| It’s become a cliché to describe statement-making jewelry as “wearable art,” but no other term quite captures the personal adornments made by Alexander Calder. His earrings, necklaces and bracelets were mini-mobiles that dangled from the wrists, necks and earlobes of sophisticates like Peggy Guggenheim and Jeanne Moreau. The Whitney Museum’s current Calder show features room after room of his playful wire sculptures but none of the 1,800 pieces of jewelry he made over the course of his career. Fortunately about 90 of these pieces are being given their own exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the first museum show to focus on Calder’s jewelry. (The New York Times, December, 11, 2008.) |
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Karen Rosenberg
Courtesy of The New York Times.It’s become a cliché to describe statement-making jewelry as “wearable
art,” but no other term quite captures the personal adornments made by Alexander Calder.
His earrings, necklaces and bracelets were mini-mobiles that dangled
from the wrists, necks and earlobes of sophisticates like Peggy
Guggenheim and Jeanne Moreau.The Whitney Museum’s
current Calder show features room after room of his playful wire
sculptures but none of the 1,800 pieces of jewelry he made over the
course of his career. Fortunately about 90 of these pieces are being
given their own exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the first museum
show to focus on Calder’s jewelry.
The works in “Calder Jewelry” are wire sculptures too, only smaller,
though not much smaller, really, than the components of Calder’s
“Circus” at the Whitney. They are made of the same materials — mostly
brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass — and are just as
self-consciously clever. All are one-of-a-kind objets d’art. Calder had
many opportunities to sign off on reproductions, and always refused
(much to his dealers’ chagrin).“Calder Jewelry” comes to New
York from the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. It was
organized by Jane Adlin, an associate curator at the Met, with the
Norton adjunct curator Mark Rosenthal and the Calder Foundation
director (and Calder grandson) Alexander S. C. Rower. It can be
difficult to exhibit jewelry, even Calder’s resolutely unprecious
metals, without creating a boutique atmosphere. Smaller objects like
brooches and hair combs are clustered in vertical display cases, and
even the larger necklaces get lost in the high-ceilinged galleries.
Photographs of Calder’s jewelry on the body are scarce in the
galleries, though numerous in the unwieldy catalog.Still, the
show has an intimate, even familial quality; Calder made many of the
pieces as gifts for friends and relatives. Mr. Rower recalls that when
he was a child, his grandmother’s dressing table “always seemed a
mysterious altar.”Two cases are devoted to the jewelry Calder
made for his wife, Louisa, beginning with the couple’s engagement ring
— a simple spiral of gold wire. Calder always returned to the spiral
for birthday and anniversary gifts; he seems to have adopted this late
Bronze Age motif as a personal talisman.He was also fond of
initials and monograms, as evidenced by the pieces he made for friends
like the curator Dorothy C. Miller and the art dealer Marian Willard
Johnson. These objects are the equivalent of the wire portrait heads at
the Whitney: bits of customized whimsy. More interesting are the pieces
with a Surrealist bent, like the pair of earrings that spell out Joan Miró’s piquant declamation “A bas la Méditerranée” (“Down With the Mediterranean”).Calder’s
jewelry appealed to women with avant-garde tastes who liked to make a
dramatic entrance. Mary Rockefeller was said to have required a little
elbow room when she wore her Calder necklace to art openings. Peggy
Guggenheim boasted in her autobiography, “I am the only woman in the
world who wears his enormous mobile earrings.” Two pairs of those broad
and pendulous earrings are in the exhibition; they are certainly not
for everyone, or at least not for the woman who might be afraid to
inflict flesh wounds while air-kissing.Consider the spectacular
object nicknamed “The Jealous Husband,” from 1940. In this oversize
necklace, a breastplate of flat curlicues of hammered wire rises into
barbed coils at the collarbone. Hilton Kramer, writing in The New York
Times Magazine in 1976, noted the work’s “humor of mock aggression and
shameless self-assertion.”Other necklaces suggest less extreme
forms of body armor. An aptly titled “Chainmail” necklace from 1940
features hand-linked circles of silver wire. An untitled piece from
1942 might be described as brass knuckles for the shoulders.Calder’s
necklaces and tiaras could take up a lot of space without looking
heavy. His “Flower Necklace” (1938) is a chain of delicate silver
leaves attached to a daisylike blossom, all fashioned from looped wire.
In “Crown” (1940), clusters of brass “ivy” rise from a simple headpiece.Craftsmanship
is anything but mysterious; nearly every piece consists of hammered,
bent or chiseled wire. Pliers marks are visible on the unpolished
surfaces. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of
metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or
fashioned rivets. Some of his intricate-looking cuff bracelets, with
wavy lines and zigzags, are little more than single pieces of twisted
and flattened wire.In both technique and design, Calder aspired to be “primitive.” Like Picasso,
he had seen and collected African sculpture in Paris. Ms. Adlin points
out, in her catalog essay, that Calder’s bracelets and neck collars
with parallel strips of wire bear a striking resemblance to the beaded
corsets worn by members of the East African Dinka tribe. Other
comparisons will come to mind, particularly if you wander through the
Met’s galleries of Celtic or Pre-Colombian art.
Calder’s forms
weren’t new, but his sense of the body as a kinetic sculpture was
liberating. He convinced us that art can be precious, and jewelry need
not be. (The New York Time, December, 11, 2008.)
