Every artist has a muse, and for Alexander Calder and Joan Mir?, it was each other. Friends for the duration of their careers, these two greats of modern art are reunited in the Phillips Collection’s latest exhibit, “Calder Mir?.”
Calder, a sculptor, and Mir?, a painter, met in Paris in 1928. From that point until Calder’s death in 1976, the pair maintained a friendship that was more than just simple correspondence: they were motivators and even collaborators on certain commissioned works. Often, their work paralleled in line, theme and color.
The current Phillips exhibit is organized thematically, beginning with the artists’ early fixation on toys and the circus. One of Calder’s best-known early pieces is a fully functioning toy circus with performers made of wire, cloth and other assorted materials. While “Calder Mir?” did not contain many circus pieces of this (most are part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum in New York), it did display some of the figurines, along with “Circus Scene” and a larger-scale sculpture, “Two Acrobats.” Mir?’s work displays a similarly childlike tendency in the abstract paintings “Circus Horse” and “Carnival of Harlequin.”
Calder’s work evolved into, as Mir? said, “drawing in thin air.” He created a different type of sculpture that did not use material throughout, but merely wire to suggest features. Simultaneously, Mir?’s work moved away from surrealist shapes into experiment with line. “Painting (Man with Pipe)” shows only an outline with shapes to suggest a human.
The two artists ventured into the spiritual realm in their separate series of “Constellations.” Named coincidentally and separately, Miro began painting smaller works that featured abstract human forms and colorful, unblinking eyes. While Mir?’s “Constellations” were not unimportant, Calder’s created history. Always enthralled by movement, as shown by his free-floating wire sculptures, he invented a form of the art that was entirely new. “Constellation Mobile,” made of painted wood and wire, is an example of Calder’s innovative hanging sculptures, or “mobiles” as artist Marcel Duchamp later named them. His motionless statues were dubbed “stabiles.”
The exhibit places an intensive focus on Calder’s trademark mobiles. Displayed appropriately in the gallery’s rotunda, “Black Polygons” and “Snow Flurry,” along with others made of sheet metal and wire, turn slightly with the delicate breeze each passerby on the steps creates. Each mobile is artfully arranged but also scientifically balanced, requiring a perfect equilibrium of weight.
Another section of the exhibit is called “Like Living Mir?s,” because the artists’ styles become so similar that Calder’s works are simply 3-D interpretations of Mir?’s abstract paintings. At this point in his career, Mir?’s paintings and collages featured strong lines, amorphous shapes and simple colors, and Calder also moved towards this style. Around the time of World War II the artists echoed each other, featuring angry and nightmarish shapes. The exhibit also features postcards and correspondence between the two artists, and the first-ever showing of their commissioned work for the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio, outside of its original location. “Calder Mir?” is, as the Phillips Collection proclaims, is a study of the “visual dialogue” between two artists. While this is true, it is more so an opportunity to see and compare the works of two of modern art’s greats, who were muses to each other, but also catalysts for groundbreaking new art.
The Phillips Collection is located at 1600 21st St. N.W. Admission is $11 for students.
