“Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”
—Alexander Calder

In 1910, when Alexander Calder was 11 years old, the French aviator Louis Blériot completed the first flight over the English Channel, piloting his sleek “Blériot XI” monoplane for the 36-and-a-half-minute journey. Winning a prize of £1,000 offered by the Daily Mail newspaper for doing so, Blériot became an overnight celebrity and is today remembered as a pioneer in the early era of aviation, a European counterpart to the Wright Brothers in America. Calder was long captivated by the heroism and enterprise of early flight: while in Paris in 1927, the artist rushed to Le Bourget with friends to cheer “L’aviateur!” as Charles Lindbergh landed the first solo transatlantic flight.ⁱ Circa 1949–1950, as propellers were becoming replaced by ultra-powerful jet engines, Calder executed two of his iconic floating “mobiles”—The Blériot and New Blériot—in reminiscence of the early days of air travel. Composed of rods that demarcate rows of squares and emulate the open-box structure of the Blériot XI, they embody the nostalgia and optimism that aviation history represented for Calder and his peers.

 

Blériot’s incredulous achievement sent shock waves across the world, ushering in a new age marked by innovation, freedom, and promise. “Great Britain is no longer an island,” a sensationalist headline from The Daily Express exclaimed in the wake of his flight; the Blériot XI was immediately hurried to London and put on public display at Selfridges department store. The ambitious aspirations of modern technology galvanized several of the 20^th century’s leadings artists, including Calder, to develop their own responses to the new era symbolized by Blériot’s groundbreaking invention. In his landmark 1913 text The Cubist Painters, Guillaume Apollinaire suggested that only “an artist as free of aesthetic considerations and as concerned with energy as Marcel Duchamp” could rival Blériot’s triumph.ⁱⁱ The following year, Robert Delaunay painted his own Hommage à Blériot, 1914, Kunstmuseum Basel, a kaleidoscope of color that captured the Parisians’ enthusiasm following the trailblazing Channel crossing. Six years after Calder’s New Blériot was executed, Joseph Cornell dedicated two of his shadowboxes to the French engineer, including the enigmatic Untitled (Homage to Blériot), 1956, Art Institute of Chicago.

 

One affinity Calder sensed between his process and that of Blériot may have been their experimentation with industrial materials, which took place in metal-filled workshops more closely suited to the needs of an amateur aviation engineer than any fellow artist. “There is a resemblance between Calder’s procedure and that of the Wright brothers,” for example, the art critic and writer Selden Rodman recalled of a visit to the sculptor’s studio in the 1950s. “...This was no studio such as sculptors and traditionally worked in throughout the ages. No casts, no marble, no plaster, no armatures. Not a bicycle shop, to be sure, but certainly a machine shop. The floor was deep in steel shavings, wire, nuts and bolts, punched sheet metal. The benches sagged under lathes and power saws. The air was busy with dangling ‘contraptions,’ such as the brothers in Dayton used to call their experimental warped airfoils and rudimentary engines.”ⁱⁱⁱ The rods, wires, and flattened sheet metal used in New Blériot are not dissimilar materials to those the Wright brothers and their French peer employed for their monoplanes.

 

 

“But more significantly, I thought,” Rodman continued, “the Wrights too were in love with simplicity, with perfection of motion and economy of means. They began and ended their work as artists. Gliding and work with kites came naturally to them. They appropriated a small motor and attached it to their wings; but the motor was an afterthought...” This focus on the mechanics of motion—not mechanization—is palpable throughout Calder’s corpus, surfacing in his first mobile as early as 1932. Despite its seemingly whimsical and weightless character, the construction of New Blériot required a remarkable degree of precision: the pieces of sheet metal, suspended only by a thin wire, are held in a precarious and ever-shifting balance by air currents and forces of gravity. The artful elegance of both Calder’s sculptures and early airplanes were achieved by capturing the harmony as well as the tension innate in the natural world and its forms.

 

The kinetic achievements of New Blériot suggest Calder’s beginnings in mathematics and science, which saw the mechanical engineering graduate work as a draughtsman and hydraulic designer for New York Edison as a young man. Considering the work’s weighty yet airborne quality that seemingly betrays the laws of physics, it is perhaps fitting that it was first exhibited in a seminal solo show at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge—the university that spearheaded America’s first aeronautical engineering course. Hovering in the air, the white and black circles appear as a set of back and front wheels, while the kite-shaped black form and red airfoil element resemble a propeller and tailwing. It is the graceful motion of the mobile, however, that echoes the work’s namesake more than any precise figurative reference. According to Calder’s friend Robert Osborn, the artist evoked the early aviation pioneers such as the Wright Brothers in his “engineering care and assurance—they and Calder would have understood one another. Their approach was quite the same... There was an incredible integrity about the way he put works together, with the joining of parts so masterly and well‐conceived.”^iv

 

 

ⁱ David Bourdon, Calder: Mobilist, Ringmaster, Innovator, New York, 1980, p. 29.

ⁱⁱ Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read, Berkeley, 2004, p. 75.

ⁱⁱⁱ Selden Rodman, “Alexander Calder,” Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957.

^iv Grace Glueck, “Friends of Calder Honor Him As Loving, Happy ‘Bear of a Man,’” The New York Times, December 8, 1976, p. 106.