Arts and Letters

I met Sandy in Paris in the early thirties. He was then considered by friends un drôle d'Américain. Inventive, young and playful, he belonged in their minds to the new America that was being discovered in those years.

Sandy enjoyed living twenty-four hours a day. He was alert to everything happening around him; even when he took brief naps, leaning on the marble tops of the bistro tables, he was only half asleep and managed to pick up the conversations taking place around him. When he woke up, he was more awake than anybody in the party.

He enjoyed all his work, regardless of its importance. He spent much time finding solutions to ordinary household problems. In Roxbury or Saché, he would knock off work on an important piece of sculpture just to repair a faucet, a doorknob, or a friend's valise. House accessories of all types show the Calder trademark. He had a rooted dislike for slick industrial design. His products were primitive in their own way but strong and natural. He enjoyed food, even when it was not too good. He enjoyed ordinary wine and ordinary people. In parties, he used to dance with anybody anywhere—in a small Italian restaurant on First Avenue in New York or in the streets of Rio de Janeiro during Carnival.

Important events and important people he took as they came. He treated everyone he liked in the same warm friendly fashion. He disliked pretentious people who believe or behaved as “important” members of a group of friends. He loved people in general and enjoyed their company and jokes. He had many friends that loved him.

He revolted against unfair things, such as exploitation, war, or hypocrisy, and with Louisa, his lifelong companion, he made his views very clear when he published a full-page statement in The New York Times in protest to the Vietnam war. I am sure he did not even consider for one moment how many commissions such openness would make him lose. Sandy was high above all such concerns or interests.

He was a great human being besides an outstandingly creative personality. His works show these qualities in the man. They are uncomplicated and healthy, rare virtues in our times. They are the direct expression of his joie de vivre. Everything he did is understandable and expresses the joy he experienced in the creative process, which is transmitted to the observer. This joy is contagious. This was evidenced in the large crowds of people of all ages that visited his last great show at the Whitney Museum in New York, which opened only a few weeks before his death. The show was justly called "Calder's Universe." There was a great variety of exhibits, from the early line drawings, the circus figures, the wire portraits, the first mobiles; the visitors then moved on to jewelry, tapestries, and paintings and then to his great stabiles and more recent works. The continuity in his selection of forms, his use of bright colors, gave a feeling of life and movement that made one aware that the same mind and hand were always present making everything alive, harmonious, and balanced. Whatever he produced, he never hesitated in his choices.

Joan Miró was a lifelong friend of Sandy. In many ways, they have a similar approach to life and the world around them, their environments. Both are interested and moved by ordinary objects and the forms in nature or manmade forms. Their works are often inspired by what they find cast away at the roadside. Pure, primary colors are used by both, as they were by Léger and Mondrian, who were also close friends of Sandy. They shared the same years in Paris and were frequently together. This give-and-take is natural in the art world, just as it is in all activities of life.

But Sandy Calder stands unique from the start. It took him a full life to create his universe. The more he worked, the more unique his personality became. He shaped the places he lived in, his houses, the objects around him, the ways he dressed, even his cars. He was once given a brand new car, which was soon depreciated (in terms of its market value) by Sandy's transformations and additions. He changed the spirit of everything he touched; it became part of himself.

But, besides all this playful work, Sandy had an inherent greatness that enabled him to invent and produce his great sculptures. The facility and inventiveness of his early works seemed to develop naturally and without effort, into his later monumental pieces—the stabiles and the combined mobile-stabiles of his last years. They are considered "abstract," while still always evoking natural, living forms. They are in a way monumental and architectural, reminiscent of medieval structures. When looking at pictures of buildings, he expressed his preference for strong primitive looking structures that express, like his works, the ways they have been put together and why they do not fall apart. His large stabiles are buttressed like cathedrals. These pieces really take possession of the sites they are conceived for. They are monumental from the start, in contrast with so many recent attempts by other sculptors that are nothing more than blow-ups of small objects.

Sandy was both a sculptor and a painter. As a painter, his flat forms, in moving, give way to many paintings; his colored cut-outs are more in the pictorial vocabulary than in that of the sculptor's. But, as they warp and twist, they take possession of space and become his own special kind of sculptures. He is also a strange kind of engineer: he had a genius for balance and movement.

Sometimes, when visiting a comprehensive one-man show, the work of a lifetime, you become aware of the limitations of the individual. No matter how good some works may be, they become repetitious and are more effective in isolation. With Calder's work, the effect is the reverse. They add up to make a totality or a whole, his universe, and you become more aware of his inexhaustible inventiveness.

Sandy left us all at the peak of his genius and glory. He was unique. He is irreplaceable. His friends and admirers will all miss him. To the world at large, he will remain one of the greatest artists of our time and, internationally, he was the most influential American sculptor of the twentieth century.