The first exhibition of works by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is due to open in Russia next month at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Alexander Calder: Retrospective (8 June-30 August) includes 52 works drawn from the New York-based Calder Foundation, along with several key pieces on loan from private collections based in Russia.
“Remarkably, there have been very few exhibitions with Calder’s work in Russia,” says Alexander Rower, Calder’s grandson and president of the Calder Foundation. “There has never been a solo Calder show in Russia, making this retrospective at the Pushkin long overdue.”
Officials at the Pushkin sent the Calder Foundation a letter expressing an interest in Calder’s canon. “I know my grandfather would have seized on this opportunity to show his work amid the Pushkin’s venerable collection, so we were delighted to begin a conversation with them,” Rower says.
The first part of the show will focus on Calder’s wire sculptures he made in Paris in the late 1920s. “I think best in wire,” the sculptor once said, referring to the technique of depicting famous figures and animals in the medium. These include Hercules and Lion, 1928, which will be shown in Russia.
Rower links Calder’s practice with aspects of Modernist Russian art history, saying: “With the invention of the mobile [kinetic sculptures] in 1931, Calder resolved a problem posed by the Constructivists at the beginning of the 20th century: the depiction of movement in its purest form. While Calder’s work resonates with that of the Russians, he came about his vocabulary through a starkly different, intuitive route; he did not even learn about the Constructivists until the end of 1933.”
Red is Dominant (1947) and Blue Feather (around 1948) are among the key standing mobile works included in the show. Black Mobile with Hole (1954), which was first presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Calder retrospective in New York in 1964, also features. A selection of maquettes, which throw light on how Calder constructed his large-scale public art pieces, will also go on display.
