ABSTRACT
alexander calder was born in Philadelphia more than fifty years ago, and his parents, who were artists, misread his childish proclivities and tried to make an engineer of him. But left to himself Sandy—as he is always called by his friends—began to draw, and when he was free to follow his own bent, he joined an art school. By 1924 he was supporting himself by free-lance work—work which included the regular provision for the National Police Gazette of what journalists called a half-page spread. In the course of his job he was asked to cover the circus, and this proved to be the decisive event in his career. He couldn’t keep away from the circus, and from drawing the animal and clowns he turned to modelling them in wire and any available bits and pieces. The first time I met Sandy—it was about twenty years ago—he asked those present to sit round him in a circle on the studio floor. He then unrolled and spread in front of him a piece of green baize. Out of a bag he brought the segments of a ring, two or three feet in diameter, which he joined together on the baize, and then he treated us to all the ritual and riotous fun of a circus. The performers—clowns, acrobats, horses, elephants—were all made of wire, and they all went through their turns with a degree of realism that would have to be seen to be fully appreciated. I cant remember all the turns, but his friend James Johnson Sweeney, who has written a book about him and has often seen the performance, tells us that “there were acrobats; tumblers; trained dogs; slack-wire acts à la japonaise; a lion-tamer; a sword-swallower; Rigoulot, the strong-man; the Sultan of Senegambia who hurled knives and axes; Don Rodriguez Kolynos who risked a death-defying slide down a tight wire; ‘living statues’; a trapeze act; a chariot race; every classic feature of the tan-bark programme”.
