“When everything goes right,” said Calder, “a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise.” It went right quite often, as he drolly acknowledged: “My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.” He wasn’t being fair to himself; the mobiles are more than mere jeux d’esprit. As the individual elements, in softly organic shapes and a restricted palette, rotate they display both a musical stateliness and a hugely satisfying sense of equilibrium — each element in perfect balance. The air around them is as much an artistic material as the wire and steel. “To an engineer, good enough means perfect,” Calder said. “With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.” But in eliding engineering and art he got close.
If this seems a purist’s aesthetic Calder was also a man fascinated by popular culture, especially theatre and dance. Among his wire sculptures are witty representations of Josephine Baker and, in The Brass Family (1929), a troupe of acrobats. Some of his mobiles, such as Red Gongs (1950), and Streetcar (1951), have chimes incorporated so that they too have a performative role. In this experimentation Calder was very much part of the avant-garde and for all his sense of fun he had a real seriousness of purpose. Which is why his work appeals to more than just six-year-olds.
Peter Lanyon was another artist whose work looked to the skies. Fifteen of the Cornishman’s paintings on the theme of gliding are on show in a small but choice exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery (until January 17). In 1959, Lanyon, a painter of near-abstract landscapes, watched three gliders sail overhead as he walked the clifftops and resolved to join them. He had served in the RAF during the war and immediately took lessons, quickly learning to fly solo and making innumerable flights until, in 1964, he crashed and later died of his injuries, aged only 46.
While airbound he experienced the altered perspectives of great height and the influence of air and thermals. Back in St Ives — where he had frosty relations with the likes of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth — he committed the sensations of flight to canvas. The gliding pictures in the exhibition are depictions of mood and impressions. There are the varied blues of the sky and sea, the browns and ochres of the land, the greens of fields, and marks imitating flightpaths and thermals. The brushwork, in its rapidity and openness, evokes the rush and swoop of flight and its intensity too.
In these works Lanyon sought to emulate his hero Turner and find a new way to represent the landscape and to transmit in paint something of the physical force of nature. The pictures are both beautiful and affecting — what-might-have-beens by a painter whose art helped to cost him his life.
If this seems a purist’s aesthetic Calder was also a man fascinated by popular culture, especially theatre and dance. Among his wire sculptures are witty representations of Josephine Baker and, in The Brass Family (1929), a troupe of acrobats. Some of his mobiles, such as Red Gongs (1950), and Streetcar (1951), have chimes incorporated so that they too have a performative role. In this experimentation Calder was very much part of the avant-garde and for all his sense of fun he had a real seriousness of purpose. Which is why his work appeals to more than just six-year-olds.
Peter Lanyon was another artist whose work looked to the skies. Fifteen of the Cornishman’s paintings on the theme of gliding are on show in a small but choice exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery (until January 17). In 1959, Lanyon, a painter of near-abstract landscapes, watched three gliders sail overhead as he walked the clifftops and resolved to join them. He had served in the RAF during the war and immediately took lessons, quickly learning to fly solo and making innumerable flights until, in 1964, he crashed and later died of his injuries, aged only 46.
While airbound he experienced the altered perspectives of great height and the influence of air and thermals. Back in St Ives — where he had frosty relations with the likes of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth — he committed the sensations of flight to canvas. The gliding pictures in the exhibition are depictions of mood and impressions. There are the varied blues of the sky and sea, the browns and ochres of the land, the greens of fields, and marks imitating flightpaths and thermals. The brushwork, in its rapidity and openness, evokes the rush and swoop of flight and its intensity too.
In these works Lanyon sought to emulate his hero Turner and find a new way to represent the landscape and to transmit in paint something of the physical force of nature. The pictures are both beautiful and affecting — what-might-have-beens by a painter whose art helped to cost him his life.
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