Calder’s Inventive Jewelry Featured in Metropolitan Museum Exhibition
American-born artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is celebrated for his mobiles, stabiles, paintings, and objets d’art. The landmark exhibition Calder Jewelry—to be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 9, 2008, through March 1, 2009—is the first museum presentation dedicated solely to his extensive output of inventive jewelry
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Among the most dramatic works in the exhibition are three large and dynamic pieces of Calder jewelry that were donated to the Metropolitan Museum in 2006 by Chicago collector Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman.
“The recent gift of Muriel Newman’s magnificent Calder jewelry to the Metropolitan made it clear to us that the subject deserved the extended examination that this exhibition affords. I am certain that our audience will delight in Calder’s inventiveness and be seduced by his virtuosic technique and lighthearted humor,” remarked Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.
As early as 1906, at the age of eight, Alexander Calder fashioned jewelry for his sister’s dolls from scraps of fine copper wire found on the street. In 1928, while continuing to explore wire sculpture, Calder created one of his earliest pieces of jewelry as an adult—a necklace with a dangling, abstracted fly. He created jewelry with increasing frequency through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and continued to make jewelry until the end of his life.
Calder possessed an uncanny ability to synthesize a variety of influences from the world around him to create often simple, always meaningful, and ultimately modern jewelry. In the early 20th century, many avant-garde artists began to collect African tribal art and to reference it in their paintings and sculptures. Likewise, Calder’s brooches, tiaras, and necklaces have more in common with the pectorals, collars, diadems, and neckpieces made by ancient cultures than traditional western European jewelry. For example, Calder repeatedly incorporated the spiral—a typical motif in late Bronze Age artifacts—into his jewelry, as well as his wire figures, drawings, paintings, and other decorative arts. The artist’s personal collections, which included objects from African, Oceanic, and Precolumbian cultures, substantiate his eclectic taste.
Calder’s exploration of jewelry in the 1930s also coincided with his burgeoning interest in Surrealism. As his largest and most dramatic ornaments are unwieldy to wear, Calder’s jewelry may be seen as a Surrealistic strategy to entrap the wearer into participating in an art performance or being metamorphosed by the object. Among those who wore his jewelry were sophisticated art aficionados and artists, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Mary Rockefeller, French actress Jeanne Moreau, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
His sculptural art, regardless of category, has less to do with solidity than with lightness, air, motion, and graceful formal relationships. Calder’s sense of economy, balance, and adaptability, so characteristic of the artist’s much larger and more familiar mobiles and stabiles, extends to his jewelry. While Calder’s more diminutive avant-garde creations converged closely with the aesthetics of the modern age, they remain unmistakably Calder
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