At John F. Kennedy Airport, you may have walked beneath the stately mobile that Alexander Calder made in 1957 for what was then Idlewild, and not even realized it. Or perhaps, sightseeing in Chicago, you have gazed at his soaring 1973 “Flamingo,” in his signature “Calder red,” in Federal Plaza. Monumental Calders reside in public places in some 20 states and at least as many countries. If you have a child, a mobile (a medium Calder invented) probably spun above their crib. Such ubiquity can be a curse. An artist risks being taken for granted, typecast as an entertainer or a plaza-filler.
“My fan mail is enormous: Everybody is under 6,” Calder quipped in 1965. But the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was a fan, too, and he understood that the easygoing charm of Calder’s art cloaks slow-unfolding mysteries. Sartre wrote in a 1946 essay that “Calder’s objects are like the sea, and they cast its same spell — always beginning again, always new. A passing glance is not enough to understand them. One must live their lives, become fascinated by them.”
How might it feel to live their lives? An ambitious new institution opening in Philadelphia on Sunday invites us to find out. Celebrating one of the city’s native sons, the site, Calder Gardens, is small but potent, an exhibition space and philanthropic project, a civic gift with a radical slant. Stuffed with both prime Calders and more obscure material, it revivifies the artist’s expansive powers, and it ought to inspire similarly adventurous single-artist museums, which are still a rarity in this country (though “museum” is a word the Calder Gardens team rejects). Its premise is almost a riddle: If you own no art, stage no special exhibitions, and offer no didactic material about the work on display, what can you do instead?
On Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the city’s museum hub, it’s clear that something peculiar is afoot: Behind an intricate field of plants — conceived by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf — is a new, low-slung building with a facade of hazy metal. “It duplicates the garden and reflects the city,” its creator, the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog, of Herzog & de Meuron, told me by video from Basel. “It’s so not Calder.” He likened it to “a coat of invisibility, like Harry Potter.”
The alluring building sits across from the small Rodin Museum, which might have amused Calder, who died in 1976 at age 78. As an on-the-make artist in 1920s Paris, he visited the Musée Rodin there, and later said, dismissively, “I did not think much of the shaving cream — the marble mousse out of which blossoms the kiss of love.” The Rodin Museum is a classical Beaux-Arts manse with a rectilinear garden out front, the antithesis of this new endeavor’s venturesome design.
Kitty corner is the Barnes Foundation, which will provide administrative and operational support for Calder Gardens, and down the parkway is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where there is a bewitching white Calder “Ghost” from 1964 and glorious galleries devoted to Calder’s friend Marcel Duchamp. It was Duchamp who told Calder to use the word “mobile” — the French word for something that moves — for his hanging constructions. Calder Gardens occupies just under two acres, the last slice of available land along the sylvan parkway, “a beautiful set of teeth with one missing,” the philanthropist Joseph Neubauer said. (The city has given a 99-year lease to Calder Gardens.) A former chief executive of the food-services giant Aramark, Neubauer has spearheaded the Calder Gardens initiative and helped line up $90 million for its construction and endowment. (His family foundation is a substantial donor.)
With Herzog & de Meuron, the Pritzker Prize winning team with buildings around the globe; Oudolf, the planter of the much-imitated High Line; and Calder, “you’ve got three amazing artists operating in one space,” Neubauer said, “and it’s in Philadelphia.”
Why here? Calder was born in the city in 1898, the son of a sculptor father, Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945), and a painter mother, Nanette Calder (1866-1960). Stirling did a handsome fountain nearby on the boulevard, and one of Calder’s grandfathers, Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), a Scottish immigrant, made the statue of William Penn that crowns City Hall (and another 250-plus works for it). Three generations of artists in one locale, their 130 years spanning modern art’s rise in the United States: a moving convergence.
The building is just 18,000 square feet, but it gets a lot done across a medley of unconventional rooms that flow underground. “We want to exploit or use every space, like in butchery, where from nose to tail, you use every single part of the animal,” Herzog said. The most capacious is a central area where a massive Calder stabile — the artist Jean Arp’s word for Calder’s stationary sculptures — stands sentinel, surrounded by mobiles and paintings. (Works on paper await elsewhere.)
On a recent morning, an herby smell was in the air as bees darted about purple flowers. Oudolf said he wanted “to create something beautiful that people get immersed in, that they get lost in on the way to the building.” He figures it will take about two years for his plants to do what he wants them to do. (In renderings, his gardens are lush and dense, a free-flowing complement to Calder’s art, which is mostly inside the building.)
Calder Gardens has an unorthodox approach to time. Art will come and go by no fixed schedule, much of it lent by the Calder Foundation, which is steered by one of the artist’s grandsons, Alexander S. C. Rower, known as Sandy (the artist’s nickname). Rower chairs curatorial matters at the gardens and secured august loans to supplement the foundation’s.
The Museum of Modern Art’s “Black Widow” (1959), a sinister black stabile with two spindly legs, sits beneath a high ceiling that holds another “Black Widow” (1948), this one a nearly 11-foot-tall mobile that suggests an enormous undersea creature of black metal and wire, from São Paulo.
Visitors may not learn about that playful pairing of names, given that the organization eschews wall labels. “We don’t want you to come and feel that you are at Calder Gardens to be taught about something,” Juana Berrío, its senior director of programs, said, “but to experience something that gives you some hints about yourself.”
Such institutional silence may seem anti-intellectual, but give it a chance. I’ve enjoyed two unencumbered visits to Calder Gardens, watching mobiles float, undistracted. Berrío’s job is to book readings, performances, screenings and other events to make the place even more alive.
When Neubauer approached Rower about creating a home for Calder, Rower told me that he replied: “I’d like to make a sacred space. I’d like to do something other than a museum. I’d like to make a place where humans can be in contact and communicate with each other.” He also wanted “to make it too small to fail,” an admirable commitment in this era of bloated museums and strained budgets.
One dark stairwell has craggy walls made of shotcrete; walking down it, you feel like you are descending a narrow cavern or a mud tunnel. (Children will love Calder Gardens.) A window-box gallery awaits at its end, framing a compact mobile with a fierce tangle of white arms.
An almost-hidden alcove behind the largest room has curved white walls that recall the endless space of a James Turrell installation. A virtuoso mobile, “Eucalyptus” (1940), with a claw at its bottom, elegant and threatening, hangs in this void. There’s room for only a few onlookers. (Herzog has placed cozy, built-in seats here and there, a gracious touch.)
A cylindrical outdoor space called the “sunken garden” holds a large, jaunty standing mobile. Plants will eventually cover its walls. Inside, that curved wall forms a gallery with two static “Constellations” that Calder made with bits of wood and wire during World War II, when sheet metal was scarce.
Even when Calder is clunky — and he could be very clunky — the building bolsters him. A goofy triangle in Calder red is a cartoonish amoeba with its jutting blobby arms, but, tucked under an overhang in a below-ground garden, it takes on a casual dignity.
It is an ennobling fun house, with a zest for drama. It is quiet, since a large part of it is beneath the earth, but it is never precious. (One window looks out to Interstate 676.)
Calder Gardens amplifies the artist’s restless wit and curiosity. It made me see him as a gentleman inventor whose antecedents include Benjamin Franklin, another great Philadelphian. His is a democratic art, made of workaday materials that he tinkered with, then left to the winds. No one ever sees the same mobile, since they are always on the move.
“To be so everywhere in the world that you then disappear is a special thing,” Alex Da Corte, the Philadelphia-based artist, a Calder fan, said the other day, of the mobiles. Calder Gardens manages to crystallize his accomplishments in a manner true to his spirit. It takes risks, and it trusts its audience, just like Calder, who rarely discussed the meaning of his art.
I hope it leads to other, more nimble experiments. The Calder Foundation is not alone in holding art in storage. What other kinds of buildings could be made or commandeered to get foundations’ treasures on view? How else can artists’ legacies be honored and extended?
Late one evening, I walked by the site and Herzog’s soft-focused facade had grown dark. It was smoldering with gold, picking up the city’s lights. Plants were swaying in the dark wind.
It will take time to decide if Calder Gardens is a success. But what a start.
Calder Gardens
Opens Sept. 21; 2100 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, (215) 278-7250; caldergardens.org.
The post In Philadelphia, a Stirring New Stage for Alexander Calder appeared first on New York Times.
