Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933

New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Yale University Press, 2008. Pictorial boards, 304 pages, illustrations (some colour); 28 cm. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Firm binding, clean inside copy. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by arrangement. Richly illustrated with colour plates. "In 1926, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) moved from New York to Paris and began to use time and motion as 'materials' for animating line and space. Calder's years in Paris--an understudied part of the artist's career--is the focus of this marvelous publication. A team of international scholars discusses Calder's many innovations of this period, chief among them his abstract, motorized, and mobile works. They analyze the extended cast of Calder's animated 'Circus,' made in Paris between 1926 and 1931, and include previously unpublished photographs by Brassai and Kertesz of Calder and this beloved performative sculpture. The essays critically explore the intellectual, cultural, and artistic milieu of Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the contexts of Calder's friendships with Miro, Mondrian, Duchamp, and Man Ray, among others. What emerges in this fascinating book is a nuanced and detailed understanding of how Calder's distinctive career first took flight." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Alexander Calder: the Paris years, by Joan Simon; Plates: Caricatures, portraits, figures; Calder the illustrator: corporeal writing to organic sign, by Brigitte Leal; Plates: Animals, toys, circus; Calder as artist-engineer: vectors, velocities, by Henry Petroski; The search for ubiquity: Calder and the reproduction of his works, 1927-32, by Quentin Bajac; Clader's once and future circus: a conservator's perspective, by Eleonora Nagy with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro; The alchemist: Alexander Calder and surrealism, by Pepe Karmel; Parisian metamorphosis in four acts, by Annie Cohen-Solal; Painting and working in the abstract: Calder's oeuvre and constructive art, by Arnauld Pierre; Plates: Abstraction; Chronology, by Alexander S. C. Rower.. 1st. Hardcover. Fine. 4to. Collectible.