The work is registered in the Calder Foundation archive.
in cooperation with:
Martha Graham Workshop
"Stage Design (maquette)"
wood
1935
42 x 28 x 12 cm (16 1/2 x 11 x 4 3/4 in.)
In 1935, Alexander Calder was collaborating on avant-garde dance and art projects with his close friend, Martha Graham, considered to be the foremost creator of Modern Dance. Calder had held a lifelong passion for dance, creating ideas for sets and even trying his hand at choreography. He had been living and working in Paris, where his Surrealist friends like Miro had influenced his modernists concepts. The present piece is a maquette for a ballet that was to be created by Martha Graham. Graham and Calder intended for dancers to perform along the steps of the pyramidal ziggurat, eventually reaching for a giant spiral with which they could dance. Like most of their concepts, the final large work was never realised. It was always Calder’s intention that each maquette should be a valid work of art in its own right.
In the mid-1930s, when Graham was already recognised as the preeminent modern-dance choreographer of her time, she worked with Calder on elaborate sets for two dances. Years later she would remember the famously informal Calder arriving in Bennington, Vermont, where the first of these collaborations was mounted, wearing “nothing but his undershorts.” For the Bennington dance, an elaborate survey of American history entitled “Panorama” (1935), Calder created mobile elements hung over the rafters in the Vermont State Armory, which the dancers would interact with as they moved around the stage. In 1936, the second collaboration between Calder and Graham was presented in New York City: the dance "Horizons," for which Calder again created the mobile sets. The dance critic Arlene Croce once called a Graham solo “solid geometry as live emotion”; that could double as a description of some of Calder’s work. Calder and Martha Graham remained lifelong friends.
Apart from collaborating with Martha Graham, Calder created stage sets for several other theatrical productions, including “Works in Progress” (1968). This was a "ballet" conceived by Calder himself and produced at the Rome Opera House, featuring an array of mobiles, stabiles, and large painted backdrops. Calder would describe some of his stage sets as dancers performing a choreography due to their rhythmic movement.
Alexander Calder was known both for his innovative mobiles, kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents that embrace chance in their aesthetic, and static "stabiles", monumental public sculptures. He also created paintings, jewelry, theatre sets and costumes. In 1935, he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. In New York, he was championed from the early 1930s by the Museum of Modern Art, and was one of three Americans to be included in Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s 1936 exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art".
