Sandy Calder

Crinkly, Sandy Calder

In 1970, almost a hundred years after the sculptor Auguste Rodin was in Amboise, Alexander Calder, an entirely new sort of sculptor arrived, not, like Rodin, to sketch the Château, but to oversee the installation of one of his stabiles.

If Rodin represents nineteenth century sculpture, Calder represents the twentieth.

In 1970 the mayor of Amboise was the dynamic Michel Debré. One of Life’s movers and shakers, he is still revered fifty years later for transforming the town into the buzzy place it is today. He asked Calder for a stabile and the Surrealist Max Ernst* for a fountain as permanent mementos of their lives in their much loved Touraine where each had lived for so many years.

In 1953 almost a hundred years after Rodin went to Saché in search of Balzac, Calder went to Saché in search of Paradise. He found it. Two years later, his life long friend Ernst followed him to the Loire Valley and settled in nearby Huimes.

Debré presented both artists with the Légion d' Honneur.

Calder gave Amboise the stabile known as Crinkly, this was the first of a series of seven works he called Crinkly. Sometimes Calder gave them names, if not, dealers made them up to make them easier to sell. Buyers and collectors prefer titles. The brightly coloured stabile Calder made for Amboise weighs in at four hundred and sixty kilos. Three and half metres high, two metres wide, it’s made of aluminium and steel. Plates were cut, folded and welded then bolted on to a concrete base.

Calder chose a site near a school at the intersection of rue 8 Mai 1945 and Clos des Gardes for the installation but so few knew about the stabile, it was moved for a while to the Île d'Or. In 2014, it was loaned for an exhibition in the Netherlands and has also been on display at Hôtel Gouin, Tours and Château Saché.

Le Garage, Amboise

Today, Crinkly is back in Amboise. Not out of town where few would make the effort to find it, but outside The Garage, an exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art. A feather in its cap for sure. Not many small towns have such close connections with superstars such as Leonardo da Vinci, Max Ernst and Sandy Calder.

Alexander (he preferred Sandy) Calder’s passion for France began in 1926 when he arrived in Paris from America. It lasted for fifty years until he died (1976). Drawn to abstract art, non-figurative, non-objective, non-representational art, he especially admired Jean Miró with whom Calder enjoyed a close, life long friendship after meeting him in Paris in 1928.

Wanting, but, by his own judgement, failing, to become an abstract painter, Calder, a trained engineer, did the next best thing. He cut abstract shapes from sheet metal, hand painted them red, blue, black and white and suspended them from the ceiling on rods. Each rod hung from a string, each shape hung from a string. Designed so that they did not touch each other, the shapes twisted and moved freely in the air.

In short, Calder had invented a completely new art form, something between painting and sculpture except it moved. It had no name and belonged to no ism, because nothing like it had been seen before.

One day, as he was fixing one of his creations to the ceiling, his friend Marcel Duchamp, watching it move called it a mobile, a mobile work of art, a marriage between engineering, sculpture and painting, abstract painting in motion. In 1936, the art critic for New York World-Telegram said [Calder’s mobiles are Jean] Miró abstractions come to life.

Others said Calder’s mobiles signify nothing, they refer to nothing other than themselves; they simply are.

When Calder started making large, free standing, stationary ‘mobiles’ another friend, the abstract artist Jean/Hans Arp, said they were stable mobiles, so called them stabiles. Accepted now as a legitimate art term when referring to Calder’s work, in 1931 Arp made it up as an antonym to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘mobile’.

Calder explained the difference: ‘You have to walk around a stabile...a mobile dances in front of you’.

Calder was a pioneer of kinetic sculpture (art that incorporates motion). His friends and peer group were all pioneers. His circle included Max Ernst*, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Jean Arp and Robert Delaunay.

Max Ernst said they were all sailing on a ship together with no idea where it was headed.

Calder’s models of stabiles were scaled up and built in the Biémont factory near Tours. Some were, and are, so massive, their stability was tested in a wind tunnel.

As for Saché. Calder met Jean Davidson, a news reporter, in Washington whose father, Jo Davidson, a famous sculptor, lived in Saché. When Calder’s daughter Sandy and Jean decided to get married, Calder and his wife went to Saché to meet the family of his future son-in-law. While there, they too fell in love. With Saché and also with an ancient house with ‘a fantastic cellar room with dirt floors, and a press installed in a cavity carved into the rock of the hill’.

He exchanged three of his valuable mobiles for it and set up a home and a workshop. Many famous people made the pilgrimage to his door including the photographer Robert Doisneau, the writer Arthur Miller and the actress Jane Fonda.

Calder’s priceless works of art are in city centres all over the world and of course in Amboise.

* Read about the life of Max Ernst and the Amboise fountain in Max Ernst and the Genie of Amboise by Pamela Shields, available via Amazon.

Post by Pamela, photography by Mark.