that included not only collaborating with his father on the city hall project but also the famed Swann Fountain of Philadelphia and the statue of George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City. The third Alexander Calder, born in Lawnton, PA, in 1898, showed artistic promise as a young boy, making animal and circus figures out of wire that presaged some of the most renowned work he would make years later. Initially Calder was allied with the Surrealist movement and the champions of pure abstraction. In his mid-twenties
Calder lived in Paris at the peak of the avant-garde era with such luminaries as Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Leger, and the American, Man Ray. Obviously at this moment in the 20th century, Paris was the epicenter of the artistic world, electric with creativity. Calder consumed this atmosphere and made works that referenced astronomy, a pre-occupation that permeated the Parisian art scene. His works, such as Gibraltar of 1936, which features two eschewed rods thrust upward from a wooden base, are meant to reference a personal solar system—the earthly uni-
Installation photograph, Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, November 24, 2013-July 27, 2014, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Calder Foundation, New York, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, photo ©Fredrik Nilsen
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