Today, an engineer takes up sculpture. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Alexander Calder's joyous
orange Crab marks our Houston Museum of Fine
Art. You know you're there when you see it. Calder
created wonderful abstract structures --
mobiles of balanced steel plates, his
so-called stabiles sitting solidly on the
ground. I especially like the way he evokes animals
with segmented slabs of steel. That menacing Crab
lurking by our museum entrance is a stabile.
Whether or not know you Calder's work, you've
certainly seen countless imitations of the style he
created. He is one of the great modern artists
whose work has settled into the background imagery
of everyday life.
Calder was born in 1898, and art historian Joan
Marter tells about the artistic silver spoon in his
mouth. Calder's father and grandfather were both
noted sculptors. His father oversaw sculpture for
the
San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915
. When it was clear that Calder had a talent for
mechanics, his parents built a workshop for him.
The boy grew up making things in his basement and
hanging out in his father's studio.
After high school in San Francisco, he chose to
study mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute
of Technology. His parents were pleased. They
didn't want him taking up art. When he graduated in
1919, it soon became clear that he didn't want to
work in an engineering company. But the education
stuck to him -- kinematics, materials,
manufacturing processes.
Calder worked at this and that for a while. Then an
epiphany changed his life while he was serving as a
fireman on a passenger ship. He lay upon a coil of
rope at dawn one day as the sun came up, fiery red,
with the moon showing silver against the last of
the night sky. "It left me with a lasting sensation
of the solar system," he wrote. And he went off to
art school in New York.
Calder committed himself to sculpture, but the
engineer in Calder had simply found its focus. His
mobiles are studies of balance and kinetics. Every
piece is an exercise in materials science. His
stabiles are sophisticated steel construction. Down
through the 1930s he honed his skills and forged
his artistic maturity. Calder's works became
everything good design must be: economical,
durable, and superbly evocative. And he wrote:
How does art come into being? Out of volumes,
motion, space carved out within the surrounding
space ... Out of vectors ... motion, velocity,
acceleration, ... momentum ... Thus [the elements
of art] reveal not only isolated moments, but a
physical law [relating] the elements of life.
So Calder returned to engineering through art just
as T.S. Eliot arrived where he'd started out in his
poem, Four Quartettes. Eliot wrote,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
