The first time I saw a mobile by Alexander Calder was in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.Texas. I was a undergraduate in the art department at University of Houston and came often to study pieces for projects. After seeing many of the paintings, I wondered into a small white room with a large Calder mobile in it. The colorful wire mobile moved slowly around in a way that produced a hypnotic effect. I was mesmerized. Here was a piece of art that not only took up three dimensional space, but also time. How delightful! The more I studied it the more I realized how carefully the pieces in the mobile were designed. First the positive and negative space they created needed to be interesting. The pieces needed to be positioned so that the others could move around it without friction. They also needed to be the right weight to keep the entire mobile balanced. Finally, the color chosen for the pieces on the mobile had to make sense in order to draw the viewers focus to the right spot. So many factors to consider and Alexander Calder was successful at all of them.
The mobile I first saw intrigued me because it was playful. I wondered what other work Calder did and set out to research him. I found a wealth of information. He was, in fact, the inventor of the mobile. It came about when he lived in Paris in the early 1900’s. He becomes friends with artists such as Fernand Leger and Jean Arp. If you look at Arp’s paintings you will recognize the same type of free form shapes as Calder used in his mobile. Calder was also friends with Marcel Duchamp. Was Duchamp’s interest in capturing monition in his paintings an inspiration for Calder to make sculpture that moved? Perhaps. While in Paris Calder created a circus out of wire. The pieces of the circus all had movement. Calder performed a show with his wire circus for his friends in Paris. This was a wonderful kinetic collection where the cannon shot out a clown and the trapeze artists actually swung across and landed in the safety net. The movement in the collection delighted the crowd.
Calder kept working with moving sculpture pieces his entire life. He started with small mobiles the size of your hand, then to museum mobiles that filled a room and finally to outside installations of huge dimension. These outdoor sculptures did not always move but gave the feeling that they could at any moment such as his fifty three foot “Flamingo” structure in Chicago . Movement in art was the core of Alexander Calder's work. He was the first to introduce the mobile. He showed us how art was a could be created in multi-dimensional space.