Alexander Calder: ‘Modern from the Start’ The Museum of Modern Art presents ‘Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start’, a focused look at one of the most well-known and beloved artists of the 20th century through the lens of his relationship with MoMA. On view from March 14, 2021, through August 7, 2021.
Source: Museum of Modern Art
“Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” includes approximately 70 artworks paired with film, historical photographs, and other archival materials drawn from MoMA’s collection and augmented by key loans from the Calder Foundation, New York.
The exhibition takes as a point of departure the idea that Alexander Calder (American, 1898– 1976) assumed the unofficial role of the Museum’s “house artist” during its formative years. His work was first exhibited at MoMA in 1930, months after the institution opened its doors, and he was among only a handful of artists selected by the Museum’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., for inclusion in his two landmark 1936 exhibitions, “Cubism and Abstract Art” and “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”. To inaugurate the then-new Goodwin and Stone Building in 1939, Calder was commissioned to make a hanging mobile for its interior “Bauhaus Staircase”; the resulting “Lobster Trap and Fish Tail” still hangs there today.
Calder also worked closely with curator James Johnson Sweeney, in collaboration with artists Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Matter, on the checklist, catalogue, and installation of his major 1943 midcareer retrospective at MoMA, which introduced the artist, by then already known in Europe, to a broad American audience, through a survey of work made since his foundational years in the late 1920s living and working in Paris, at the heart of the international avantgarde. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Calder’s sculptures were a mainstay of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where they have continued to reappear in the intervening decades. Ten years before his death, in 1966, Calder made an impressive gift of 19 artworks to MoMA in order to round out the institution’s holdings.
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