

Description

Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start retraces the fertile bond between Alexander Calder and the Museum of Modern Art, a relationship begun as early as 1930 and woven from decisive creative and institutional exchanges. The volume reveals how, alongside figures such as Alfred H. Barr Jr. and James Johnson Sweeney, the artist inscribed his work at the very heart of the museum's nascent history. His mobiles-fragile architectures set adrift in motion-and his emblematic interventions embody an aesthetic revolution in which matter itself seems to awaken. From avant-garde Paris to vast public spaces, Calder unfolds a poetics of void and balance, born of engineering yet transfigured by the imagination. The book also underscores his role as a patron, sealed in 1966 by a major donation that consecrated this profound symbiosis. Thus emerges a двойfold genesis: that of a pioneering artist of modern sculpture, and that of an institution learning, through contact with him, to conceive of itself.