Calder. Rêver en équilibre @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Alexander Calder, Black Widow, 1948

The Alexander Calder exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton to mark the centenary of his arrival in France is glorious. The curation of the exhibition looks as effortless as the works themselves, and yet, to showcase their weightless, ethereality must have been as carefully determined as the engineering of the metal sculptures. The simplicity and fluency of these incredibly sophisticated mechanisms, evoking the dreamy and the equilibrium of the exhibition's title was breathtaking. 

Alexander Calder, The Brass Family, 1929

Calder's early works are playful and fantastic, while at the same time being deeply connected to everyday life in modernity. His focus on city life—the circus, the velodrome, and other activities of industrial modernity—shows his engagement with his historical moment and the new kinds of movement /motion /kineticism introduced to daily life thanks to the manufacture of metal and other forms of industrial production. In his early years, he was also working for a sports illustrated magazine, and the National Police Gazette where he was hired to produce drawings of the circus. However, even though he was in many ways required to engage with modern life, his turn to sculpture and performance in the circuses were entirely his invention. In them, other than the wonder of the constructions, we see his interest in movement, flying and ethereality. From early on, he also shows a fascination for the physicality of the body, even though the body is rendered as a void through twisted wire. 

Alexander Calder, Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong, 1948

Similarly, his use of wire for technical and creative innovation to explore scale and the formal possibilities of his circus and other sculptures is fascinating. Calder used these everyday materials in exciting ways, pushing them against themselves to create delicate forms that were everything the material was not. In these sculptures, metal and other industrial materials become delicate, made into perfectly balanced creatures that fly and somersault, dance and play musical instruments. From the very earliest work, we see that Calder's use of wire is like line in a drawing often very simple. But while the objects look effortless, their conception and making cannot have been easy. 

Alexander Calder Jewelry 

I am not usually a fan of exhibitions that include the work of other artists, however here, works by Picasso, Leger, Miro and Duchamp are effective. They show that Calder was not an outlier,  that his work was closely related to that of his contemporaries, particularly in their common pursuit to take art out of its two dimensional frame, to reflect modern life, and to escape its bourgeoise pretensions. In addition, the juxtaposition with well known contemporaries shows that Calder's art was serious - despite its playfulness - engaging with the concerns of the time. Abstraction, movement, form, bodies, circus, sports, mechanical movement were all the subjects of representation to show modernity in their midst. Calder's sculptures may look different from the work of others, but there are many similarities. There is also something akin to Man Ray's light machines - and his photographs of light - in search of abstraction without weight and material. 

Alexander Calder, Aztec Josephine Baker, 1976

As his sculpture develops, many of the works become as much about the shadow as the sculpture itself. We see this in portraits such as that of Josephine Baker. Moving around the wire sculptures, when we look at them from different angles, we see the representations making different faces and the bodies move. And like the later abstract sculptures, these works are also about shapes, form, moving in space, constant kinesis. One of Calder's great inventions was to take sculpture out of its verticality, typified by a dependence on pedestals. He hangs sculpture from ceilings, attaches it to walls. And then he shifts beyond painting and sculpture to make works about time, and works that exist through movement of wind and the energy in the air. In some of his most sophisticated sculptures such as, metal creates the sound of the air in a way that we would not otherwise be able to hear. 

Installation @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Calder's works are also about unpredictability, a lack of control, and the creativity that comes with that lack of control. Because the works come alive when we are with them, in are presence, they transform, become different. These works are still and reflective, silent and dreamy, light, but they manage to be complex and contradictory. Monumental and invisible, making the atmosphere visible and audible. Always turning. Steel becomes completely whispy, itself an challenge their material. And yet, they occupy public space, even as they are ephemeral. Calder's feat is to create complex engineering structures, made to look like fabric blowing in the wind. 

Leonora Carrington @ Musée de Luxembourg

Leonora Carrington, Feeding the Table, 1959

The Leonora Carrington Exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg is stunning. The curation, the paintings, the flow of the exhibition, all come together to show the extraordinary work of this exceptional artist. Carrington is not unknown to anyone in the art world, and neither is she a stranger to the discourse on surrealism. But she did not enjoy the renown of her friend Max Ernst, of course, because she was a woman.

Leonora Carrington, Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, 1975

The exhibition includes her early notebooks and drawings. From the age of ten Carrington was filling pages with magical and mythical creatures in wild and wonderful narratives. There's no doubt that she had the most extraordinary imagination that becomes developed into intricately detailed, brilliantly coloured stories in which creatures morph and diverge across canvases, all somehow speaking to the others.   

Leonora Carrington, Artes 110, 1944

The exhibition text emphasizes the ardent feminism of Carrington's work, propelled by her suffering at the abuse of her father and brother. Her paintings show both the domination of women in the scowling faces of evil men and fallen women as well as the empowering levitation of women escaping the real world. The paintings are filled with anger and remorse, magic tricks and Greek legends. But what is most astounding are the figures; long, lean, with skeletal hands and feet, often emphasized. It is not always immediately obvious - because masculine and feminine are not always distinct - that the paintings are about pain and suffering. They often have a whimsical, joyful, at times humorous streak to them, encouraging us to laugh and smile at their playfulness. 

Leonora Carrington, The Lovers, 1987

Throughout the oeuvre, we see animals as the face of humanity, keeping women company, offering a place to sit, sharing the experience, comforting.  A head becomes three animal heads, a bird perched on a cow, or a pig asleep in a corner delight us with their imaginative depictions. Alternatively, animals are given the role of humans where men are noticeably absent or threatening. Often there was so much going on in the paintings that the cuteness of the animals was only discovered in time. But animals are also there to protect Leonora if we assume that many of the women are indeed, representations of her. Rabbits, cats, birds and other animals encircle her, a duck and a reindeer are dinner guests in Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, and various animals are more than onlookers in The Lovers. While they animals can take centre stage, they also come along for the ride. Often. like the presence of animals, the most compelling part of a painting is not the one that takes up the most space. In The Temptation of St Antoine, for example, the women holding the dress of the queen are vivid in their individuality.

Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of Ste Antoine, 1945

Despite the fanciful imaginative worlds, there are also erudite references to the great traditions of past art. Two curious figures peering over the top of the wall watching the woman feeding a bird are clearly drawing on the putti, angels, and children watching scenes of battle, beheading, and ascension in the Renaissance. The colourful dresses if the women holding the queen's dress in The Temptation of Ste Antoine remind of explorations in the same period, when new colours were being made possible and wealthy patrons were eager to see their wealth on display. Or the narratives that run across her Mars Red Predella, clearly referencing the surreptitious narratives of the form in its classical iterations.

Leonora Carrington, Mars Red Predella, 1947

While there were plenty of wizards and witches and all manner of beings ready to attack, overall, there was such joy in the paintings. Carrington was a committed feminist, vociferously speaking out about the madness she experienced under male domination, and yet, as I say, the stories she tells are always playful and sometimes funny, and there were moments of real lightness. As I walked around the exhibition, I couldn't help lamenting that feminism and identity politics today seems to have lost this ability to find different registers of criticism.