Grosse Pointe's Other Modern Art: a Mobile in the Central Library Branch

The Central Branch of the  not only houses books but it also is home to modern art. The building was designed by the famous Bauhaus architect , and two of the original pieces of art in the main room selected by him remain, exactly as they were originally placed.

One such is a that hangs on the south wall of the main room. The other is perhaps the most striking element in the room: a gently moving mobile that was designed by Alexander Calder.

I have looked up at that Calder mobile in our library for decades now, never fully appreciating it for what it is or the man who designed it.  Mobiles today are common place, but the one in our library is the creation of the man who actually conceived of and created the first modern mobiles in the world.

The Artist

Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, PA, which is now Philedelphia.  His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a sculptor and teacher. His grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, was also a sculptor.

Alexander Calder received a degree in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1919. He enjoyed LaCross  and joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. After college, Calder learned how to draw and paint in New York and Paris, France.  His early work included designing toys and drawing caricatures for various periodicals. He became fascinated by the Circus, and made a mini-wire circus, and showed it off in his travels and at art shows. 

Calder preferred to work in wire, and even designed delecate wire jewelry—bracelets, earrings, and necklaces.

Calder did not make a lot of money in his early career. In his autobiography he lamented that his first stroke of fortune did not come until 1928, “I did wire athletes tugging at the lenses for the firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, and I got my first check for a thousand dollars. I was about thirty and Hoover already had a million dollars by that time. Mine came much slower.”

After some time in Paris, he returned to New York and worked at his father’s studio where he admits, “I worked in wire as usual.”  Indeed, his friends often chided him with his obsession with wire , “I always travelled with a roll of wire and a pair of pliers.”

After earning enough money in New York, Calder returned to Paris. It was in 1929 in Paris where Calder began working in the abstract, “Though I had heard of the word ‘modern’ before, I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract.’ So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract.”

Calder’s Mobiles

It was after this time that Calder began creating motor-driven wire mobiles, which later he designed to move without the need of a motor. It was Marcel Duchamp in France who came up with the name ‘Mobile.’ Calder said of the name, “In addition to something that moves, in French it also means motive.”

According to Gerard-Georges Lemaire in his writing of Calder for the series Great Modern Masters, “Thus was born the idea of the mobile, a manifestation of the dream of the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni: the moving statue.”  The concept of the suspended mobile was first developed by Calder in 1934.

In describing Calder’s mobiles, such as Mobile sur deux plans, c. 1955 and the mobile in the New York Airport—both remarkably similar to the one that hangs in our library, Lemaire continues, “He made subtle calculations to control his machine-like sculptures.  Such manipulation gave his objects free and ever-changing qualities that play on the viewer’s imagination."

Indeed, that is why our Calder mobile hangs in front of a giant white wall—so that as it quietly moves and changes shape with the airflow created by the libraries patrons, there is nothing obstructing the mobile as it moves.

Perhaps the next time you are caught looking up Calder’s gentle giant, you might think of what his goal was in creating these mobiles. As Lemaire put it, “Calder searched for the paradigmatic space within which to display his ideas; the celestial vault and the Milky Way provided the inspiration he needed to construct a universe at once abstract yet beyond tangible reality.”