EXHIBITION: ALEXANDER CALDER - LES ANNEES PARISIENNE 1926-1933

A "transatlantic" artist, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is well known here for the large mobiles and stabiles of painted metal to be seen in French cities and parks. As well as presenting outstanding pieces, the exhibition offers an opportunity to witness the original state of works conceived in terms of motion and equilibrium but now condemned to immobility by the exactions of time or by the death of their creator and animator, these being here accompanied by films such as Jean Painlevé's and photographs such as Brassaï's, in which they are shown being operated by Calder himself.
Little animals of bent metal, acute magazine illustrations, toys sparkling with colour and ingenuity: the young Calder's earliest works offer a key to his art, the art of an inspired DIYer, of a magician who took base materials and primitive mechanisms and transformed them into true sculpture. These assemblies of recycled materials and objects, held together by wire, provided the models for his first masterpiece, the Circus, produced in Paris between 1926 and 1931.