Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder
By Pedro E. Guerrero
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 160 pages, $40
Alexander Calder, one of the most joyful, playful artists of the 20th Century, is also one of its most accessible. The shapes and colors of the works for which he is best known–stabiles and mobiles–need no explanation. Even children– especially children–react to them with delight, for Calder was able to retrieve in his work that childlike quality that adults usually shed to acquire a “grownup” veneer.
“Calder at Home–The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder,” by Pedro E. Guerrero, has been published to coincide with an upcoming major retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington and the centenary of Calder’s birth.
More than a collection of his work, it is a celebration of his life and the way he and his wife, Louisa, lived it.
Calder (Sandy to his friends) shaped everything in his environment, endowing even the humblest objects with beauty. He crafted his own kitchen utensils–works of simple, sculptural beauty–and painted faces on the undersides of toilet seats.
More Top Picks Buying Advice
Louisa’s contribution as designer, cook, collector and organizer is also here appreciated.
In addition to the wonderful photographs, Guerrero, long a Calder friend, contributes a lovely personal essay. But the true pleasures of this book are its glimpses of the spaces in which Calder worked and lived. The jumble of beloved objects, collected and created, the barely controlled chaos of his studios, reveal something vital about creativity itself.
At the core of great art is process: the doing of the thing. The finished work is often merely byproduct. Calder’s life and work mesh completely: His life was his work, his process his product.