“Southern Cross,” a maquette from 1963 by Alexan-der Calder.
SALEM — An inclination to take seriously the work of Alexander Calder could be said to depend on how seriously you take beauty itself. But actually, beauty doesn’t need your seriousness, and may in fact be more at ease with smiles than sobriety. The same is true of Calder.
Calder Foundation
Smiles, creeping out Mona Lisa-style from the corners of the mouth, emerge before you even set eyes on the art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, where Calder is the subject of a numinous exhibition, his first museum show in the Boston area since the 1950s. (He died in 1976 at 78.)
You enter the space and encounter not a “mobile” or a “stabile” — terms for Calder’s moving or static constructions coined by his artist friends Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp — but a slowly shifting shadow. The physical object casting the shadow, a large, suspended mobile from 1940 called “Eucalyptus,” has been placed behind a semi-transparent screen. In a nice curatorial ploy — floating suspense! — the piece itself isn’t actually seen until halfway through the exhibit, by which time you will likely be under Calder’s spell.
The show, which was organized by Stephanie Barron for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and overseen in Salem by the Peabody Essex’s Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, brings together 40 works, including mobiles, stabiles, and a few midsize maquettes made for the huge public sculptures that Calder produced for sites all over the world in the latter stages of his career.
Displayed chronologically, the exhibition begins with beautifully proportioned sculptures made from thin rods or wires that describe circles, open-ended right angles, and diagonals connected to small discs and spheres — black, white, or red — for balance and counterweight. They suggest celestial harmonies, astronomers’ models, or — slightly closer to home — Russian Constructivism transposed into three dimensions.
Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic
By Sebastian Smee
fonte:@edisonmariotti #edisonmariotti http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2014/09/20/beauty-casts-spell-calder-art-peabody-essex-museum/VdsAgDTZkzhhpr8tCaO2aI/story.html
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