Les Granettes, 1953, a behemoth Alexander Calder mobile standing nearly 11 feet tall, whose red and black polygons float daintily in the air, is currently on public view in “Calder: François Premier” at Hauser & Wirth Paris (through Dec. 19) for the first time in 72 years.
The work takes its name from the hamlet near Aix-en-Provence where Calder and his wife, Louisa, stayed after their return to France in 1953. After a stint as a hydraulic engineer and draftsman, Calder moved to Paris in 1926, where he connected with the French avant-garde and honed his distinct mobile technique. By 1953, Calder was already an established artist who had won the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale just a year before, but that spring, the artist and his wife set up in a small cottage with little running water and no electricity.
Calder continued his practice at a nearby blacksmith’s shop, surrounded by the sweeping lavender fields and red-hued mountains of Provence, cutting and welding several large standing mobiles in his signature style, chalking their forms directly onto steel plates. Here, he would also create a series of ink and gouache paintings based on bold lines and geometric patterns of his mobiles.
That November, Calder traded three mobiles for François Premier, a crumbling 17th-century stone house built against a cliff in Saché, in the Loire Valley, where Les Granettes would later stand in the courtyard. Calder would divide his time between the French country home in Saché and Roxbury, Connecticut, for the rest of his life. The French countryside became a significant influence on his sculpture practice, with several works bearing the names of his surroundings.
To commemorate the opening of this new exhibition, Calder Foundation President—and Calder’s grandson—Sandy Rower sat down with CULTURED to discuss his grandfather’s legacy and the long-overdue homecoming of Calder’s works to France.
The new exhibition focuses on the postwar period of Calder’s work. What drew you to this period, and what do you hope visitors take away from it?
My grandparents returned to live in France in 1953, 20 years after departing Paris for the United States to start a family. Saché became their primary home in the last two decades of my grandfather’s life, an exceptionally fertile time. I look forward to sharing with visitors this moment of great personal and creative expansion for Calder and showing how rural France at mid-century allowed him to go deeper within.
What is the piece you were most eager to include in the exhibition?
Les Granettes is a large-scale standing mobile that we are exhibiting for the first time in more than 70 years. My grandfather made it in Aix-en-Provence with the help of a local blacksmith. It wasn’t a commission, which was highly unusual for a piece of this size. Calder was especially fond of it and kept it in the intimate courtyard of François Premier, his home in Saché, which gives this exhibition its name.
Can you talk a little about Calder’s return to Paris in the ’50s? What had he been doing before, and why was this such a momentous move for him creatively and personally?
My grandfather was already an exceptionally well-known artist when he returned to France in 1953. He had built upon his intrinsic vocabulary in the sculptures from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he was eager to come home to France, re-expose himself to Europe, and see how he could further develop.
In what ways did the move to France influence or inspire the work he made in the years that followed?
Calder focused on large-scale outdoor sculpture and fluid works on paper in Aix-en-Provence and Saché during these years, the two bodies of work that would captivate and dominate his practice in the last decades of his life.
Much of Calder’s work is driven by the idea of objects in motion. How is that guiding principle reflected in this exhibition?
Something that is very effective about his work is how it forces us to slow down, to be present, to grapple with anxieties—through impermanence. A mobile demands time, evolving its composition in space, and the anticipation that builds can be exhilarating. This exhibition reveals the beginnings of a new maturity in my grandfather’s work.
What is an aspect of Calder’s work that you still think is under-recognized?
On the surface, Calder pushed beyond the established norms by dissolving sculpture’s mass and setting it irretrievably into motion. But on a deeper level, my grandfather engaged sensations of immateriality and the actuality of the moment, meaning the present-time perceptions of the viewer. This is what keeps his work relevant in the 21st century.
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