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    Calder : the conquest of time : the early years, 1898-1940 / Jed Perl.

    • Title:Calder : the conquest of time : the early years, 1898-1940 / Jed Perl.
    •    
    • Author/Creator:Perl, Jed, author.
    • Published/Created:New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
    • Holdings

       
    • Library of Congress Subjects:Calder, Alexander, 1898-1976.
      Artists--United States--Biography.
      Sculptors--United States--Biography.
    • Genre/Form:Biographies.
    • Edition:First edition.
    • Description:viii, 687 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
    • Summary:Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography,which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal.
      "Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This...book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen-further enrich the story." -- Publisher's description
    • Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 607-649) and index.
    • ISBN:9780307272720 (hardcover)
      0307272729 (hardcover)
      9780451494214 (ebook)
    • Contents:Prologue: "I was framed"
      Philadelphia
      Stirling and Nanette
      Father and son
      Pasadena
      Croton-on-Hudson
      The Panama-Pacific International Exposition
      The Stevens Institute of Technology
      Engineering
      The Art Students League
      Animal sketching
      Paris
      Cirque Calder
      Wire sculpture
      Rue Cels
      Louisa James
      Villa Brune
      Mondrian's studio
      Marriage
      Volumes
      Vecteurs
      Densités
      Mobiles
      Rue de la Colonie
      Painter Hill Road
      From Sandra to Socrate
      A very good year
      Mercury fountain
      A London season
      Turning forty
      The classical style.
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