Calders

The frigid way the last two generations of Calders are stiffing Philadelphia’s most celebrated three-generation sculptural family is a disgrace to the family’s name. And a pain to the potential pleasures of generations of Phillies to come.

Alexander S.C. Rower—grandson of “Sandy” Calder (1898-1976) and current head of the Calder Foundation in New York— wouldn’t even answer the telephone when the elaborate $70 million plan to link a Tadao Ando-designed museum for Calder with the Art Museum and the Rodin on the Parkway was suggested. So the plan just fell through. Governor Rendell had snatched $15 millions from his taut budget, and retired cable magnate and phillyanthropist H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest promised to raise $15 millions more. Now Gerry concludes: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a dead duck.” The real blockers appear to be the six Calder heirs who are greedy beasts unwilling to negotiate 99-year leases for Sandy Calder’s eye-catching stabiles.

Which reminds me sadly of my last visit to Louisiana Museum just north of Copenhagen. It has brought together the most glorious ensemble of Sandy’s mobiles/stabiles on its dining terrace, sited so that you’re looking through a clutch of Calders to the Oresund, which separates Denmark from Sweden. I was so distracted from my lunch by this delicious view that the Danes sharing my table inquired if there was something wrong with my food, so distraught looked I.

“No,” I replied, “I’m just envying you your Calder visual dessert.” And I went on to explain that my home town was Philadelphia, and that I was a certified nut when it came to Calder’s work, from his tiny circus ensembles to the humongous Chicago City Hall Stabile. And I further explained that three generations of sculpting Calders were Philly’s hidden pride and joy. And that we were having one hell of a time getting the heirs to lease some Golden Sandies to a projected museum along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. They were astonished that little old Denmark was way ahead of the artist’s hometown in celebrating his ouevre.

Heh, damn it. We can’t let those greedy heirs deny our town a Calder Future. I still remember with utter joy that day in 1962 when Ed Bacon took me and Joe Carreiro (then head of Industrial Design at Philadelphia College of Art) to the Penn statue atop City Hall that Sandy’s gramp sculpted. From there we could see the Swann Fountain at Logan Square that Sandy’s dad had created later. Indeed, that 360-degree view was my Philly baptism as a Detroit immigrant.

(There too was Claes Oldenburg’s “Clothespin,” a.k.a. “The Kiss.” And further off Robert Indiana’s LOVE. Not to forget those stunning initials, PSFS, atop our first skyscraper at 12th and Market, designed by William Lascaze and George Howe. Or the Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges. Every Philadelphia school child deserves the Bacon Saunter we two took that day with our most creative city planner. It is the ideal place to gawk at our Public Art.)

Let me use Bacon’s mind to solve the Calder impasse. Bacon induced Louie Kahn’s protégé, Richard Saul Wurman, to write a guide to Philadelphia architecture for elementary and secondary school children. I envision an analogous Calder Walk Guide, beginning with a sneaky preview of the Calders in the Art Museum collection. (The National Gallery of Art already offers an on-line saunter through the giant retrospective it created in his honor.)

Then let’s let a teacher who has been enlightened by a Rickie Wurman-level guidebook on Philly outdoor sculpture lead a lively crowd of young-uns down our grand Champs Elysées, grandly named after our greatest tinkerer, Old Ben. The tour guide can point out that it was Marcel Duchamps, our greatest Urinator, who dubbed Sandy’s moving works “mobiles.” And later Jean Arp dubbed his stationary jobs “stabiles.” (We’ll keep quiet as the kids pass by Sly Stallone’s reeking Rocky Balboa sculpture, a stabile that wishes it were a mobile.)

As I looked into Sandy Calder’s life, I became all the more certain that his bio would appeal to those myriad students who don’t quite dig the Kultur thing. It surprised me to learn that Sandy’s parents, both artists, dissuaded young Alexander from pursuing an artistic career because it was such an iffy source of income. So Sandy studied mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology! It was a while later, serving below-decks on a San Francisco-New York passenger cruiser, that he experienced his artistic epiphany. While steaming past Guatemala, he looked out a porthole, and lo, the full moon rose from the sea just as the sun was sinking. Wowie, mused our hero.

When he got back to New York, Sandy enrolled in the Art Students League. And before you could say Pablo Picasso, he was in Paris (1926) showing off his Cirque Calder—tiny wire figures made to move by the gears and motors this onetime engineer brought to his muse. It dazzled his fellow artists, who were already accustomed to quirky Phillies, as they had just learned to love Man Ray’s strange photographs. The Cirque Calder so beguiled Arno Breker (1900-91), soon to gain notoriety as Hitler’s sculptor (and later undeserved obliquity), that Calder was invited to share Breker’s atelier. His career had begun.

Let’s not let it get bogged down in a relative diatribe.