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The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Mir, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen--further enrich the story.



About the Author

Jed Perl

Jed Perl, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, has been called by poet John Ashbery "an almost solitary, essential voice." And a reviewer in the Atlantic, writing about Magicians and Charlatans--Perl's most recent collection of essays --observed that he "may be the finest American critic at work today in any field." Perl was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade. The first volume of his biography of the American sculptor Alexander Calder - Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940 - has been published by Knopf this fall. "All artists are critics," the novelist Fran Lebowitz has written about Perl's biography of Calder, "but very few critics are artists. Jed Perl is one of those few."Among Jed Perl's many books are Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis, and New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, which was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book. He is also the editor of Art in America: 1945-1970, a 900-page anthology that he edited and introduced, published by the Library of America. He has written for Harper's, The New Criterion, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, the McNeil Lehrer News Hour, CNN, as well as National Public Radio; and he is a professor of Liberal Studies at The New School in New York City, where he lives with his wife, the painter Deborah Rosenthal.



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