Alexander Calder was born in Lawton, Pennsylvania. His mother was a painter, his father was a sculptor, and the family traveled around the country working on commissions. As a child he was interested in gadgets and handicraft; his parents received two small sculptures from him for Christmas in 1909. In 1919 he graduated with an engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Four years later, after a series of engineering and manual labor jobs, he decided to become an artist and enrolled himself with the Arts Student League in New York. Commissioned to produce illustrations for the National Police Gazette in 1925 he spent two weeks sketching at the circuses that soon became one of his perennial subjects. In Paris the following year he started to produce circus-themed sculptures out of wood, wire, and other media. The sculptures could be manipulated. "Every piece was small enough to be packed into a large trunk, enabling the artist to carry it with him and hold performances anywhere," reports his website. Wire became his new favorite medium. He met Piet Mondrian. "My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930," he wrote in 1951. "I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature. I told him I would like to make them oscillate." By the end of 1931 he was introducing moving parts into his abstract sculptures, first with motors, then by suspending shapes in the air and letting them stir in the wind. Calder referred to them as "mobiles." Still works were the "Stabiles." Returning to the United States in 1933, he held his first New York show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1935. For the rest of his life he worked on an increasingly large scale, producing supersized outdoor commissions for UNESCO (Spirale, 1958) and the Mexico City Olympics (El Sol Rojo, 1966). "The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe," he wrote, "the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities... some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the idea source of form."
