“Alexander Calder in Saché,” by John Russell, was originally published in the July 1967 issue of Vogue.
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In the mid-1960 s something has gone out of the romance between France and America, and when individuals on one side look over to the other, it is across a wasteland of lost illusions. The American reared on the novels and memoirs of the great expatriates finds before him a new France: a bustling short-haired technocracy fired by le Coke, le beefburger, and le drugstore, a France as remote from The Ambassadors or Tender Is the Night as is the Russia of Kosygin from the Russia of Turgenev.
In this new France, the sons of yesterday s gamekeepers and handymen are more likely to give you a quote for Bethlehem Steel than to keep your house in order for ten dollars a week. The French, too, have had their surprises: The archetypal American in France is no longer the superior dilettante cushioned by Wall Street but a mid-Atlantic executive making do on his untaxed foreign-service allowance.
In so far as one place and one man can counterbalance all this, the town of Saché and Alexander Calder have done it. It is an amazing thing to cut deep into the middle of France, as the carver cuts into a shoulder of lamb, and find there a way of life hardly flawed since Balzac and a resident American who personifies the pioneer virtues: independence, candour, straight dealing, and a salty uncorrupted manner of speech. Calder is credited, and quite rightly, with having invented the mobile; anyone who has seen him in Saché will know that he and Mrs. Calder have also re-invented a climate of total confidence between French people and Americans. Of course he is a man of genius, and known as such; and, of course, everyone likes the feeling that he has a man of genius for a neighbour. But it is not because he is a man of genius that Calder has saved something from the wreck of Franco-American relations: It is because he is patently larger, truer, and better than other men.
The visitor to Saché will not find the mindless adulation which surrounded the "great men" of the 1920 s and 30 s, or the little court of toadies and middlemen with which other artists of Calder s age and standing surround themselves. He could have a big house, and a secretary, and a lot of servants; but he and Mrs. Calder do everything for themselves, as they did when they had no alternative. "I tried to think," Mrs. Calder said lately, "if anything has really changed in our lives, and I realized that if I want to go to the airport and take a ticket to New York I can do it without worrying. That s about the only difference."
Saché was Balzac s village, and till a year or so ago the skyline on the north bank of the river Indre had hardly changed since his droopy femme de trente ans went through emotions now more suited to a demoralized woman of fifty-five. But today you can make the classic Balzacian pilgrimage along the valley and see high about you the silhouettes of the big stabiles by Calder which stand on the belvedere outside his new studio. From a distance it is not easy to know to what to assimilate them, for they have something of engineering, something of architecture, something of animal life, and something of exotic vegetation. Like all major works of art, they can be penetrated at many levels and from many points of view. And unlike many admired works of modern sculpture, they do not look fussy or inbred when confronted with Nature: They come to an agreement with her, and it is an agreement by which both are enhanced. They radiate, in fact, a kind of beneficent magic; and in this they fit in ideally with the valley of the Indre, which is not at all a countryside to match the torments of the psyche.
Calder himself is not blind to those torments, but his work is proof that an optimistic art need not be insipid. In human relations he is the kind of man who could re-invent society and make a better job of it, and in his work the dominant qualities are intelligence, equilibrium, lucid analysis, magnanimity, and fun. People get the message of all this, even if they know nothing of art; and that is why, if you are driving to Saché and ask the way to his house, his neighbours will not gesture vaguely from the far side of the road. They will come over, put their heads through the window, and tell you how lucky you are to be heading that way.
Calder is the son and the grandson of sculptors. If heredity stands for anything in art he could have gone into sculpture the way Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt went into politics. But making sculptures and getting a new kind of grip on the world are not necessarily the same thing, and when Calder was still in school he decided to find out what made the world move: actually, in that he decided to be an engineer; and figuratively, in that the art world in itself was not enough for him. It was not much of an ambition to aim at making works of art that looked like other works of art.
In the art world of that time his father, Stirling Calder, cut a distinguished figure: Pascin called him "the best-looking man in our society," and when Alexander Calder was seventeen his father had charge of the sculpture section of the Panama-Pacific Exhibition of 1915 in San Francisco. But young Calder wanted to get out, and he had the abilities to do so: His grades in descriptive geometry at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, were the highest ever recorded. He had, and has still, the gift of doing things as if no one had ever done them before. When he went to sea as an ordinary seaman, it was with the instincts of a Viking of the ninth century.
When Calder worked on a newspaper in St. Louis, he discovered provincial America the way Robinson Crusoe discovered his island. When he worked on a timber plant in Independence, Washington, he saw the tree stumps and the distant snowy mountains as if they were something new in the earth s history. Even now, when he pads across the village street that he crosses a dozen times a day, he never absents himself: If there was ever an automatic pilot in his organism he tore it out on delivery.
It was forty years ago this last summer that Calder came to live in Paris, in the little street back of the Cimetière de Montparnasse that is named after Daguerre. He had a lot of "qualifications," but they didn t fit together. An experienced mechanical engineer had no business to have been a cartoonist-reporter for the Police Gazette, for instance, and it was perverse of someone who had saved several thousand dollars to study under Luks and John Sloan in New York to sign on as a seaman in a merchant-man bound for Hull, England. It looked as if art had claimed in him, at twenty-eight, one more unfocused aspirant. Old-style "art studies" did not engage more than a part of his interest, any more than old-style art practice engaged the particular human faculties which most appealed to him. The idiom he was after was one that would express in an epigrammatic way the master-qualities of humour, agility, heightened personality, and poetic invention.
These qualities had come out very strongly in the Barnum cir- cus which Calder had reported on for the New York Police Gazette, and Paris in the late 1920 s was of course the last sanctuary of the un-amplified, more than life-size stage personality. In someone like Josephine Baker, who in her prime was rarely seen on film, and still less on television, the magic of direct contact was paramount. Calder got on this straightaway, and when he began to make wire portrait-sculptures, Miss Baker was one of his first subjects.
As likenesses, these portraits are to the 1920 s what Ingres s drawings of well-heeled visitors were to the Rome of a century earlier: portraits, that is to say, in which the nature of the age is consummately brought out. Drawn in the air, and not on the flat, they have a hallucinatory vividness. Nor does that vividness depend on a safe choice of sitters: Fernand Léger, Helen Wills, Calvin Coolidge, Carl Zigrosser, and Kiki de Montparnasse have no common denominator. Set in a draught, the portraits generate a slight persistent vibration which suggests to us, against all logic, that they are actually alive: human beings fleshless and weightless but physically present.
Calder had looked at his sitters with an engineer s eye and had taken out everything but what, finally, made them what they were. And he did it with other subjects also: Romulus and Remus were suckled for instance by an animal ten feet in length and remarkably benign for a she-wolf.
But the real success of Calder s first years in Paris was the miniature circus. Cocteau, Léger, Mondrian, Kiesler, Varèse, Le Corbusier, and Van Doesburg were among the many people who first got to know Calder as the inventor and manipulator of this complex, elaborate, astutely economical combine-toy. As with the wire portraits, Calder had observed and analyzed the movements of everyone with the circus until he could reproduce them with everything nonessential pared away.
Opportunities for seeing the complete circus are now very rare, and its components are kept in four locked suitcases in Saché, but enough rogue animals exist on their own account for us to be able to judge that the point of the whole lay not merely in its mechanical ingenuity but in the element of individual life which Calder gave to every participant. (Very telling, also, is the tenderness with which he will fish among the débris of the studio and come up with a vagrant kangaroo, lamed in its forepaws, or a rusted equilibrist.)
A great many people took to Calder, then as now, and among Europeans in general he impressed above all by his forthright and undivided nature. He was what an American was expected to be, and a great deal else besides. This did not, however, commend him to the father of Louisa James, whom Calder sighted on board the liner "De Grasse" when westbound across the Atlantic in June, 1929. Louisa James was returning with her father from a European tour which had been, to put it plainly, a monumental failure. As the nephew of Henry James, Mr. James was well placed enough to know that well-born Europeans did not always put themselves out to meet visiting Americans, and that those who did put themselves out did not always do so from the best motives.
Mr. James had had unbounded hopes, even so, of establishing a stylish European connection; and when it became clear that he and his daughter were not likely to meet any Europeans except those who hung around hotel lobbies, he turned for home in dudgeon. Numerous were his warnings, as the great ship pulled out of Cherbourg, against the coarse, unlettered American opportunists who tried to strike up acquaintance on shipboard with young American ladies. One such homily was in progress when Alexander Calder overtook them on the promenade deck, turned sharply in his tracks, and offered Mr. and Miss James a respectful but uninvited salutation. "Ahhhh!" said Mr. James, whistling between his teeth like an affronted swan, "Sssss! There s one of them, already!"
It did not take Calder long to consolidate this first meeting to the point at which Miss James became Mrs. Calder. It is a great thing to be the great-niece of Henry James, but it is an even greater one to be Mrs. Calder and to carry it off with the kind of aplomb that Louisa Calder displays in all possible situations. "Beautiful as a classic statue" was Miró s phrase for her a year or two ago, and you don t have to be Miró to sense the feeling for order and serenity which she brings to their house. That house is not tidy, in any bourgeois sense, and there is nothing fixed or constricting about the kind of order which she produces.
The house just is a place where the priorities have been got right once and for all. Superficially there are great discrepancies of style between the two Calders, and he in particular loves to play these up. But you don t need to be there very long to realize that those far-famed grunts and those abrupt, fore-shortened forays into the talk are a mask for an exceptionally quick and subtle turn of mind, just as Mrs. Calder s thoughts are none the less direct and passionate for being expressed in such a way that you can hear the subjunctives two sentences before she gets to them.
There are no dark corners in the Calders house, any more than there are dead or dull places in his work. Everything, in both cases, is out in the light: Newcomers are often astonished to find that, in a house which lies for much of the day in shadow and is in any case "built into the rock," one s first impression is of high, pure colour. Touraine is troglodytes country, and for centuries people there have lived in the recesses of overhanging rocks. The Calders house is based partly on this practice, but they have turned it upside down and inside out, so that the cave is Aladdin s, and the rock turns out to have opened up almost as spectacularly as the one which Moses struck with his staff.
No two people could care less about interior decoration, as it is usually understood: It just happens that Calder s feeling for space is as acute in a house as it was in the circus, forty years ago, and that Mrs. Calder knows the difference between an unconstructive muddle and a house that really works, inexhaustibly, and to the enrichment of everyone in it.
One s own house is a place to be at ease in, and since Calder has at five minutes distance the house, also, of his son-in-law and daughter, Jean and Sandra Davidson, it is natural that the "Calder complex" should include some marvellous examples of his sense of play. He is as interested to make birds for his grandchildren as he was, thirty-five years ago, to make a wire cigarette holder that summed up a whole decade.
In the studio just across the yard from his house he has an anvil that could fit into a poacher s pocket and a selection of old beat-up tools that look as if nobody could do anything much with them. When he first goes into that studio he has a dreamy hesitant air about him, as if he were some vast creature of the hedgerows that had strayed in there by accident. He gets down to work without hurry or fuss: with plenty of time, anyway, to rib anyone who happens to be around. But we mustn t be deluded: This is where the great things get done; and if he decides to get up and go to the Etablissements Biémont, the heavy-engineering works near Tours where many of his big stabiles have been made, it s clear on the instant that he is the man on whom everything turns.
Biémont s is the kind of place where the noise invites the stage direction "End of world," and to a stranger it often seems as if some great collective hallucination had seized everyone present, causing one aging employee to roll round and round inside a stainless-steel cylinder while another sits astride a hollow drum and belabours it with the biggest hammer outside performances of Wagner s Ring.
But the hallucination is ours, not theirs: This is, in point of fact, a precision workshop of the highest class, and it is here that Calder made among other things the forty-six-ton stabile for Montreal s Expo 67. He is as much at home in a great engineering shop as he is in the single-handed chaos (as it seems) of his studio. Many well-known artists have called in the help of professional engineers in the last ten years or so, but Calder is the only one who can out-talk the professional in his own language. These huge new pieces are a blend of architecture, engineering, vegetation, and the world of elephant and giraffe. If they are not properly anchored, a hurricane could cause them to slice through a ten-storey building and come out the other side.
Yet the calculations involved do not prevent the echoes of leaf form in "Cactus" from being as moving as anything in Matisse s late paper cutouts, or the bunched hump of muscle in "Bucephalus" from being as stirring as anything that the anatomy of a dinosaur or brontosaur can have had to show. Calder is as much Calder in these gigantic pieces (you can comfortably drive a truck through the middle of the fifty-eight-foot high "Teodelapio" ) as he is in the toys he makes for his grandchildren or in the "Chien Méchant" sign that he painted outside the front gate.
It is because Calder is a complete man and not a well-developed fake that everything he does, on no matter what scale, speaks for him. If asked directly about all this, he will take refuge in self-parody or a quick dive towards the well-stocked cellar; but we can say, though he never will, that Saché-Balzac, as the guidebooks try so hard to call it, could be renamed Saché-Calder and be all the better for it.