Alexander Calder’s wild jewelry
Angelica Huston in one of Alexander Calder's creations
Nobody could be a wallflower in a piece of Alexander Calder jewelry.
It was a sure remedy for reticence. Wearing a piece of Calder turned one into a mobile, and often into something more martial and primal, a Masai goddess or Celtic chieftain.
Calder, who spent the bulk of his artistic life in Roxbury, was celebrated for breathing air into sculpture, with his three-dimensional mobiles and stabiles. But his contribution to jewelry has been overlooked and underappreciated. A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hints at why that might be. Culling from the more than 1,000 unique pieces of brass, silver and gold ornaments, the Met has come up with a representative sample of 90, the first time they have been exhibited exclusively.
That is more than enough to convince viewers of Calder’s transgressive approach to fine art. These bent, twisted, coiled spirals of hammered metal say as much about the artist’s fetishistic devotion to primitive art as they do about his own pilgrim spirit. Calder didn’t simply want art to move; he wanted people to move with it.
These are sinuous designs that hypnotize you with their enormity and elasticity. They twist and pivot, suspend and support, twist and swerve. Only a few are gold – including a stunning ring of a spiral curling into a double-helix – most are brass or silver and all are bruised by Calder’s hammer. Most were made for friends; although it’s clear Calder had a broader audience in mind. These works, particularly the gifts, are leavened with Calder’s pun-heavy humor, soldered with his breathtaking manipulation of formal images. (While courting his wife, Louisa, he created a bracelet fashioned out of brass wire that read “Medusa,” a reference to Louisa’ untamed ringlets)
Calder’s puckish sense of humor, vividly displayed here with his fish, pig, lizard and initialized brooches, can sometimes undercut the bravura nature of his art. Strangely, in these smaller, mesmerizing pieces, his broader ambition becomes more evident. Whether in mobiles, drawings or steel sculptures, Calder was blurring distinctions between high and low, primitive and precious, art and craft and even surrealism and modernism, whose concepts he deftly straddled.
To achieve that in the international art scene was but no means a cinch, but to do so in the realm of jewelry heightened the intimacy of his quest. This was a man who created jewelry out of scrap metal during the glittering jazz age and put it on heiresses and socialites. And they wore it – even if it hurt.
Peggy Guggenheim, in particular, was an admirer and a picture of her in her Calder earrings, which are on display nearby, demonstrates how overwhelming (and uncomfortable) the pieces could be. Guggenheim poises delicately, looking a bit like she is about to be impaled by their exuberance.
But Guggenheim loved the earrings, and boasted among her friends, that although they had brooches, bracelets and necklaces, only she had a Calder mobile hanging from her lobes (She also had a Calder headboard for her pied a terre in Venice.)
Calder began creating jewelry out of scrap parts as early as 8, when he cobbled together some electric cables he found to make a ring for his sister’s doll. He began creating jewelry in earnest beginning in 1928 and kept at it throughout his career. Jewelry seemed to give him the opportunity to explore the archetypal power of ancient symbols in a more tangible way. After moving to Paris in 1926, Calder had clearly been influenced by the primitive art he saw at Le Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero (Today Le Musee l’homme). He was particularly captivated by late-Bronze Age Celtic ornamentation, which he
As his grandson, Alexander S.C. Rower said, “The jewelry is an invitation to join him in a utopian view that he had in which you don’t have to wear pearls and jewels. Why not wear brass and ceramic plates?”
Why not indeed? As his friend, the British surrealist Stanley William Hayter said, “In the early days in Paris, everybody was wearing Calder jewelry.”
A Calder collar signaled Bohemianism of the most primitive sort.
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