Alexander Calder-Alexander Iolas

Alexander Calder

Childhood

Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898, Calder came from a family of artists. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them located in Philadelphia. Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.^[1] Calder’s parents were married on February 22, 1895. His older sister, Margaret “Peggy” Calder, was born in 1896. Her married name was Margaret Calder Hayes, and she was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.^[2]

In 1902, at the age of four, Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub that is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In that same year, he completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.^[3]

Three years later, when Calder was seven and his sister was nine, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis and Calder’s parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year.^[4] The children were reunited with their parents in late March, 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.^[5]

After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder’s first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sister’s dolls. On January 1, 1907, Calder’s mother took him to the Tournament of Roses and he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder’s wire circus shows.^[6]

In 1909, when Calder was in the fourth grade, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as Christmas gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped. These sculptures are frequently cited as early examples of Calder’s skill.^[7]

In 1910, Stirling Calder’s rehabilitation was complete and the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where he briefly attended the Germantown Academy, and then to Croton-on-Hudson in New York.^[8] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by the painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. As Calder described:

We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights.^[9]

After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended Yonkers High.

In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.^[10] He began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915. During Alexander Calder’s high school years between 1912 and 1915, the Calder family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location Calder’s parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated in the class of 1915.

Early years

Although Calder’s parents encouraged his creativity as a child, they discouraged their children from becoming artists, knowing that it was an uncertain and financially difficult career. In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering after learning about the discipline from a classmate at Lowell High School named Hyde Lewis. Stirling Calder arranged for his son's enrollment at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. During his freshman year, Calder stayed in Castle Stevens, a 40-room Victorian mansion that was originally a summer home of the Stevens family. In 1959, Castle Stevens was demolished and replaced in 1962 by the 14-story Wesley J. Howe Administration Building.

It was a beautiful room in a square tower, really a wonderful room, with windows looking up and down the river and across—it was all windows.^[11]

Calder joined the football team during his freshman year at Stevens and practiced with the team all four years, but he never played in a game. He also played lacrosse, at which he was more successful. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. He excelled in the subject of mathematics.

In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1917, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.

Red Mobile, 1956. Painted sheet metal and metal rods, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

I learned to talk out of the side of my mouth and have never been quite able to correct it since.^[12]

Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919. For the next several years, he worked a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulics engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company, but he was not content in any of the roles.

In June 1922, Calder started work as a fireman in the boiler room of the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder woke on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. As he described in his autobiography:

It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch — a coil of rope — I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other.

The H.F. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled up to Aberdeen, Washington where his sister lived with her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.

Art career

Having decided to become an artist, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work.

In 1926, Calder moved to Paris. He established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre. At the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant, he began to create toys with articulation. He never found the toy merchant again, but, at the urging of fellow sculptor José De Creeft, he submitted his toys to the Salon des Humoristes. Later that fall, Calder began to create his Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other found objects. Designed to fit into suitcases (it eventually grew to fill five), Calder could travel with his circus and hold performances on both sides of the Atlantic. He gave elaborately improvised shows, recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his "Cirque Calder"[1][2] (now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. Some months Calder would charge an entrance fee to pay his rent.[3][4]

Man, a "stabile" by Alexander Calder; Terre des Hommes (Expo 67 fairground), Saint Helen's Island, Montreal.

In 1927, Calder returned to the United States. He designed several kinetic wooden push and pull toys for children, which he had mass-produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, in Oshkosh, WI. His originals, as well as playable replicas, are on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

In 1928, Calder held his first solo show at a commercial gallery at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. In 1934, he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

In 1929, Calder had his first solo show of wire sculpture in Paris at Galerie Billiet. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface.

In June of 1929, while traveling from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James, grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931.

While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.

The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures Duchamp would ultimately dub as "'mobiles". He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. However, it was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that lead to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys.

By the end of 1931, he had quickly moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room. From this, Calder's true "mobiles" were born. At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Arp to differentiate them from mobiles.

Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). Calder continued to give "Cirque Calder" performances but also worked with Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrate in 1936.

His first public commission was a pair of mobiles designed for the theater opened in 1937 in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

During World War II, Calder attempted to join the marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. Instead, he continued to sculpt, but a scarcity of metal lead to him producing work in carved wood.

Calder's first retrospective was held in 1938 at George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a well-received Calder retrospective, curated by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp.

Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. His mobile, International Mobile was the centerpiece of the exhibition and hangs in 2006 where it was placed in 1949.

In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures. Notable examples are ".125" for JFK Airport in 1957 and "La Spirale" for UNESCO in Paris 1958. Calder's largest sculpture, at 20.5 m high, was "El Sol Rojo", constructed for the Olympic games in Mexico City.

'The Crab', painted steel sculpture by Alexander Calder, 1962, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.

In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile “La Grande Vitesse” located in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first public work of art in the United States to be funded with federal monies; acquired with funds granted from the then new National Endowment for the Arts under its “Art for Public Places” program.

Calder created a sculpture called WTC Stabile (also known as The Cockeyed Propeller and Three Wings), which in 1971 was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets.^[13] It stood in front of 7 World Trade Center when it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.^[14]

In 1973, Calder was commissioned by Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size DC-8-62 as a "flying canvas", In 1975, Calder completed a second plane, this time a Boeing 727-227, as a tribute to the U.S. Bicentennial.

Calder died on November 11, 1976, shortly following the opening of another major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Calder had been working on a third plane, entitled Tribute to Mexico, when he died.

On January 10, 1977, Calder was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford. Representatives of the Calder family reportedly boycotted the ceremony to make a statement favoring amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters.^{[citation needed]}

Reporter: How do you know when its time to stop [working]?

Calder: When it's suppertime.

- From a television interview

Selected works

Untitled gouache on paper by Alexander Calder, 1967, Honolulu Academy of Arts

• Dog (1909), folded brass sheet; this was made as a present for Calder's parents

• The Flying Trapeze (1925), oil on canvas, 36 x 42 in.

• Elephant (c. 1928), wire and wood, 11 1/2 x 5 3/4 x 29.2 in.

• Two Acrobats (ca. 1928), Brass wire, painted wood base, Honolulu Academy of Arts

• Aztec Josephine Baker (c. 1929), wire, 53" x 10" x 9". A representation of Josephine Baker, the exuberant lead dancer from La Révue Nègre at the Folies Bergère.

• Untitled (1931), wire, wood and motor; one of the first kinetic mobiles.

• Feathers (1931), wire, wood and paint; first true mobile, although designed to stand on a desktop

• Cone d'ebene (1933), ebony, metal bar and wire; early suspended mobile (first was made in 1932).

• Form Against Yellow (1936), sheet metal, wire, plywood, string and paint; wall- supported mobile.

• Object with Yellow Background (1936), Painted wood, metal, string, Honolulu Academy of Arts

• Mercury Fountain (1937), sheet metal and mercury

• Devil Fish (1937), sheet metal, bolts and paint; first piece made from a model.

• 1939 New York World's Fair (maquette) (1938), sheet metal, wire, wood, string and paint

• Necklace (c. 1938), brass wire, glass and mirror

• Sphere Pierced by Cylinders (1939), wire and paint [5]; the first of many floor standing, life size stabiles (predating Anthony Caro's plinthless sculptures by two decades)

• Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile); design for the stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Black Beast (1940), sheet metal, bolts and paint; freestanding plinthless stabile)

• S-Shaped Vine (1946), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile)

• Sword Plant (1947) sheet metal, wire and paint (Standing Mobile)

• Snow Flurry (1948), sheet metal, wire and paint (suspended mobile)

• .125 (1957), steel plate, rods and paint

• La Spirale (1958), steel plate, rod and paint, 360" high; public monumental mobile for Maison de l'U.N.E.S.C.O., Paris

• Teodelapio (1962), steel plate and paint, monumental stabile, Spoleto, Italy

• Man (1967) stainless steel plate, bolts and paint, 65' x 83' x 53', monumental stabile, Montreal Canada

• La Grande Vitesse (1969), steel plate, bolts and paint, 43' x 55' x 25', Grand Rapids, Michigan

• Eagle (1971), steel plate, bolts and paint, 38'9" x 32'8" x 32'8", Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington

• White and Red Boomerang (1971), Painted metal, wire, Honolulu Academy of Arts

• Stegosaurus (1973), steel plate, bolts and paint, 50' tall, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

• Cheval Rouge (Red Horse) (1974), red painted sheet metal, at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

• Flamingo (1974), red painted steel, at the Federal Plaza, Chicago, Illinois

• The Red Feather (1975), black and red painted steel, 11' x 6'3" x 11'2", The Kentucky Center

• Untitled (1976), aluminum honeycomb, tubing and paint, 358 1/2 x 912", National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.

• Mountains and Clouds (1976), painted aluminum and steel, 612 inches x 900 inches, Hart Senate Office Building

See also

• List of Alexander Calder public works

Bibliography

• Calder, Alexander. An Autobiography With Pictures. HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-853268-7.
• Guerrero, Pedro E. Calder at Home. The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York, 1998, ISBN 1556706553
• Prather, Marla. Alexander Calder 1898 - 1976. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1998, ISBN 0894682288, ISBN 0300075189

Notes

1. ^ http://www.herbertpalmergallery.com/main_pages/artists/calder_nanette_bio.html
2. ^ Hayes, Margaret Calder, Three Alexander Calders: A Family Memoir. Middlebury, VT: Paul S Eriksson, 1977.
3. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 13.
4. ^ See website (Wikipedia blacklisted URL)—www.suite101.com/article.cfm/american_artists/81069
5. ^ http://www.calder.org/
6. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, pp. 21-22.
7. ^ http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/calder/calder_childhood.html
8. ^ http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/calder/calder_childhood.html
9. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 31.
10. ^ http://calder.org/chronology/period/1898-1930/10
11. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 39.
12. ^ Calder, Alexander and Davidson, Jean, Calder, An Autobiography with Pictures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966, p. 47.
13. ^ Wenegrat, Saul. "Public Art at the World Trade Center", International Foundation for Art Research, February 28, 2002. Retrieved on 2007-07-27.
14. ^ Lives and Treasures Taken, The Library of Congress Retrieved 27 July, 2007.

Alexander Calder was born in 1898, the second child of artist parents—his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter. Because his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, received public commissions, the family traversed the country throughout Calder's childhood. Calder was encouraged to create, and from the age of eight he always had his own workshop wherever the family lived. For Christmas in 1909, Calder presented his parents with two of his first sculptures, a tiny dog and duck cut from a brass sheet and bent into formation. The duck is kinetic—it rocks back and forth when tapped. Even at age eleven, his facility in handling materials was apparent.

Despite his talents, Calder did not originally set out to become an artist. He instead enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology after high school and graduated in 1919 with an engineering degree. Calder worked for several years after graduation at various jobs, including as a hydraulics engineer and automotive engineer, timekeeper in a logging camp, and fireman in a ship's boiler room. While serving in the latter occupation, on a ship from New York bound for San Francisco, Calder awoke on the deck to see both a brilliant sunrise and a scintillating full moon; each was visible on opposite horizons (the ship then lay off the Guatemalan coast). The experience made a lasting impression on Calder: he would refer to it throughout his life.

Calder committed to becoming an artist shortly thereafter, and in 1923 he moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League. He also took a job illustrating for the National Police Gazette, which sent him to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to sketch circus scenes for two weeks in 1925. The circus became a lifelong interest of Calder's, and after moving to Paris in 1926, he created his Cirque Calder, a complex and unique body of art. The assemblage included diminutive performers, animals, and props he had observed at the Ringling Brothers Circus. Fashioned from wire, leather, cloth, and other found materials, Cirque Calder was designed to be manipulated manually by Calder. Every piece was small enough to be packed into a large trunk, enabling the artist to carry it with him and hold performances anywhere. Its first performance was held in Paris for an audience of friends and peers, and soon Calder was presenting the circus in both Paris and New York to much success. Calder's renderings of his circus often lasted about two hours and were quite elaborate. Indeed, the Cirque Calder predated performance art by forty years.

Calder found he enjoyed working with wire for his circus: he soon began to sculpt from this material portraits of his friends and public figures of the day. Word traveled about the inventive artist, and in 1928 Calder was given his first solo gallery show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. The show at Weyhe was soon followed by others in New York, as well as in Paris and Berlin: as a result, Calder spent much time crossing the ocean by boat. He met Louisa James (a grandniece of writer Henry James) on one of these steamer journeys and the two were married in January 1931. He also became friendly with many prominent artists and intellectuals of the early twentieth century at this time, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, James Johnson Sweeney, and Marcel Duchamp. In October 1930, Calder visited the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris and was deeply impressed by a wall of colored paper rectangles that Mondrian continually repositioned for compositional experiments. He recalled later in life that this experience "shocked" him toward total abstraction. For three weeks following this visit, he created solely abstract paintings, only to discover that he did indeed prefer sculpture to painting. Soon after, he was invited to join Abstraction-Création, an influential group of artists (including Arp, Mondrian, and Hélion) with whom he had become friendly.

In the fall of 1931, a significant turning point in Calder's artistic career occurred when he created his first truly kinetic sculpture and gave form to an entirely new type of art. The first of these objects moved by systems of cranks and motors, and were dubbed "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp—in French mobile refers to both "motion" and "motive." Calder soon abandoned the mechanical aspects of these works when he realized he could fashion mobiles that would undulate on their own with the air's currents. Jean Arp, in order to differentiate Calder's non-kinetic works from his kinetic works, named Calder's stationary objects "stabiles."

In 1933, Calder and Louisa left France and returned to the United States, where they purchased an old farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut. Calder converted an icehouse attached to the main house into a studio for himself. Their first daughter, Sandra, was born in 1935, and a second daughter, Mary, followed in 1939. He also began his association with the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York with his first show in 1934. James Johnson Sweeney, who had become a close friend, wrote the catalogue's preface. Calder also constructed sets for ballets by both Martha Graham and Eric Satie during the 1930s, and continued to give Cirque Calder performances.

Calder's earliest attempts at large, outdoor sculptures were also constructed in this decade. These predecessors of his later imposing public works were much smaller and more delicate; the first attempts made for his garden were easily bent in strong winds. Yet, they are indicative of his early intentions to work on a grand scale. In 1937, Calder created his first large bolted stabile fashioned entirely from sheet metal, which he entitled Devil Fish. Enlarged from an earlier and smaller stabile, the work was exhibited in a Pierre Matisse Gallery show, Stabiles and Mobiles. This show also included Big Bird, another large work based on a smaller maquette. Soon after, Calder received commissions to make both Mercury Fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the Parisian World Fair (a work that symbolized Spanish Republican resistance to fascism) and Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a sizable mobile installed in the main stairwell of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

When the United States entered World War II, Calder applied for entry to the Marine Corps but was ultimately rejected. He continued to create: because metal was in short supply during the war years, Calder turned increasingly to wood as a sculptural medium. Working in wood resulted in yet another original form of sculpture, works called "constellations" by Sweeney and Duchamp. With their carved wood elements anchored by wire, the constellations were so called because they suggested the cosmos, though Calder did not intend that they represent anything in particular. The Pierre Matisse Gallery held an exhibition of these works in the spring of 1943, Calder's last solo show at that gallery. His association with Matisse ended shortly thereafter and he took up the Buchholz Gallery/Curt Valentin as his New York representation.

The forties and fifties were a remarkably productive period for Calder, which was launched in 1939 with the first retrospective of his work at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. A second, major retrospective was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York just a few years later, in 1943. In 1945, Calder made a series of small-scale works; in keeping with his economy, many were made from scraps of metal trimmed while making larger pieces. While visiting Calder's studio about this time, Duchamp was intrigued by these small works. Inspired by the idea that the works could be easily dismantled, mailed to Europe, and re-assembled for an exhibition, he planned a Calder show at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris. This important show was held the following year and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his famous essay on Calder's mobiles for the exhibition catalogue. In 1949, Calder constructed his largest mobile to date, International Mobile, for the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Third International Exhibition of Sculpture. He designed sets for "Happy as Larry," a play directed by Burgess Meredith, and for Nuclea, a dance performance directed by Jean Vilar. Galerie Maeght in Paris also held a Calder show in 1950, and subsequently became Calder's exclusive Parisian dealer. His association with Galerie Maeght lasted twenty-six years, until his death in 1976. After his New York dealer Curt Valentin died unexpectedly in 1954, Calder selected the Perls Gallery in New York as his new American dealer, and this alliance also lasted until the end of his life.

Calder concentrated his efforts primarily on large-scale commissioned works in his later years. Some of these major monumental sculpture commissions include: .125, a mobile for the New York Port Authority that was hung in Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport (1957); La Spirale, for UNESCO, in Paris (1958); Teodelapio, for the city of Spoleto, Italy (1962); Man, for the Expo in Montreal (1967); El Sol Rojo (the largest of all Calder's works, at sixty-seven feet high) installed outside the Aztec Stadium for the Olympic Games in Mexico City; La grande vitesse, the first public art work to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan (1969); and Flamingo, a stabile for the General Services Administration in Chicago (1973).

As the range and breadth of his various projects and commissions indicate, Calder's artistic talents were renowned worldwide by the 1960s. A retrospective of his work opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964. Five years later, the Fondation Maeght, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, held its own Calder retrospective. In 1966, Calder, together with his son-in-law Jean Davidson, published a well-received autobiography. Additionally, both of Calder's dealers, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Perls Gallery in New York, averaged about one Calder show each per year.

In 1976, he attended the opening of yet another retrospective of his work, Calder's Universe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Just a few weeks later, Calder died at the age of seventy-eight, ending the most prolific and innovative artistic career of the twentieth century.,