: Thanks to a very generous $5 million grant to the Philadelphia
Museum of Art from the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2001, the
Benjamin Franklin Parkway today became the site for the second in
an on-going series of displays of artistic treasures that will
augment the enjoyment of any stroll along the parkway for the
next year. The constellation of 11 outdoor sculptures by the
Philadelphia-born sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) - one of
the great artists of the Twentieth Century - is situated at 22nd
Street and the Parkway, on the site of the proposed Calder
Museum.
The much-anticipated installation brings to Philadelphia eight
new loans from the Calder Foundation that range over the two
decades during which the artist was most engaged in the creation
of outdoor sculptures on a monumental scale. They include "Funghi
Neri," 1957; "Discontinuous," 1962; "Polygons on Triangles,"
1963; "The Rocket," 1964; "Dent de Sagesse (Wisdom Tooth)," 1964;
"The Tall One," 1968; untitled 1972; and "Angulaire," 1975. All
are constructed of sheet metal, painted black.
This group of elegant sculptures now gracefully interacts with
"Ordinary," 1969, the 21-foot-tall, multicolored stabile/mobile
that had already occupied the site, and with two other painted,
metal stabiles that formerly were seen in the garden of the Rodin
Museum, including "The Pagoda," 1963, also lent by the Calder
Family Foundation, and "Three Discs, One Lacking," 1968, owned by
the City of Philadelphia. With the installation of Calder's works
along the Parkway, Philadelphians and visitors alike can fully
appreciate the boldness and brilliance of Calder's art as they
approach the area where the new museum is expected to rise.
The 12-year program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts
underscores the connection of Calder's work to the achievements
of his father, Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945) who designed
the Swann Memorial Fountain at Logan Circle in 1924, and his
grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), who designed the
gigantic figure of William Penn that stands atop the clock tower
of City Hall (1886-1894), as well as all the other bronze and
marble sculptures that embellish that great building.
Anne d'Harnoncourt, director and chief executive officer of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, said, "Philadelphia is the
quintessential sculptor's city, with superb sites for a wealth of
public art executed over the past three centuries. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the succession of sculptures by three
generations of Calders along the parkway, now so brilliantly
enriched."
Alexander S.C. Rower, director of the Calder Foundation, said, "I
can think of no more appropriate place to celebrate the greatness
of my grandfather's work. It is extraordinary in this urban
garden and underscores the remarkable place that generations of
my family hold in the city of Philadelphia."
Alexander Milne Calder, who immigrated to Philadelphia from
Scotland, created some 200 sculptural decorations adorning City
Hall in addition to the much-loved bronze statue of William Penn.
Alexander Stirling Calder, who was born in Philadelphia, was
especially noted for his Swann Memorial Fountain but also created
many other sculptures throughout the city and on the parkway. At
the western end of the Parkway, Alexander Calder's ethereal
mobile "Ghost," 1964, is suspended in the great stair hall of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Members of Calder's family formed the Calder Foundation in 1987
to promote, research and disseminate Alexander Calder's work.
Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Penn., in 1898. He
graduated in 1919 from the Stevens Institute of Technology with a
degree in mechanical engineering. In 1923, after a series of
assorted jobs, he entered the Art Students League in New York and
embarked on a career that would revolutionize the course of
modern sculpture and earn him international renown.
From 1926 to 1929, his miniature wire circus sculpture and
performance piece "Cirque" brought Calder to the attention of the
art world's leading figures, including Miró, Leger, Mondrian and
Picasso. He worked in a wide range of media and is best known for
inventing freely moving constructions suspended in air (for which
Marcel Duchamp coined the term "mobiles") and for his large
freestanding sculptures (dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp).
In the final decades before his death in 1976, he devoted himself
increasingly to monumental outdoor sculpture. His work figures
prominently in the modern collections of major museums throughout
the world. A retrospective exhibition celebrating the centennial
of his birth at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in
1998, also shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
attracted 603,700 visitors during its run in the two cities.
