Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940 - Hardcover

Perl, Jed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300233310 ISBN 13: 9780300233315

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor. In this beautifully written, deeply researched book Jed Perl shows how Alexander Calder became an avant-garde artist with enduring appeal. One of our most beloved modern artists, Calder is celebrated above all as the inventor of the mobile. Only now is the full story of his life being told in a gloriously illustrated biography, which features unseen photographs and is based on scores of interviews and unprecedented access to Calder's papers. Born into a family of artists, Calder forged important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century masters, including Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. His early years studying engineering were followed by artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to Louisa James-- a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story. This transatlantic life carries readers from New York's Greenwich Village, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then to a refugee-filled London just before the War, where Calder's circle of friends included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Kenneth Clark.

About this title

About the Author

JED PERL is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine's Alphabet, and New Art City, which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Book of the Year. He lives in New York City.

Review

“Calder is an artist whose influence is so ubiquitous that you sometimes completely lose sight of him. Jed Perl, one of our most brilliant art critics, has remedied this in a superbly researched, illustrated, and crafted biography of his early years. We can now savor Calder's accomplishment fully and see where his genius lies, and how it matters to us today.” —John Ashbery
 
“In this richly satisfying biography, Calder appears as charming as ever, but he is also a much more powerful figure than the beloved teddy bear of legend. He becomes a modern philosopher-king, unpretentious but serious, who takes the true measure of a world that never stops moving.”
—Mark Stevens, co-author with Annalyn Swan of De Kooning: An American Master

“All artists are critics but very few critics are artists. Jed Perl is one of those few. He has the critical imagination to imagine Calder’s imagination, and the rare ability to engage that of the reader.” —Fran Lebowitz
 
“Calder’s magic brilliantly captivated by an astute biographer.” —John Richardson, author of A Life of Picasso

“Not all brilliant studies are definitive, and not all definitive studies are brilliant: Jed Perl’s Calder succeeds at being both. It’s a masterwork account of the life of one of America’s greatest artists that’s also an account of America coming into its own. Passionate, learned, playful and ranging, it’s as solidly-grounded as a stabile, but like a mobile it appears to defy gravity—and float.” —Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers and Moving Kings

“Perl’s vibrant, driving prose distills a detailed, captivating and multigenerational history into a lucid and useful biography that miraculously eschews excess. He reveals how Calder’s magnetic personality and synthetic thinking determined a radical new course for 20th-century art.” —Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, ‪Whitney Museum of American Art

“A meticulously researched biography of one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century....Not only an essential record of the first 40 years of Calder’s life, but an exceptional chronicle of the genesis of modernism.” —Kirkus Reviews *starred review*

“A hulking and exhaustively researched biography of American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976), focusing on the first four decades of his life....Perl throughout emphasizes Calder’s debt to the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in his ability to blend fine art with everyday objects such as children’s toys. Generously illustrated and delivered in vibrant writing (he describes one of Calder’s tabletop standing mobiles as ‘the spiderweb strength and delicacy of an Emily Dickinson poem’), Perl offers what will be without question the authoritative source on the man whom the French affectionately nicknamed le roi du fil de fer—‘the wire king.’” —Publishers Weekly *starred review*

“Art critic Perl joins the select ranks of multivolume arts biographers, among them Hilary Spurling on Matisse and John Richardson on Picasso, with the first in a foundational two-book inquiry into the unusually sunny life and exuberantly radical work of sculptor Alexander Calder....Graced with 400 photographs, Perl’s dynamic and illuminating biography, as buoyant and evocative as Calder’s sculptures, concludes with the ebullient and cosmic artist poised for ever more creative adventures and renown.” —Booklist *starred review*

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300233310
• ISBN 13: 9780300233315
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 704