CALDER at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder.. This item is unavailable.CALDER at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder.

Inspired by a 1963 trip to Alexander Calder's home for "House & Garden", this book, a 13-year odyssey to document the artist's lifestyle, features an intimate, insider's view of the way he lived, worked, and entertained. 150 photos, many in color .

What a thrill this book should be for those who have yet to fall in love with sculptor Alexander Calder, who died in 1976. And it will deepen the affection the rest of us already hold for him and his fabulous creations. The author, photographer Pedro Guerrero, first took his camera to Calder's Connecticut studio in 1963, on a routine assignment with an editor from House and Garden magazine. As soon as they arrived at Calder's shambly, magical, jam-packed home, Guerrero could sense that the editor was less than enthralled. "If I had known you were going to photograph that room," she later sniffed, "I would have straightened the slipcovers."

"What a thing to notice!" writes Guerrero, who was, as he put it, "plotting my next move." Over the next 13 years, he photographed Calder, often with his beautiful wife, Louisa, in different houses and studios, all of them mesmerizingly overflowing with wire sculptures, homemade toys for their grandchildren, stabiles, mobiles, piles of mail, chairlike contraptions, and sculptural kitchen paraphernalia. "Be careful where you step," Calder warned Guerrero in the studio, "everything here is important."

Calder at Home is as playful and entertaining as the artist's famous Circus acrobats and animals installed (alas, behind glass) in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art. From the foreword by Calder's grandson to Guerrero's final, pensive photograph of the master alchemist, this is a book to dream on. --Peggy Moorman