Photograph by John T. “Jet” Lowe, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Landscapes Survey, HABS MO, 96-SALU,105—32 (CT)
The mobile is a gift-shop staple, a shower of plushy rainbow hearts on strings, plastic animal shapes orbiting over a baby’s crib. But once, it was avant-garde; Marcel Duchamp coined the word in 1932 to describe kinetic sculptures—which it’s weird to think didn’t exist before that. The art form’s inventor was Alexander Calder, who began his career as an engineer and designed toys and jewelry long after he became a famous artist. In the 1920s, as an expatriate in Europe, he filled five suitcases withLe Grand Cirque Calder, its figures hand-built from discarded wire, corks, rags, wood, yarn, and paper. With slight manipulations on Calder’s part, they blew up balloons, smoked, played the tuba, or cracked a whip at a tiny lion with a mane of raggedy yarn. The cirque’s first performances took place in the bohemian salons of Paris, and it was here that Calder’s winsome wire figures evolved into mobiles.
At first, they were small, abstract pieces that spun with the gentle force of a single human breath; later, he built maquettes for large, moving pieces like this one, 1966’s The Tree, which as you can see is almost true to the scale of its namesake. Despite its title, it exists, like a lot of Calder’s work, in a place between the abstract and the figurative. Here, it’s on the grounds of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the perspective almost merges it with the living tree behind it, despite its leaves looking like silver kites or mechanical birds. Sadly, The Tree left St. Louis—and America—ages ago. In 1989, Swiss art collector Ernst Beyeler bought it and shipped it to Basel. It’s been in the collection of the Fondation Beyeler ever since, though it didn’t go on view till this January. Last summer, conservators took it apart, stripping and scouring every piece, down to the bolts. The Fondation even commissioned a weather study, finding that twice a year, the wind would blow too hard on the sculpture, and planted trees and shrubs around it as windbreaks. For those of us here who want to see nature through the lens of Calder, we have no trees, but there are flowers: the delicate, nodding White Lily, on the third floor of the Saint Louis Art Museum.
