Calder. Rêver en équilibre

This exhibition spans half a century of work, from the late 1920s and the first performances of the Cirque Calder that captivated Parisian avant‑gardes, to his large‑scale sculptures that redefined the idea of public art in the 1960s and 1970s. At the Fondation, floating within the architecture of spaces designed by Frank Gehry, his mobiles transform the exhibition into a choreography.

The exhibition, devoted to Alexander Calder, was conceived in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the principal lender. It also benefits from loans from international institutions and private collectors, bringing together nearly 300 works: mobiles and stabiles — borrowing Calder’s terminology to designate kinetic and static abstractions — as well as wire‑made portraits, carved wooden figures, paintings, drawings and jewelry conceived as genuine sculptures. Throughout a chronological route occupying more than 3,000 m², Calder’s fundamental artistic concerns are articulated: above all movement, but also light, reflection, humble materials, sound, the ephemeral, gravity, performance, and positive and negative space.

As this exhibition is an anniversary celebration, it broadens its scope with contributions from the artist’s contemporaries. Works by his friends Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion and Piet Mondrian, as well as by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, help to situate Calder’s radical inventiveness within the chorus of the avant‑gardes. Thirty‑five photographs by twentieth‑century photographers (Henri Cartier‑Bresson, André Kertész, Gordon Parks, Man Ray, Irving Penn and Agnès Varda, among others) show an artist walking a tightrope between art and life. “Calder. Dreaming in Balance” also presents focused displays dedicated to key groups of Calder’s work, notably his Constellations series and his jewelry.

Continuing the monographic exhibitions devoted to major figures of twentieth‑ and twenty‑first‑century art — such as Jean‑Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Perriand, Mark Rothko, David Hockney and Gerhard Richter — the Fondation Louis Vuitton dedicates all of its spaces to Calder’s work and, for the first time, the adjacent lawn. In doing so, the exhibition also initiates a dialogue between Calder’s volumes, planes and movements and the architecture of Frank Gehry.

At around the age of 25, Alexander Calder reconnected with his family heritage (son of a painter and a sculptor, grandson of a sculptor) by first turning to painting and drawing. After studying at the Art Students League in New York, he settled in Paris in 1926. In the Montparnasse neighborhood he quickly integrated into what was then a major artistic hub. There he presented unique forms, figurative and pared‑down wire sculptures that attracted critical attention, and a miniature circus. Thanks to a loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, a first in fifteen years, the Cirque Calder returns to Paris, the city where it was created. At the center of this new‑kind spectacle, Calder manipulated miniature acrobats, clowns and riders before an ever‑growing audience. Fernand Léger, Jean Hélion, Le Corbusier, Jean Arp and Joan Miró were among his spectators, as was Piet Mondrian.

Calder’s 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio, where he was deeply struck by the spatial and chromatic environment, marked the abstract turn in his work, first in painting and then in sculpture. Marcel Duchamp proposed the name “Mobiles” for the abstract, kinetic compositions Calder presented in 1932 at the Galerie Vignon in Paris. Initially driven mechanically and later stirred by the slightest breath of air, these mobiles then drew “their life from the vague life of the atmosphere,” as Jean‑Paul Sartre wrote in 1946. As for the “stabiles,” Arp proposed that term in response to Duchamp’s terminology to designate Calder’s static objects in the early 1930s.

Although Calder returned to the United States in 1933, he maintained ties with Europe, marked by his participation in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic in 1937 alongside Miró and Picasso. He returned to France after the war and established a studio in the hamlet of Saché, in the Loire Valley, in 1953. With a foot in each country he continued to develop his work, renewing the very idea of sculpture until his death in 1976. Through movement, of course, but also through the invention of a vocabulary he deployed at every scale — from delicate metal assemblages set in motion by the slightest breath to monumental constructions — he created non‑objective sculptures that coexist with nature. As curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer note, “Calder’s innovative approach expanded the dimensions of sculpture to include time as a fourth essential dimension.”

Curators

Suzanne Pagé, artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, general curator
Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, guest curators
Assisted by Valentin Neuroth and Claire Deuticke
Olivier Michelon, associate curator, assisted by Léna Lévy