CALDER, Alexander

The son and grandson of sculptors, but also an alumnus of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Calder was a great inventor who recognized that the early modern avant-garde idea of Kinetic Art could be realized without motors. His innovation was art that moved through the balancing and counterbalancing of weights within the piece itself. His colleague Marcel Duchamp dubbed them mobiles. Initially Calder used simple wooden shapes, most of them painted, which are delicately suspended from...