Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder Details
Amazon.com Review What a thrill this book should be for those who have yet to fall in love with sculptor Alexander Calder, who died in 1976. And it will deepen the affection the rest of us already hold for him and his fabulous creations. The author, photographer Pedro Guerrero, first took his camera to Calder's Connecticut studio in 1963, on a routine assignment with an editor from House and Garden magazine. As soon as they arrived at Calder's shambly, magical, jam-packed home, Guerrero could sense that the editor was less than enthralled. "If I had known you were going to photograph that room," she later sniffed, "I would have straightened the slipcovers." "What a thing to notice!" writes Guerrero, who was, as he put it, "plotting my next move." Over the next 13 years, he photographed Calder, often with his beautiful wife, Louisa, in different houses and studios, all of them mesmerizingly overflowing with wire sculptures, homemade toys for their grandchildren, stabiles, mobiles, piles of mail, chairlike contraptions, and sculptural kitchen paraphernalia. "Be careful where you step," Calder warned Guerrero in the studio, "everything here is important." Calder at Home is as playful and entertaining as the artist's famous Circus acrobats and animals installed (alas, behind glass) in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art. From the foreword by Calder's grandson to Guerrero's final, pensive photograph of the master alchemist, this is a book to dream on. --Peggy Moorman Read more
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Reviews
This book is pretty much what the publisher says it is: a more intimate view of an artist's life than you get in most monographs. There are many photographs and some entertaining, telling anecdotes you probably won't read anywhere else: a favorite of mine was the owner of IBM dropping by Calder's studio and finding $125 too much to pay for a work he was interested in. If you're young you may never have heard of IBM - that's why it's a telling story. So yes - you get these little glimpses of a life but they tell the big story of a man in his time in his culture, told by someone with the tone of a friend who was there in person.
