Calder's Circus

Dust jacket notes: "Alexander Calder, creator of the mobile and the stabile, occupies a unique position as the sculptor generally considered America's greatest, and the American artist with the widest international reputation today. His fame, and his career as a sculptor, began almost fifty years ago with his miniature Circus. The Circus, now on extended loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, was begun in the mid-twenties with just a few figures. Calder enlarged the Circus over half a dozen years into a full performance with a troupe of dozens of people and animals. He was invited in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties to give shows for special audiences in America and abroad, and the Circus brought him into early contact with the leaders of the Paris art world - Mondrian, Miro, Cocteau, Kiesler, Man Ray, Pascin, Leger, Foujita, pevsner, Arp - many of whom inspired aspects of his style. It is most significant, however, as a laboratory in which all the most original features of his later work developed. The toys, wire, wood and bronze sculpture, jewelry, drawings, gouaches, and even the great mobiles and stabiles and the recent 'animobiles. evolved from the miniature Circus. Calder's constant partiality for animal sculpture and his use of specific circus subjects and titles are significant, but less so than the fact that the basic qualities of his major works have developed as abstractions of his early Circus troupe. This is especially evident in the mobiles, with their precision engineering, their tightrope tension and balance, and their lively acrobatic motion. The circus aesthetic - a combination of suspense, surprise, spontaneity, humor, gaiety, palyfulness - has always been the basis of Calder's work. The occasional quotations that accompany the illustrations - Calder's remarks about circus things - are the only 'text' in the book...."