The Calder Problem: Mobiles, Modern Taste, and Mass Culture

alexaylorThe Calder Problem: Mobiles, ModernTaste, and Mass Culture

Alex J. Taylor

Oxford Art Journal Advance Access published February 17, 2014 at U

niversity of New

castle on February 19, 2014http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/

Dow

nloaded from

http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/


at University of N

ewcastle on February 19, 2014

http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from



The Calder Problem: Mobiles, Modern Taste, and MassCulture

Alex J. Taylor

In addition to beauty and utilityThe genuine mobile has mobility.You know it’s art when assorted metalsCaress your brow like falling petals.

Ogden Nash

When Ogden Nash’s four-line poem ‘Baby, It’s Calder Inside’ was published in1952, his title was more than just a witty spoof on Frank Loesser’s popularChristmas duet.1 Written amidst a veritable explosion of mobiles acrossAmerica, it was very likely that a Calder was inside – or, at least, somethingthat looked just like it. Within the year, the vogue for mobiles had become afully fledged fad – ‘mobile madness’ as one magazine headline exclaimed.2 Theomission of this craze in accounts of the career of sculptor Alexander Calderignores the lasting problems it has posed for his reputation, and compounds thefrequent avoidance of the artist’s substantial relationship with the commercialand decorative arts.‘Calder’s work is bound to stay popular’, wrote Fernand Leger, at the outset of

the fad, writing with no apparent irony that he thought it was ‘a sign of creativeauthenticity to inspire a minor decorative art’.3 Leger’s optimism wasgenerous, but off the mark: the mobile fad eventually faded, and in its wake, itwas precisely Calder’s authenticity that was depreciated. As Joy Sperling hasdescribed more generally, ‘Calder’s reputation has always been tarnished by hisimmense popularity’.4 The suspicious tone of reviews in Artforum is a case inpoint. ‘Calder is one of those figures whose absorption into popular taste is soabsolute, whose work feels so generically moderne, that it is difficult to see hisart at all’, wrote David Rimenelli in 1998.5 A more recent retrospectiveprompted similar comments from Carroll Dunham: ‘He is arguably one of themost beloved and readily identifiable artists of his time, but it can be tough totake him completely seriously’. ‘Even if he’s given a free pass for paintingBraniff airplanes’, he concluded, ‘his work still has a tendency to slip into thereference frame of decoration’.6 And while Calder exhibitions and their lavishcatalogues abound, he routinely remains absent from recent critical histories ofsculpture, or, as in one influential study, is summarily written off as the makerof ‘designer mobiles’ with little consequence to the history of sculpture.7

Roy Lichtenstein has made roughly the same points in visual terms. Followinghis explorations of Leger-style moderne and magazine-layout Mondrian, severalLichtenstein works have used Calder-style mobiles as a superficial sign formodern taste. The reduction of the Calder look to designer wall decor ispushed further in his painted scenes of tastefully modern interiors, where theform is often reduced to a framed painting of a mobile hung on the wall. InLandscape Mobile (1990) (Fig. 1), Lichtenstein’s penchant for motionless mobilesis maintained in a freestanding table sculpture made from Sevres porcelain, inwhich Calder’s neo-plasticist biomorphs are replaced with cartoonish landscape

1. Ogden Nash, The Private Dining Room and OtherNew Verses (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1952),p. 103.

2. Gertrude C. McConnell, ’Mobile Madness’,Recreation, vol. 47, December, 1954, pp. 30–31.

3. Fernand Leger, ‘Calder’, Gongs and Towers(New York: Curt Valentin Gallery, 1952),unpaginated.

4. L. Joy Sperling, ‘The Popular Sources ofCalder’s Circus: The Humpty Dumpty Circus,Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, and theCirque Medrano’, Journal of American Culture, vol.17, no. 4, 1994, p. 1.

5. David Rimanelli, ‘Alexander Calder, NationalGallery of Art’, Artforum International, vol. 36, no.10, 1998, p. 123.

6. Carroll Dunham, ‘High-Wire Act’, ArtforumInternational, vol. 47, no. 6, 2009, p. 164.

7. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative,Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2000), p. 103.

# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2014 1–19doi:10.1093/oxartj/kct044

at University of N



ownloaded from



motifs. As Hal Foster has written of similar Lichtenstein works, their‘commingling of art and commercial design’ engages with the fact that ‘by themoment of Pop, many avant garde devices and modernist styles had becomegadgets of the culture industry’.8 Lichtenstein’s appropriations seem fonderthan Calder’s less generous critics, but they remain unavoidably reliant on thedebased artistic status of the mobile.The tainted position of Calder’s art no doubt infuriates and offends his

champions – so much so, that the topic of Calder’s relation to his mass cultureimitations has all but become taboo in scholarship on his work.9 But thecriticism that Calder’s art is involved in decoration should not be ignored. AsT.J. Clark has put it, ‘abstract art has lived for much of its life in some kind ofproductive anxiety about the uses which might be made of it in the culture’.10

My task here is less to defend Calder’s reputation than it is to reconstruct theconditions of his rapid and spectacular absorption into mass culture; to suggestthe pressures this exerted on his own practice and reputation, and to recast themobile as an exemplar of the symbiotic and polyvalent relations between art andconsumption at mid-century.If ThomasCrow’s pithyand period-apt designation of themodern avant garde as

a ‘kind of research and development arm of the culture industry’ is correct, by themid-1950s, Alexander Calder was among its most productive personnel.11

Calder’s mobiles were imitated in a wide range of consumer products andcommercial contexts, across home decor, fashion, film, and advertising.Calder’s art was thus deeply entangled in the continuum between art and

Fig. 1. Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape Mobile, 1991.# Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2013.

8. Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting andSubjectivity in the Art of Hamilton Lichtenstein, Warhol,Richter and Ruscha (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2011), p. 89.

9. On the focus on formal invention and artisticchronology that dominates much writing onCalder’s work, see Alex J. Taylor, ‘UnstableMotives: Propaganda, Politics and the LateWorkofAlexander Calder’, American Art, vol. 26, no. 1,March 2012, p. 3, p. 22, note 1.

10. T. J. Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, inSerge Guibault (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Artin New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), p. 219.

11. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the CommonCulture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),p. 35.

4 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2014

Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



everyday objects, which in Lynn Spigel’s terms, meant that ‘the relationshipbetween the fine arts and modern design became ever more consolidated andintertwined’.12 The mobile fad is an extreme case, but I think a paradigmaticone: far from rejecting middle class taste, or resisting the norms of consumerculture, the identity of post-war modernism was substantially formulatedthrough its supposedly antithetical relations with the popular and thedecorative. While it is important not to flatten the very real differencesbetween modern art and its various mass culture offspring, the post-warreception of Calder’s art was unavoidably filtered through its ubiquitouscommercial imitations. It is the impact of these materials that this essay considers.Copies ofCalder’s style played amajor role in the growing consumeracceptance

of abstraction as a decorative style in the early 1950s, and in turn, growingmainstream interest in Calder’s work was filtered through these secondarysources. More persistently, Calder’s connections with the world of design anddecor have coloured the critical reception of his art. These dynamics, I suggest,are the origin of the persistent concerns about the quality of Calder’s art, andtheir spectre undermines the recognition of his practice as a serious brand ofmodernism.

Weekend Modernists

While Calder had beenmaking mobiles since 1931, public enthusiasm for the formcorresponds with his increased public profile in the early 1950s. Herbert Matter’sshort film Works of Calder, narrated by Burgess Meredith and with music by JohnCage, toured widely throughout the USA following its release in early 1951,distributed by the film department of the Museum of Modern Art. While thefilm was still touring, Calder was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the25th Venice Biennale in July 1952. As access to his mobiles increased – byexhibition, but more powerfully, by photographic reproduction – so too did thepossibility for their imitation. Of course, the relationship was not one way:Calder’s public prominence was in no small way boosted by those inspired tocopy his style, who often cited Calder as the ‘inventor’ of the mobile. Nor didthe craze follow a simple route from authentic artistic innovation to mass culture,the path decried by so many mid-century critics as a corrupting influence on eliteculture. No less important than the diffusion of the mobile in commodity culturewas its enthusiastic adoption in amateur crafts.Mobiles may have moved from their high art origins to become a truly popular

art, but they were also made to the plans of the burgeoning mid-century hobbyindustry. The certain arrival of the mobile into the amateur arts sphere isconfirmed by John Lynch’s book How to Make Mobiles (1953). Structured as acourse in the techniques in mobile making, the book progresses from a simplefive-piece construction in cardboard, via which the core methods are explained,to progressively larger and more complicated pieces – culminating in a gianteighteen-piece extravaganza. Each design featured detailed templates andphotographs of the final work. The book spurred a variety of demonstrationsand classes across America, at ‘various art museums and public workshops’.13

Lynch’s follow-up book Mobile Design (1955) featured another eight templates,and illustrated over a dozen Calder works. Lynch contributed articles ondo-it-yourself mobiles to publications ranging from Design to Popular Science.14

Advocating the making of mobiles as a rest from modern automation, Lynchregarded the popularity of the mobile as a sign that ‘in this modern age inwhich practically everything is done for us . . . people still like to do somethingfor themselves’.15

12. Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and theRise of Network Television (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2009), p. 11.

13. ‘What Is This Thing Called a Mobile?’, RacineSunday Bulletin, 14 February 1954, p. 24.

14. John Lynch, ‘Delightful Decorations AnyoneCan Create’, Design, vol. 55, November 1953,p. 72.

15. ‘What Is This Thing Called a Mobile?’, p. 27.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 0.0 2014 5

The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



Calder himself participated in the idea that the mobile might offer respite fromthe controls of a machine age. ‘If you get sold on mechanization’, Calder told Lifemagazine in 1951, ‘your work becomes manufactured instead of inventive andimaginative’. Describing the artist’s favour for ‘hand equipment’, the magazineadvised its readers that Calder’s tools ‘might be found in any layman’s toolchest’.16 As do-it-yourself activities burgeoned in garages across America, sucha presentation of Calder’s practice resonated with the promise that manual

Fig. 2. Genevieve Naylor, ‘Model Posing with Mobile in Calder’s Studio’, 1948. # Genevieve Naylor/Corbis.Artwork:#2014 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS London.

16. Dorothy Seiberling, ‘Calder: His Gyrating“Mobile” ArtWins International Fame and Prizes’,Life, 25 August 1952, p. 90.


Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



labourwould offer ‘spiritual compensation’ from the deadening standardisation ofmass-production.17 Such meanings could extend beyond the sphere of theworkshop. In a Genevieve Naylor spread in Harper’s Bazaar, Calder’s studioserved as backdrop for a feature on homemade fashions (Fig. 2) – his YellowSpike (1946) grounding the free movement of the model’s yellow cut-offs andflats, and the workshop atmosphere reinforcing the do-it-yourself promises ofthe Simplicity-brand pattern it used. Enthusiastically absorbed into all mannerof mass produced commodities, the mobile was also positioned as theirhandmade antidote, a modern and genuinely democratic creative outlet thatwould compensate for the monotony of mass produced products.Themost spectacular hobby arts success of the 1950swas paint-by-numbers. In

his history of the phenomenon,William L. Bird dates their mass market explosionto late 1952, which makes them roughly simultaneous with the craze formobiles.18 As Bird has shown, paint-by-numbers became ‘a metaphor for thecommercialisation and mechanization of culture’, and the site for viciousdebates around art and mass culture.19 Paint-by-numbers was dismissed by itscritics as an unmistakable kitsch, the undemanding antithesis to properly‘difficult’ avant garde art.20 In contrast, the mobile craze largely dodged directcriticism, shielded by the convincingly advanced appearances of its abstract form.But the lowbrow implications of the mobile fad for Calder were clear enough.

A Punchmagazine cartoon from 1952, for instance, an art supplies store has beenemptied of its archetypal easels and palettes, overrun instead by boxes of pre-cutmobile parts (Fig. 3). It proved a prescient prediction: if Lynch’s book allowed forthe possibility of spontaneous invention, byearly 1954, it was indeed reported that‘kits which include materials and parts for several mobiles have hit the market’.21

According to another source, such ‘assemble-your-own’ mobiles were, from themid-fifties onwards, sold by department stores to ‘amateurswho could not paint arespectable cow’.22 Whether homespun or store bought, such imitations were a

Fig. 3. Russell Brockbank, ‘The Art Shoppe: Make Your Own Mobile’, Punch, 14 May 1952, p. 160.(Reproduced courtesy Punch Ltd.)

17. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The VisualCulture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 56.

18. William L. Bird, Paint by Number: The How-toCraze That Swept the Nation (New York: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), p. 23.

19. Bird, Paint by Number, p. 3. Many of thesedebates can be found in Bernard Rosenberg andDavidM.White (eds),Mass Culture: The Popular Artsin America (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957).

20. AsClement Greenberg’s famously formulatedit, kitsch ‘detours what is necessarily difficult ingenuine art’. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant Gardeand Kitsch’, in John O’Brien (ed.), The CollectedEssays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgements, Volume2 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986), p. 17.


22. Richard Lemon, ‘The Soaring Art ofAlexander Calder’, The Saturday Evening Post, 27February 1965, p. 32.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



contradictory force – at once bolstering his reputation as the creatorof an artform,while profoundly destabilising his claims to avant garde originality.

Upwardly Mobile

The fad for homemade Calder imitationswas not limited to those lacking access tothe real thing. Seeing his work at theMuseum ofModern Art inspired twowomento try their own hand at themobile, albeit ‘withoutmuch success’.23 Art collectorand businessman Otto Spaeth – who had recently commissioned a Calder mobilefor his company headquarters – spent two days in late 1952 constructing amobilefrom Christmas tree ornaments.24 That his initiativewas not unique is guaranteedby the December 1952 edition of woman’s magazine McCall’s, which provideddirections to make a Christmas-themed mobile populated by glass baubles,miniature wrapped gifts, and an angel, all suspended from Calder-style wirebranches.25 An anecdote in The New Yorker in July 1953 told of a more abstractattempt to mimic Calder’s art:

This newly wed couple, staunch believers in abstract art, suspended a shiny new eel trapas a mobile from the living room ceiling of their new apartment. Well, you might guesswhat happened – advent of friends, cries of ‘What will Sandy Calder do next?,’ smilingexplanation of hosts. Not at all. The first person to call on them was a man who came toconnect the telephone. He cast his eyes upward and asked the lady of the house whereher husband fished. Said he’d been looking for a good eel spot for years.26

The failure of this Calder simulation to fool a utilities worker only reinforces thepoint of the anecdote: being ‘staunch believers in abstract art’ was central to theadvanced tastes of the fashionable urban elite. That the tale was conceivablyinspired by the title of Calder’s Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939) (Fig. 4),commissioned for the stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art, is telling –these were metaphors that Calder helped propagate. Though Calder isinsistently positioned as the ‘inventor’ of the mobile, this should not distractfrom the significant formal relations between the mobile and other objects fromeveryday life. From fishing lures to bird scarers, wind chimes and weathervanes, the popular forms that the mobile could evoke were not simplyconnections that provided their reception with added cultural resonance. As thetitles of works such Red and Yellow Vane (1934) and Lobster Trap and Fish Tail(1939) suggest, these were interactions that were, on occasion, alreadyinscribed in the forms of Calder’s art.The relation between Calder’s art and such material culture was the subject of

a 1953 editorial in a local Pennsylvania newspaper. ‘Seems like we had a glassgadget in years past – painted lengths of glass on strings – that tinkled merrilywhen the wind swept across the front porch’, the journalist recalled, ‘ButCalder gave the idea artistic meaning and purpose’.27 While the work of Miro,Picasso and Braque still caused this journalist ‘bewilderment’, the popularresonance of the Calder mobile had, this writer thought, allowed it to ‘becomean accepted, and appreciated form’. Such validation of the mobile relied on itsabsorption into consumer culture. As the same article explained, as evidence ofthe success of Calder’s art, such ‘highbrow fantasies are beginning to appear inthe most exclusive gift shops’.28

In a drawing by Calder’s friend Saul Steinberg (Fig. 5), a mobile is shown as itfalls from the ceiling, such that the task of illumination is deferred to candles andfloor lamps – including one three-pronged affair no less tied to the atomic stylethan Calder. For the modern homemaker seeking social elevation, a Caldermobile emerged as a kind of a high-status cipher for the chandelier. Steinberg’s

23. Julie Mark, ‘Odds and Ends’, Lebanon DailyNews, 5 February 1954, p. 20.

24. Gerald Kloss, ‘Plan "Arty" Dedication ofCedarburg Building’, The Milwaukee Journal, 27March 1953, p. 15.

25. Calder’s Otto’s Mobile (1952), commissionedfor the lobby of his Meta-Mold AluminumCompany and featuring an unpainted section in thecompany’s material, is now in the collection ofFondation Beyeler. ‘How to Make the ChristmasMobile’, McCall’s, December 1954, p. 90. OtherChristmas mobiles included ‘Gay HolidayMobiles:Try Your Hand at These’, Better Homes and Gardens,December 1953, pp. 56–7, 209–10.

26. ‘Trap’, The New Yorker, 18 July 1953, pp.17–18.

27. ‘Dangling Doodles’, Chester Times, 25 March1953, p. 6.

28. ‘Dangling Doodles’, p. 6.


Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



Fig. 4. Alexander Calder’s ‘Lobster Trap and Fish Tail’, a hanging mobile commissioned by the advisory Committee for the stairwell of the Museum’s new building in

1939 (photograph 1949). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). PA315. # 2013. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.Artwork:# 2014 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS London.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



evocations of Picasso and Rivera paintings signify the advanced taste of the hosts noless than their giant ‘picturewindow’, but it is the exaggeratedmobilewhich is thedominant sign for the host’s advanced taste. One local newspaper reported that‘the fortunate fold who flaunt mobiles are a clan to themselves – and uppish asplutocrats with luxury cars or yachts’.29 As this article made clear to Ohio’shome decorators, the ‘indolently drifting’ motion of the mobile spoke of theeffortless ease of the leisure class, those for whom the greatest worry was toensure ‘more provocative conversation when there’s a party’.30 As with the‘assorted metals’ that are ominously described as caressing the brow in OgdenNash’s poem, the dramatic possibility that a mobile could injure its viewers wasrealised in Steinberg’s drawing, literalising the perils faced by the overeagersocial climber.That mobiles represented an elite taste in art and design did not simply rely on

the avant garde position of Calder himself, and his 1940s favour among theManhattan museums and galleries that served as America’s cultural arbiters.31 Italso corresponded with the installation of mobiles in a variety of otherelite public contexts, such as cocktail bars, hotels, banks, and corporate

Fig. 5. Saul Steinberg, Calder Ex-Voto, 1952. Ink on paper, 1112 × 141

2 in. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. # The Saul SteinbergFoundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

29. Aline Jean Treanor, ‘Before Another YearGoes by, You May Make a Mobile’, Toledo Blade, 26July 1953, p. 2.

30. Treanor, ‘Before Another Year Goes by, YouMay Make a Mobile’, p. 2.

31. In 1943 the Museum of Modern Art hadpresented a retrospective of Calder’s work.


Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



headquarters. Although itwas not until later in the 1950s that Calder mobileswereprominently installed in several airports, Cincinnati’s glamorouslymodern TerracePlaza Hotel featured his Twenty Leaves and an Apple (1946), and Neiman Marcusinstalled Mariposa (1951) in their flagship Dallas store in 1953. In the same year,a mobile greeted the thousands who traipsed through Frank Lloyd Wright’sUssonian House, a display design installed on the future site of the GuggenheimMuseum on Fifth Avenue.32 Calder’s mobiles also featured in the fashionablemodern interiors of Florence Knoll.33 With such spaces of elite design makingprominent use of his sculpture, the Calder mobile emerged as a widelyunderstood signifier of a highly developed taste for modernism.In an influential 1949 article inHarper’s Bazaar, Russell Lynes argued that it was

taste rather than class that marked social distinction in mid-twentieth-centuryAmerica.34 When Life magazine worked with Lynes to summarise his claims ina chart of ‘Everyday tastes from high-brow to low-brow’, Calder appearedtwice at the elite end of the scale: a Calder-style mobile illustrated among theart that was the highbrow’s favoured ‘cause’, and Calder himself was named astheir preferred sculptor.35 Again, a few years later, Lynes set out to describethe cultured urban sophisticates he regarded as a new social strata. Calling them‘Upper Bohemians’, Calder again appeared among their favoured aestheticexpressions: a mobile was a likely decoration for their living room, and a ‘bigpiece of brass cut into a mobile by Alexander Calder’ demonstrated theirrejection of more conspicuously valuable types of jewellery.36 As readers ofsuch articles compared their own tastes to the ideals sketched by Lynes, it nodoubt occurred to some that Calder-style decor in their own homes mightdeliver a kind of social mobility. But it was a precarious position: Calder’srepeated representation as an exemplar of high-brow taste almost certainlycontributed to the proliferation of the mobile at the other extreme of culturalproduction.

From Fashion to Fad

Written as mobile mania exploded, Harold Rosenberg’s famous essay ‘TheAmerican Action Painters’ (1952) contains a section grappling withmodernism’s contradictory relation to elite and mass tastes. ‘Modern art inAmerica represents a revolution of taste – and serves to identify power of thecaste conducting that revolution’, he wrote, but it is ‘a revolution that restrictsitself to weapons of taste – and which at the same time addresses itself to themasses’.37 Rosenberg’s scorn for the latter ranges across modernistic furniture,appliances, designer goods, and other generalised targets, but there is oneaesthetic co-optation that he singles out. In 1952, searching for a timelyexample of the absorption of modern art into the sphere of the ‘bargainbasement’, he chose ‘beer-ad “mobiles”.’38

Further investigation shows that his example was far from a trivial bete noire.A promotions firm had recently launched ‘Displa-Mobile’, a patented die-cutcardboard point-of-sale device that they claimed was inspired by Calder’s art.Within twelve months, over forty national advertisers had placed orders.Reproducing several examples, Business Week reported one brewer had ordered35,000 units of their design and that, in one city, ‘beer stores frequently hadthree or four mobiles from different advertisers hanging from their ceilings’.39

Coverage of this innovation in the British press explained that ‘now that artdealers have gradually popularised them’ the ‘market for mobiles is wideningall the time’.40 Another Pittsburgh-based mechanising company launched‘Shobiles’, which, they boasted, ‘incorporate all the advantages of the mobile:

32. Frank Lloyd-Wright, The Natural House(New York: Horizon Press, 1954), p. 118.

33. See illustrations, for instance, in Earl Martin(ed.), Knoll Textiles (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2011), p. 207, 209.

34. Russell Lynes, ’Highbrow, Lowbrow,Middlebrow’, Harper’s Magazine, February 1949,pp. 23–5.

35. The others listed were ‘parlor sculpture’(low-brow), ‘front yard sculpture’ (lowermiddle-brow) and ‘Maillol’ (higher-middlebrow).‘High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow’, Life, 11April 1949, p. 101. Calder’s sculpture wasrepresented by an illustration of his work Devil Fish(1937), from the collection of the Museum ofModern Art.

36. Russell Lynes, ‘The Upper Bohemians’,Harpers Bazaar, February 1953, pp. 47–8.

37. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American ActionPainters’, The Tradition of the New (New York:McGraw Hill, 1965), pp. 35–6.

38. Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’,pp. 220–1.

39. ‘Mobiles Give Advertisers New Medium’,Business Week, 28 February 1953, pp. 47–8. Anadvertising mobile from the period can be found inthe Palmer Paint Company Scrapbook, PBN/NMAH, Smithsonian Institution.

40. ‘U.S. Industrial Notes’, Financial Times, 16March 1953, p. 5.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



inexpensive motion, no floor or space requirement, ease of installation, tradeacceptances and modern design’, but with the more promotionally practicaladdition of ‘large surface areas for impact photos and type’.41

As mobiles swept through commodity culture in the mid-1950s, their prestigestatus was difficult to maintain. Calder’s champions found it necessary todistinguish the originality of Calder’s achievement. Thus, the mobile was‘invented by Alexander Calder, in whose hands they are never less thaningenious’, according to John Canaday in his Mainstreams of Modern Art (1959),finding it necessary to then distinguish Calder’s originals from both the mobiles‘efficiently imitated by certain other craftsman’, and – worse still – those‘widely prostituted as gadgets’.42 Another art historical survey text illustrated aCalder imitation in a Chicago restaurant to demonstrate just how ‘comparativelypedestrian and clumsy’ it was compared with those from the virtuosic hand ofthe master – without realising that this glistening mobile in brass was, in fact, byCalder himself.43 Then, as now, the unmistakable and inimitable balance ofCalder mobiles was deployed as a critical trope to uphold the artist’s originality,and on occasion, as a connoisseurial tactic to support judgements of quality –and the matters of attribution and authenticity which they can serve.44

The mobile craze spread rapidly through fashion design. ‘If you do not have anoriginal, youmay have something like a Calder’ advised awidely syndicated articlein 1953. ‘Calder is catching’, the piece continued, ‘There may be Calder in yourwife’s bracelet, necklace or bobbing earrings, in a fancy greeting card strung withbaubles, or in a restaurant sign, or in a gay display frame in a store window’.45

Complete with ‘gravity pleats’, Adele Simpson’s 1953 summer collectionboasted ‘fluid lines cued from the mobile fad’ inspired by a Calder exhibition.46

More puzzling was the forecast of a society hairdresser who predicted ‘hair inmotion . . . inspired by Alexander Calder’s mobiles’.47 Mobile earrings were aparticular success. One writer said that these ‘tiny little versions’ of Caldersculptures had ‘taken the town by storm’.48 The occurrence of such trends,combined with the artist’s own jewelry production, provided associations thatcould re-emerge in later efforts to diminish Calder’s achievements, such asKurt von Meier’s designation of Calder’s sculpture as ‘macro-jewelry’ that, nomatter how effective, was always ‘still essentially an earring’.49 As much as hispractice destabilised cultural hierarchies, the broader aesthetic field occupied byCalder’s art also provided the very metaphors by which its artistic significancecould be dismissed.By October 1954, it was claimed that the ‘pleasant mobile craze’ had

‘penetrated practically everywhere’.50 One Chicago-based companymanufacturing such ‘atmospheric danglers in plastic, metal and wood’ wasreportedly making $10,000 a month.51 In early 1954, it was reported thatmass produced Calder-style sculptural mobiles were available for ‘around$10’.52 The journey of Calder’s ‘invention’ from the museum and gallery tothe shop and the home even earned the attention of The Economist, who in a1955 article regarded the craze as archetypal of the embrace of modern art bycommerce:

The New York Museum of Modern Art commissioned its Calder mobile, the hangingconstruction of wire and gaily coloured metal plates which casts hovering shadows on thestaircase well, in 1939. It took fourteen years for mobiles to become a commercialproposition. 1953 was the year when every well-equipped nursery has a celluloid cowjumping over a plastic moon suspended on wires from its ceiling and every privilegeddebutante has rhinestones fluttering on silver threads from her ears. Now mobiles havebeen banished to the advertising doldrums of drug store displays.53

41. L. E. Gallagher, ‘Why I Like Mobiles’,Advertising Requirements, October 1955, p. 113. Anearlier example of a commercially produced pointof sale mobile is illustrated in Julius R. Teich, ‘ThePayoff Point in Point of Purchase’, AdvertisingRequirements, February 1953, p. 35.

42. John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1959),p. 501.

43. Frank Seiberling, Looking into Art (New York:Henry Holt and Company, 1959), p. 147. Thework Seiberling assumedwas not by Calder seems,in fact, to be Brass in the Sky (1947), the mobilecommissioned byMarshall Field’s for their Chicagoairport restaurant.

44. The Calder Foundation has been involved inseveral legal disputes concerning attribution. TheFoundation recently added a section to its websiteconcerning ‘misattributed’ works, a category thatranges from fakes to mass-produced printsfeaturing Calder designs which are ‘often confusedas works of art’.

45. W.G.Rogers, ‘Sculpture on theMove Is SandyCalder’s Speciality’, The Salina Journal, 19 July1953, p. 32.

46. Ozeil Freyer Woolcock, ‘Adele Simpson’sSummer Collection Has Fluid Lines Cued from theMobile Fad’, Atlanta Daily World, 28 April 1953,p. 3.

47. ‘Asides by the Society Editor’, The WinonaRepublican-Herald, 7 January 1953, p. 8.

48. ‘Tobe’, ‘Those Fascinating Mobile Earrings’,The Ogden Standard-Examiner, 20 April 1953, p. 7a.Such imitations are not referenced in the 287-pageexhibition catalogue for Calder Jewelry, whichconsistently positions his necklaces and brooches assculpture rather than fashion.

49. Kurt von Meier, ‘Los Angeles’, ArtInternational, April 1967, p. 51.

50. Eleanor Jewett, ‘61st American Art ShowPreviewed Tonight’, Chicago Tribune, 20 October1954, p. B3.

51. ‘Dangling Doodles’, p. 6.


53. ‘Museum Comes to Life’, The Economist, 31December 1955, p. 1178.


Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



The Economistmaps themobile fad on to the commercial dynamics of taste, and therise and fall of consumer fashion. But the translation of the mobile into flatdecorative patterns of coloured curvilinear shapes and spidery line workboomed in mid-1950s packaging and graphics. Indeed, ‘mobile’ was the namechosen by several manufacturers for their new ranges which used theseforms.54 Such explicit references suggest that Calder’s influence on the formallanguage of 1950s design is more direct than usually described.55 Asmid-century design has come to be revived and replicated at a global scalewholly unknown to its original creators, these are repetitions with continuingrelevance. Martin Boyce’s sculpture Mobile (Being with you is like the new past)(2002) (Fig. 6) uses fragments of Arne Jacobsen’s 3107 chair (1955) – itsshape-shifting design no less imitated than the Calder mobile itself – to renderthe stackable functionalism of this modern design icon dysfunctional again,remaking Jacobsen’s elegant forms in the more awkward image of its sculpturalantecedent.By the end of the 1950s, Calder’s influence on design and the graphic arts was

unrivalled. Absorbed into the spheres of fashion and domestic decoration, thefeminised position that the mobile could acquire is well suggested by one widelypublished period anecdote:

The distraught husband rushed into the kitchen. ‘What’s that thing hanging in the livingroom? It tried to bite me when I came in.’ ‘Now, now,’ said his wife soothingly. ‘You must

Fig. 6. Martin Boyce, Mobile (Being with you is like the new past), 2002. Powder-coated steel, chain, wire,

altered Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chairs, Dimensions Variable. Installation view Charlottenborg Museum,Copenhagen, 2002. Collection: British Council. (Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/TobyWebster Ltd. Glasgow.)

54. These include, in ceramics,Metlox ‘CaliforniaMobile’ (1954), Edwin Knowles ‘Mobile’ (c.1954–55) and Libbey Glass ‘Mobile’ (1955), andin fabric, designs by June Lyon and Marian Mahler.

55. Calder’s surely more minor influences onearlier design trends have been acknowledged: onthe 1930s, seeGregory Votolato, American Design inthe Twentieth Century (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1998), p. 113, and on the 1940s,see Robert Goldwater, Modern Art in Your Life(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), pp.26–29.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



have bumped into my mobile. I’m so glad you like it.’ ‘But I didn’t say . . . ’ ‘I made it myselffor $1.78,’ she said, smoothing her apron, ‘and it looks almost like the one at the artgallery that’s priced at a thousand dollars.’ ‘A thousand dollars?’ His voice rose to asqueak. ‘They’re really the smartest thing in home decoration. And legitimate art, too.’ Shefaltered. ‘I should think you would be proud of me, instead of . . .’ ‘Oh I am, I am honestI am, honey.’56

Here the mobile stands for tasteful and up-to-date home decoration, where theconsumption of the latest style is restrained by thrifty resourcefulness. Narratedlike a scene from a sitcom preparing for an ad break, the mobile serves toposition modern taste as a folly of impractical femininity. Nor is modernism inthe home represented as an entirely harmless pursuit. Like the imperilledparty-goers in Saul Steinberg’s drawing, the anecdote uses the potentialviolence of the wiry metal mobile to literalise the dangers of modernism,forever threatening to bite those insufficiently attuned to its ever-changing arrayof aesthetic distinctions.Located in the spaces of domesticity and the shopping mall, but also the

masculine sphere of the garage workshop, the contradictory gendering ofmobile making mirrored the uneasy gendering of modern art, caught betweenits masculine materiality and its feminine decorative functions. As post-warmetal sculpture embraced a masculinist topos of welders and workers, thecontamination of Calder’s foremost artistic invention in the domains of fashionand domesticity gravely threatened its claim to represent a serious brand ofmodernism. Calder’s later monumental stabiles, with their welded seams andindustrial-style bracings, began to offset for the delicacy of his earlier work, butthe flood of domestic imitations he inspired made it all but impossible forCalder’s art to shed the stigma of decorative femininity.

Fig. 7. Hans van Nes, ‘Cow-Jumped-Over-The-Moon Mobile’, 1953. Manufacturer unknown. Photograph:Hans van Nes. (Courtesy of the New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, Library of Congress,

Washington DC.)



Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



The Swing Set

Further compromising the status of Calder’s art was its connection with thetrappings of childhood, and the sphere of women’s work into which it fell. Thesense that the mobile was perfectly suited for occupying the inquisitive minds ofinfants rapidly turned it into an essential nursery accoutrement (Fig. 7). In1953 and 1954, a Cincinnati-based toy manufacturer registered patents on theircantilevered mobiles of plastic birds and butterflies designed to be clamped onthe edge of an infant’s crib – one of which happily invoked Calder’s influence,footnoting the 1952 Calder article in Life magazine as the sole reference in itspatent office documentation.57 Thomas Hine’s claim that ‘a kind of mobile wasthe first thing that millions of Americans ever saw’ might overstate the case,but it is clear that the mobile’s most avid adoption was in the new regime ofinfant amusements demanded by the baby boom.58

One source even suggests that mobiles found their place in children’s hospitals.As the 1953 article reported, mobiles were ‘practically as good as medicine’ andquoting a doctor who thought that mobiles were useful for providing ‘color andmovement and beauty’ for sick children.59 The artist responsible for thismobile was British sculptor Kenneth Martin (Fig. 8), whose work had beeninstalled at London’s Whittington Hospital.60 The vaguely therapeutic benefitsof making mobiles had found applicability in the emerging sphere of children’sart education. Led by MoMA educator Victor D’Amico, the Young People’sGallery of the Museum of Modern Art had presented ‘Experiments in MobileDesign’ (1947), featuring works by local high school students. Unlike imitativeand ‘indoctrinary’ exercises in drawing and perspective, abstract mobiles suitedD’Amico’s zealous advocacy of free creative expression.61 They featuredprominently in his NBC television special on children’s art Through theEnchanted Gate (1952) and in his Art for the Family (1954) book, whichreproduced several Calder originals as examples from which children couldmake ‘clothes hanger mobiles’.62 ‘You don’t have to be an artist and you don’tneed talent’, D’Amico emphasised of his democratised aesthetic pedagogy.‘Everyone can do it’.63

As the Museum of Modern Art had pointed out in its promotions for Works ofCalder (1950), centring on a child’s view of his art, ‘[t]he color, the motion, andgaiety of Calder’s work is eminently suited to the color film medium’.64

Educators could choose from several films on Calder and mobile makingdesigned specifically for the classroom. As the Education Film Guide from 1953described, one film showed how to make a mobile from ‘wire, thread,sheet aluminum, a discarded towel rack, sponge, colored toothpicks and a pingpong ball’.65 Throughout the 1950s, over a dozen articles on mobile makingappeared in the educators publication School Arts. It is little wonder that by1957 one writer came to wish that the ‘“junk on a string” type of thing only tooprevalent in our schoolrooms today’ would be replaced ‘with some-thing moreimaginative and stronger in construction’.66 (One magazine had in factadvocated mobile making as a ‘good way to clean out supply cupboards ofexcess “junk”.’67) The proliferation of the mobile in nurseries and classroomsprovided an unavoidably juvenile taint to Calder’s own practice, associationsthat surface in his own statements. When asked by an interviewer whether hereceived letters from admirers, Calder joked of his fan base that ‘everybody isunder six’.68

Hollywood was equally quick to capitalise on the fad. In Disney’s animatedshort Melody (1953), a mobile contains the information of the opening credits.It is notable that the short was the first 3D animation to be produced by Disney,

Fig. 8. Kenneth Martin, Mobile Reflector,

c. 1953. Installation view at WhittingtonHospital, London.# The Estate of the Artist.

57. Bromo-Mint Company, ‘Infant’s Plaything’,US Patent No. 2769276, Applied for 19 October1953; ‘Butterfly Mobile Toy’, US Patent No.2994156, Applied for 3 December 1954.

58. ThomasHine, Populuxe (London: Bloomsbury,1987), p. 110.

59. Joan Barberis, ‘U.K. Hospital Has New Usefor Mobiles’, Winnipeg Free Press, 18 December1953, p. 4.

60. A similar Kenneth Martin mobile MobileReflector (1955) is held in the collection of Tate. Formention of the hospital project, and details onMartin’s attitude to the mobiles of Calder, seeMatthewGale’s online catalogue entry forMartin’sSmall Screw Mobile (1953).

61. For his 1955 exhibition Developing Creativenessin Children, D’Amico went so far as to display ‘aphotograph of Hitler youth marching inunison . . . over the pattern of stereotypeddrawings made by children’.

62. Victor D’Amico, Art for the Family (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1954), p. 77.

63. D’Amico, Art for the Family, p. 9.

64. ‘New Herbert Matter-Burgess Film onAlexander Calder to be distributed by museum’,26 January 1951, Museum of Modern Art, PressRelease Archives.

65. Frederic Krahn, Educational Film Guide(New York: H.W. Wilson, 1953), p. 738.

66. Lorraine Jensen, ‘Metal Sculpture’, ArtEducation, vol. 10, no. 7, October 1957, p. 19.

67. McConnell, ‘Mobile Madness’, p. 30.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



such that the sculptural quality of the mobile was a prescient design choice tointroduce audiences the spatial illusions of 3D film. In The Girl Next Door(1953), June Haver’s character moves into house whose three Calder-inspiredworks are used to attest to its shockingly up-to-date modern design, thecharacters staring quizzically at their unfamiliar forms. The executive suite ofLinus Larabee in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954) is decorated with a Caldermobile, demonstrating the sophisticated tastes of the wealthy industrialist. Ataround the same time, five performers on the Dinah Shore Show performedwhile suspended on a Calder-style mobile. ‘Since Miss Shores’s show goes intothousands of homes’, Look magazine reported, ‘art of this sort is being broughtto a much wider audience’.69

In light of the concurrent proliferation of television sets in living rooms acrossAmerica, the endlessly changing spectacle of the mobile is suggestive. As HerbertRead once wrote, the ‘animation’ of Calder’s work proved that even ‘sculpture isnot to be outdone by the cartoon’.70 Itwould be too cynical to regardmobiles as anartform in which entertainment was already implicit, but the perpetual motioncertainly resonated with the promises of mass culture to provide endlessnovelty and distraction. Enchanting adults and children alike, it would be hardto imagine a sculpture more ‘theatrical’ in its form than the mobile. Just as itcame to straddle categories of high and low, professional and amateur, themobile also flew in the face of the borders between the arts that have been soassiduously policed by the history of art. It was a mix that produced lastingpressures on the status of Calder’s art.

Judgements and Rebuttals

Calder’s public reputation became inseparable from the mobile craze. The term‘mobile’ itself, which Marcel Duchamp had suggested for Calder’s sculpture in1931, entered the collective vocabulary less through his own practice, than viathe sheer ubiquity of his imitations. The addenda section of the Webster NewInternational Dictionary listed both ‘mobile’ and ‘stabile’ in their 1954 edition.In 1955 one museum director rather flippantly wrote that the word was‘frequently heard nowadays’ to describe the forms made by both ‘AlexanderCalder and by kindergarten children’.71 By 1958, mobiles were so wellestablished that one art historian could write in the College Art Journal that ‘noform of modern art has achieved more popularity than the mobile’.72 Forthe artworld cognoscenti, such a fate was problematic – transgressing therequirement for vanguard art to challenge the norms of middle class taste.In the mid-1960s, media coverage associated with Calder’s retrospective at the

Guggenheim Museum provided a renewed opportunity to address the artist’srelationship with his ubiquitous imitators. When Sol LeWitt saw the exhibition,he wrote to Eva Hesse that he thought Calder’s stabiles in the exhibition were‘just tremendous’, but that his ‘mobiles got to be too much and some too cute(the fishes and crap like that)’.73 Compared with the increasingly austere designof American avant garde sculpture, Calder’s sometimes naıve figurative stylecould certainly seem uncomfortably close to the tchotchkes he had inspired. Inan article presciently titled ‘The Alexander Calder Problem’, John Canadayanxiously attempted to dispel the mass culture taint, insisting that Calder’s art‘remains invulnerable to . . . the hordes of imitators (including children) whohave plagiarized it’.74 But many more articles understood Calder’s achievementin terms of this very relationship: such that he was, in one gloss on his career,described as both ‘the old master of American non-objective art’ and the‘grandsire to all the dime store mobiles which delight millions of infant and

68. Ted Morgan, ‘AVisit to Calder Kingdom’,New York Times Magazine, 8 July 1973, p. 37.

69. Quoted in Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art andthe Rise of Network Television, p. 47.

70. Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art:Collected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1952),p. 196.

71. Anna Olmsted, ‘Museum’s Artmobile IsDream Come True’, Syracuse Herald-American, 18September 1955, p. 28.

72. John Alford, ‘Art and Reality: 1850 to 1950’,College Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 3, 1958, p. 246.

73. Elisabeth Sussman and Fred Wasserman, EvaHesse: Sculpture (New York: Jewish Museum,2006), p. 42

74. John Canaday, ‘The Alexander CalderProblem’, New York Times, 8 November 1964,p. X21.


Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



adult Americans’.75 Such a position required Calder to address the increasinglydebased status of his invention:

The mere mention to Alexander Calder of the millions of pasteboard copies of his danglingsculptures brings a derisive snort. ‘I prefer to ignore them.’ He labels as ‘just commercialproducts’ those Christmas mobiles of Santas and Reindeers that turn gently in the breezeas they hang from coat-hangers like rods. Mobiles for babies or birds and flowers are ‘justrubbing it in’ to Calder.76

The artist reiterated the point for Lifemagazine, telling the interviewer that ‘thosewho imitate me do not flatter me’.77 When curator Katherine Kuh had askedhow he felt about his imitators in 1960, Calder’s answer had been morecharacteristically succinct: ‘They nauseate me’ was the extent of his response.78

Such answers were firmer than his attitudes expressed at the outset of themobile trend: when in 1953 he was asked about the commercial adaption of hisartform, his only comment was that ‘It doesn’t interest me’.79 (Calder’s scornfor imitators may have predated his mid-century celebrity: he apparently hadonce refused to meet British sculptor Lynn Chadwick on the grounds that,according to one account, ‘he did not want to meet someone he regarded as an“imitator”.’80) Calder’s reservations about allowing a touring exhibition of hiswork to visit Japan, he told a journalist in 1967, was in part provoked bythe likelihood that ‘the market would be flooded’ with mass marketreproductions.81 Perhaps it was in this context in mind that Calder titled a laterendition of his classic mobile form Un de ceux-la (1972). Translating to ‘One ofThose’, with the same depreciative implications, the work’s title seems to nodto the tiresome ubiquity in which Calder understood his art to be unavoidablyimplicated.The mistake of writers who described Calder as having ‘turned a toy into an

artform’ must have been especially infuriating for the artist, who was clear thathe had ‘invented’ the mobile.82 Just as the recourse to Calder’s example byamateur mobilists had bolstered such claims, so too did Calder’s designation asa precursor to the flourishing of kinetic art scene of the sixties, or as HansRichter dubbed it, ‘the movement movement’.83 Another kinetic sculptorGeorge Rickey offered a rare rejection of ‘the Calder myth’, criticising the ideathat Calder had spawned a ‘one-man-school’.84 He has ‘virtually no influence’,wrote Rickey, and ‘has contributed nothing to basic thought, has himselfprovoked no new tendencies’.85 Elsewhere, Rickey’s harsh judgements targetedthe reproducibility of Calder’s style as evidence of his mediocrity. ‘He is themost easily imitated sculptor alive’, or, as he put it in another withering attack:86

. . . his simple, artless craftsmanship, and his engaging, artless wit won both connoisseurand common man and made Calder’s name and product a household word throughoutthe civilized world . . . For fifteen years he had the field to himself. During that time heproduced a tremendous oeurve and also had to suffer a host of plagiarists at the popularlevel. What is strange is that one cannot name a single disciple of Calder.87

Rickey’s remarks are uniquely spiteful, but they do bring to the fore the connectionbetweenCalder’s claims to artistic significance, and the imitation of his style. Being‘simple’ and ‘artless’was asmuch a recipe for short-termpopular success as itwasfor long-term artistic irrelevance. For critics, Calder’s connection with stylishdecoration emerged as the chief rhetorical tactic to dismiss his art: ‘He is reallya salon man, a rococo craftsman’, one British critic wrote, claiming that his artbelongs ‘not in the Tate . . . but in the Victoria and Albert Museum, alongsideother amusing, elegant objects made for our domestic use and delight’.88

75. ‘Exhibit of Swinging Art Honors ItsOriginator’, Press-Telegram, 4 November 1964,p. A15.

76. ‘Inventor of Mobiles Says Copies Today AreNot Art’, Bennington Banner, 18 November 1963,p. 8.

77. ‘Mobile Makers Giddy Whirl’, Life, 5 March1965, p. 52.

78. Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks withSeventeen Modern Artists (New York: Harper andRow, 1962), p. 41.

79. ‘Mobiles Give Advertisers New Medium’,p. 48.

80. Dennis Farr, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor 1947–1996 (Stroud, Gloustershire: Lypiatt Studio,1997), p. 19, note 51. Like Martin, Chadwickmade mobiles in the late 1940s and early 1950s,some of which were used in commercial contexts,though denies knowing of Calder’swork. Farr, LynnChadwick, pp. 2–4, 46–65.

81. Vivian Brown, ‘Mobile Sculptor HadMoments of Doubt’, News Journal, Mansfield, 17January 1967, p. 7.

82. Miles A. Smith, ‘Mobiles Aflutter inGuggenheim’, The Rocky Mount, 29 November1964, p. 48.

83. Hans Richter quoted in ‘The MovementMovement’, Time, 28 January 1966, p. 64.

84. George Rickey in Peter Selz, Directions inKinetic Sculpture: From George Rickey to Jean Tinguely(Berkeley: University of California Berkeley,1966), p. 13.

85. Selz, Directions in Kinetic Sculpture: From GeorgeRickey to Jean Tinguely, p. 13.

86. George Rickey, ‘Calder in London’, ArtsMagazine, vol. 36, no. 10, September 1962, p. 27.

87. George Rickey, ‘Origins of Kinetic Art’,Studio International, February 1967, p. 67.

88. Nigel Gosling, ‘Flirting with the FourthDimension’, The Observer, 8 July 1962, p. 23.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



Such criticisms are unfair, and fail, I think, to sufficiently distinguishCalder’s artfrom its mass culture imitations. But it should be acknowledged that Calder hadhardly shied away from the applied arts. Examples of his work in this fieldinclude his early toys, commercially produced scarfs, fabric, wallpaper, ahammock, rugs and porcelain, as well as more elite decorative commissions,such as the exuberant silver bedhead he designed for Peggy Guggenheim, or thechic pool-side mural for Marcel Breuer’s Stillman House (1950). Most famously,his late career designs for the first BMW Art Car and the livery of BraniffAirlines cemented the artist’s mass culture connections at a spectacular scale,with equally large public relations campaigns.89 Even if such work seems tohave been increasingly – and, no doubt, strategically – edged out of Calder’ssanctioned oeuvre, the nexus between Calder’s decorative and commercialpractice, and the home decor he inspired, has produced lingering uncertaintiesabout the merits of Calder’s art.As is often the case in mid-century art, the judgements of Clement Greenberg

provide a useful barometer for these fluctuating valuations. Where Greenberghad, in the 1940s, considered Calder merely ‘decorative’ and suspiciously‘tasteful’, by the 1960s, his judgements had hardened. He now regarded Calderas ‘over-rated’, enjoying an ‘influence [that] has never been commensurate withhis reputation’.90 Here, Greenberg carefully differentiates between the artistic‘reputation’ forged by critical judgement (preferably his, of course), and thatminor and transitory ‘influence’ ensured by public popularity. A 1968 essay byGreenberg laments the descent of artistic style into a ‘multitude of fashions,vogues, waves, fads [and] manias’. The problem of novelty art, he wrote, was itsrapid passage from high to low: ‘All art styles deteriorate and, in doing so,become usable for hollow and meretricious effects. . . . But no style in the pastseems to have become usable for such effects while it was still an up-and-comingone’.91 Eventually, Greenberg came to regard the opposition to middle class tasteas the defining character of modernism, which, he wrote, ‘consists in thecontinuing endeavour to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by therelative democratisation of culture under industrialism’. It would be difficult tofind an artist who fails tomeet Greenburg’s demandsmore successfully thanCalder.Greenburg’s ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) had laid the framework for his

opposition between mass culture and modernism. He opens the influentialessay by contemplating the difference between a Braque painting and the coverof the Saturday Evening Post, it is clear that he had Norman Rockwell in mind.But, by the 1960s, the opposition between authentic modernist abstraction andthe effortless realism of kitsch was less stable. When the Post abandonedRockwell’s covers in an effort to reverse declining circulation, among its firstchoices was a photograph that showed an infant playing with a Calder mobile(Fig. 9). Inside, the article showed more children frolicking with his sculptures,proving the pure appeal of modernism through the naıve vision of the child, andlisting the products of ‘the fertile mind of Alexander Calder’ that stood inParis, New York, Los Angeles, and ‘somewhere in Kansas where a little oldlady is snipping stars and circles out of shirt cardboards, stringing them onpicture wire to dangle from a piece of coat hanger’.92 Even at the distinctlyconservative Saturday Evening Post, the ‘almost universal’ appeal of Calder’sabstractions were, by the 1960s, mainstream enough to hijack the colour covermade so famous by America’s most popular, and critically derided, realistpainter.93

If graphic design and advertising had borrowed modernism’s innovationsthroughout the first decades of the twentieth century, the absorption of avantgarde innovations into commercial contexts had become, by mid-century, more

Fig. 9. The Saturday Evening Post, 27 February1965, cover. (Image courtesy Curtis Licensing.)

89. Many of these projects are, however, includedin Jean Lipman’s invaluable 1977 monograph,which remains singularly inclusive in its treatmentof Calder’s diverse practice. See Jean Lipman,Calder’s Universe (London: Thames and Hudson,1977).

90. See Clement Greenberg, ‘Review ofExhibitions of Alexander Calder and Giorgio deChirico’, vol. 1, p. 159; ‘The Present Prospects ofAmerican Painting and Sculpture’, vol. 2, p. 167;‘Painting and Sculpture in Prarie Canada Today’,vol. 4, p. 172; ‘America Takes the Lead’, vol. 4, p.216. All in John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg:The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1986–1993).

91. O’Brien, Clement Greenberg, p. 298.

92. Lemon, ‘The Soaring Art of AlexanderCalder’, p. 31.

93. Lemon, ‘The Soaring Art of AlexanderCalder’, p. 31.


Alex J. Taylor

at University of N



ownloaded from



rapid and voracious than ever. Both elite and popular commodities participated inthis process, often simultaneously. The divergent meanings that these contextsproduced coexisted in the field of products with which the works of the avantgarde was increasingly entangled. The fate of Calder’s mobile certainly pavedthe way for the rapid incorporation of pop and op in the 1960s, but as withthese later examples, it is insufficient to imagine the relationship as a kind ofunidirectional incorporation. In significant ways, mid-century modernism itselfwas constituted by its relation to mass culture. Mass mediation and imitationconfirmed which of the innovations of modernism really mattered: whether fora public striving for the consensus of good taste, or a critic seeking todistinguish passing trends from lasting artistic achievements.Persistent suspicions about the feminine qualities of modernism, the juvenile

simplicity of its aesthetic values, its disinterest in technical skill, or its embraceof transitory novelty and perpetual pursuit of newness – all critical turnsdeployed no less by anxious artworld outsiders than by avant garde arbiters –are tropes substantially informed by the relations between modernism and massculture. In the case of the Calder, the absorption of the mobile into the fabricof everyday life indelibly marked his art as an artificial kind of modernism, tooeasy and too entertaining. But no less than such links with decoration andconsumer culture damaged Calder’s art historical status, his public recognitionas one of the most famous sculptors of the century – and, by extension, hiscontinued favour with museums and collectors alike – is inextricably linkedwith the circulation of his art through its mass culture iterations, and the lastingfamiliarity with his sculptural ‘invention’ that they set in motion.

Thank you to Alastair Wright, Geraldine Johnson, Seth Feman, Jean-Philippe Antoineand my anonymous readers for their useful feedback on this essay.


The Calder Problem

at University of N



ownloaded from



Date post:	16-Jan-2023
Category:	Documents
Upload:	pitt
View:	0 times
Download:	0 times

The Calder Problem: Mobiles, Modern Taste, and Mass Culture

Documents