Skip to main content

Alexander Calder’s Archive Goes Online: Explore 1400 Works of Art by the Modernist Sculptor

Like all great artists, Alexander Calder left his medium quite unlike he found it. Nearly 45 years after his death, Calder’s expansion of the realm of sculpture in new directions of form, color, and engineering remains a subject of voluminous discussion, including critic Jed Perl’s Calder: The Conquest of Time and Calder: The Conquest of Space, a two-part biography published in full last year. More recently, a wealth of material has come available that enables us to conduct Calderian investigations of our own: the Calder Foundation’s online research archive, which as Hyperallergic’s Valentina Di Liscia reports includes “over 1,300 Calder works across different media.”

But wait, there’s more: the archive also offers “1,000 photographs and archival documents,” “48 historic and recent texts by the artist, his contemporaries, and present-day scholars,” and “over 40 microsites exploring Calder’s exhibition history.” (This in addition to the Calder Foundation’s Vimeo channel, where you’ll find the films seen here.)

Pace Gallery, which represents Calder, highlights the “new interactive map feature called ‘Calder Around the World,’ which allows viewers to find public installations of his monumental sculpture in 20 states domestically and 21 countries internationally, including museums with important Calder holdings and permanent and temporary exhibitions dedicated to the artist.”

As that map reveals, much of Calder’s work currently resides in his homeland of the United States of America, primarily in the northeast where he spent most of his life, but also the California in which he did some growing up — not to mention the Paris where he lived for a time and met fellow artists like Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, information about whom also appears in the online archive. You may locate a Calder near you, even if you live in another region of the world, entirely: living in Seoul as I do, I now see I’ll have to pay a visit to 1963’s Le Cèpe and 1971’s Grand Crinkly. Though this ever-more-extensive Calder Archive can help us understand this most optimistic of all Modernists, there’s nothing quite like being in the presence of one of his sculptures.

via Hyperallergic

Related Content:

Discover Alexander Calder’s Circus, One of the Beloved Works at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Watch Alexander Calder Perform His Circus, a Toy Theatre Piece Filled With Amazing Kinetic Wire Sculptures

Watch Dreams that Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter

178 Beautifully-Illustrated Letters from Artists: Kahlo, Calder, Man Ray & More

The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Alexander Calder’s Archive Goes Online: Explore 1400 Works of Art by the Modernist Sculptor is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Ov8Aty
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more