Alexander Caulder

Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born into a family of renowned artists who encouraged him to create from a very young age. As a boy, he had his own workshop where he made toys for himself and his sister. He received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1919 but soon after decided to pursue a career as an artist. Calder attended classes at the Art Students League in New York from 1923 to 1926, supporting himself by working as …

…his amusing performances with a partly-mechanized miniature circus of wire and cloth figures. By 1930 he had developed freely moving sculptures of arcs and spheres. Calder's mobiles were squarely within the spirit of the times, from their engagement with machine technology to their use of abstraction as a universal language of creative truth. Linked to Dada and Surrealism by playfulness and chance arrangement, his sculpture responded to Constructivism by energizing art's elements in the viewer's space.