SUBSTACK: Calder's "Spirale" sculpture and its best friend, the Eiffel Tower
Imagining 1958 at the Palais de l'UNESCO in Paris, and I'm selling a vintage photograph of it!
03.17.25 for Absolument !, my Substack channel
Alexander Calder’s most breathtaking Parisian sculpture shares the grey-toned sky of the country’s capital with the Frenchest woman: La Tour Eiffel.
I absolutely love seeing this picture of Calder near Spirale because it immediately makes me think of what I’ve read about his spirt and self. He’s always described first as being very American. To give a little context, he was born and raised in Pennsylvania to artist parents, then moved alongside Europeans and those from other continents as he explored, created, displayed, circus-ed, and sculpted.
In The Lives of the Surrealists, author Desmond Norris described the artist from his own experience: “When you shook hands with Alexander Calder, it did not feel like the clasp of a highly refined artist, but more like the grip of a steel worker. In conversation, it was the same—you found yourself in the presence of a gruff construction engineer rather than an articulate surrealist. Yet, barrel-chested Sandy Calder was one of the most original artists of modern times.” Prudence Peiffer, while researching for her book The Slip: The New York City Street that Changes American Art Forever, discovered an archived postcard written by painter Ellsworth Kelly. “Kelly described Calder in a postcard as ‘very jovial’ and, perhaps a comment on Calder’s boisterous, ruddy presence, ‘a farmer.’”
In the mid-1950s, modern architect Marcel Breuer and two other architects were commissioned to build the Maison de l’UNESCO campus. In turn, Breuer hired Alexander Calder to create a sculpture for its garden at the southwestern entrance on Avenue de Suffren….