In Postwar Rural France, Alexander Calder Found Respite from Pressures of Fame and a Chance to Dream Big

If you’ve ever looked long and slow enough at Alexander Calder’s mobiles made of wire-suspended, leaf-like metal shapes painted solid colors, you likely know that they are as much about their sculptural form and silhouette as they are about the breathing air, light, shadow, and nature all around them. They shiver, drift, and play with the unpredictable whims of the surrounding atmosphere, making the invisible ether newly visible. Calder’s alternately delicate and massive sculptures are in communion with much larger forces around us.

At Hauser & Wirth in Paris, several of these sculptures are now on view (until December 19) in the exhibition titled “Calder: François Premier.” The show focuses on the late artist’s return to France from the US from 1953 to 1954 and includes a few mobiles that haven’t been seen in over 70 years: Les Granettes (1953) and The Putney Mobile (1954).

They are joined by an upstairs gallery full of bold, abstract, and figurative gouaches made between a small hamlet near Aix-en-Provence, called Les Granettes (where the 1953 mobile was made and named for), and a 17th-century home in Saché, another hamlet in the Loire Valley, now an artist residency. The more figurative gouaches include mysterious imagery such as pyramids, pulsing, planet-like orbs and even some camels.

“I seemed to develop something new,” Calder said of this sojourn to France after a 20-year absence. His “main” home and studio remained anchored in Roxbury, Connecticut, but he ultimately spent time living and working in Saché until his death in 1976.

“Calder’s return to France in 1953 is essential in understanding his late period. He was really emboldened and really inspired by being back,” Alexander S. C. Rower, his grandson and president of the Calder Foundation, says in a film screened at the gallery. “In really an unprecedented way, he was drawing directly on the metal: fabricating, welding, crafting the works into existence in full-scale, and that didn’t happen before. It was an extraordinary moment, with fantastic works of tremendous vocabulary.”

But what had brought Calder to the French countryside in the first place, and how did the place change how he worked?

To find out, ARTnews spoke with Rower, who was 13 when his grandfather died. After he completed a quick, “energetic reading” on me, which first mistakenly concluded I had been a sculptor in my youth but was amended to predict I would become one later, possibly in my 60s, Rower started with recounting Calder’s postwar story.

“The backstory is that during WWII, all of Calder’s friends were trying to come to America and be refugees,” he told me. Calder wrote to the State Department and successfully urged them to let in artists from Europe, such as Fernand Léger and André Masson. He eventually housed Masson and his young family, who all slept in Calder’s Connecticut barn-studio. After the war, Masson insisted Calder come to Aix-en-Provence, but it didn’t take much convincing. With his wife, Louisa, and their two daughters, Calder packed their things and joined their friends in southern France by 1953.

Later that year, the Calders discovered Saché in central France, where another friend (and later son-in-law) was living: the French-American journalist Jean Davidson. Calder soon bought a house in Saché on Davidson’s land, in exchange for three mobiles. From that moment on, “Saché just very naturally evolves into this hub. They have grandchildren there, and it becomes their homestead,” Rower said.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.

ARTnews: What was special and inspiring about the French countryside to Calder, that might have led to the works we’re seeing here in Paris?

Alexander S. C. Rower: I wouldn’t say that France, or the countryside, was inspiring to him. He wasn’t making works related to what he was experiencing in the village and region. He was using being there to quiet his nervous system. He’s already a super famous guy when he shows up in 1953, and he has lots and lots of commissions. He’s this worldly character, and he needs to have quietude. That’s what Saché really deeply represents. It wasn’t the architecture, the chateaux in the region.

In Calder’s own words, he said he was trying to return to the ‘medieval‘—he’s talking about simple things, like going to this one place with a wood oven for baking bread, and another place that has this flock of goats and they’re making cheese. He liked the people that had maybe more challenges in life, but also had more authenticity, and he felt he was that way. He grew up with absolutely no money. His mom was a painter. His dad was a sculptor. He had to fend for himself. So the countryside in France, it’s still quite like that.

Did that simpler life away from it all change his work?

It definitely changed his work, but didn’t inspire his work. I’d say that he then had the chance with the big open skies to dream about bigger sculpture. He also was achieving success. By 1962, he found a big industrial iron works to execute his major works. He already had a smaller one in Connecticut that was making all the big works, and now he needed one in France, and the very biggest works were executed here in France. For that first group of works completed in 1963, they were all made for his own account. He commissioned seven outdoor sculptures, because he had enough money to make what he wanted to make.

What was his studio in France like?

The wagon shed, or remise, he converted to his studio was a very small space. A highly productive space. He made so many works there of the late period. Some of the 1950s, but mostly ’60s. Most of the sculpture made in the 1960s was made in that studio. Everything else before that was made in Connecticut, which was his number one studio.

When he arrived in France in 1953, he made four outdoor sculptures, standing mobiles that you put in your garden, one of which was Les Granettes (1953). He made lots of smaller works, but he didn’t make any big sculptures [in France that year].

And yet he started to think more about making large-scale works in Saché?

Saché is this little town where Henri de Balzac used to go and write, and it’s very flat. There’s nothing mountainous in the region, and the idea of monumental sculptures coming up out of the landscape is pretty obvious. It’s big sky country. Maybe the sky, you could say, was inspiring, because a big dynamic black form against the sky is terrific.

Why did you love about this place as a child?

Seeing Calder hard at work in France was a great pleasure. To go to the foundry, and see how he talked to the guys. He loved the guys that helped him execute his works. He wasn’t dismissive. He wasn’t offhand. He wasn’t at a distance. He was really connected with them. He gave them all gouaches and stuff. The welder was the guy he really liked. He’d come bring him a bottle of wine and talk about welding.

I wonder whether they kept any of those artworks he gave them.

They’ve all sold them. They’ve all come to market, and the grandchildren have sold them for education or whatever. Calder would have loved that. It’s just as it should be.