Unseen Calder Mobiles Resurface in Paris Exhibition on His French Turn

By Marcus Bennett

Two Alexander Calder mobiles unseen in public for more than 70 years went on view this month at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. The exhibition, "Calder: François Premier," runs until December 19 and examines the sculptor's return to France from the United States between 1953 and 1954.

The rediscovered works are Les Granettes (1953) and The Putney Mobile (1954). They hang alongside an upstairs gallery of bold abstract and figurative gouaches, made between Les Granettes, a hamlet near Aix-en-Provence, and Saché, a 17th-century house in the Loire Valley that now serves as an artist residency. The figurative gouaches carry mysterious imagery: pyramids, pulsing planet-like orbs, even camels.

"I seemed to develop something new," Calder said of that sojourn, his first in France after a 20-year absence. His main home and studio stayed in Roxbury, Connecticut, but he worked in Saché until his death in 1976.

What drew Calder back to France?

The backstory runs through the war. "During WWII, all of Calder's friends were trying to come to America and be refugees," Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder's grandson and president of the Calder Foundation, told ARTnews. Calder wrote to the State Department and successfully urged it to admit European artists, including Fernand Léger and André Masson. He later housed Masson and his young family in his Connecticut barn-studio.

After the war, Masson insisted Calder come to Aix-en-Provence. Little convincing was needed. By 1953, Calder had packed up his wife, Louisa, and their two daughters and joined his friends in southern France.

Later that year the family discovered Saché in central France, where the French-American journalist Jean Davidson — later Calder's son-in-law — was living. Calder bought a house on Davidson's land in exchange for three mobiles. "Saché just very naturally evolves into this hub," Rower said. "They have grandchildren there, and it becomes their homestead."

Was the countryside the inspiration?

Rower rejects the word. "I wouldn't say that France, or the countryside, was inspiring to him," he said. "He was using being there to quiet his nervous system." Calder arrived in 1953 already famous, loaded with commissions, and in need of quietude.

In his own words, Calder sought a return to the "medieval" — simple things like a wood oven for baking bread, a neighboring flock of goats making cheese. Rower links this to the artist's upbringing: Calder grew up with no money, the son of a painter mother and sculptor father, and gravitated toward people he saw as authentic.

The place changed the work without inspiring it. "He then had the chance with the big open skies to dream about bigger sculpture," Rower said. By 1962, Calder had found a large industrial ironworks in France to execute his major works, complementing a smaller Connecticut operation. The very biggest works were executed in France.

What did Saché change for the late work?

"Calder's return to France in 1953 is essential in understanding his late period," Rower 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."

His French studio was a converted wagon shed, a remise — very small and highly productive. Most of the sculpture Calder made in the 1960s came out of that space. In 1953 itself, he made four outdoor standing mobiles, including Les Granettes, plus many smaller works, but nothing large.

Saché is flat country where Balzac once wrote, and monumental forms against a big sky made obvious sense. "A big dynamic black form against the sky is terrific," Rower said.

Rower, who was 13 when his grandfather died, remembers the foundry visits. Calder stayed close to the workers who executed his work, gave them gouaches, and brought the welder bottles of wine to talk shop. The workers' families have since sold those gifts. "Calder would have loved that," Rower said. "It's just as it should be."

For visitors, the Paris show offers a rare chance to trace how a quiet French hamlet set the stage for the monumental sculpture of Calder's final decades.