Calder’s Performance Art at the Tate Modern

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Alexander Calder spent a lot of time contemplating the circus. In 1925, the American artist spent two weeks sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette. A year later, he created and began performing “Cirque Calder,” an elaborate wire circus in miniature—complete with sword swallower, lion tamer and tightrope walker.

Of all the attractions at the circus, though, his favorite was the spotlight. He recounted seeing a woman perform acrobatics suspended from a wire. “What I loved was the spotlight on her and the rest in obscurity,” he stated.

Calder’s fascination with the drama of the spotlight is at the heart of a new show opening Wednesday at London’s Tate Modern. “Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture” is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in the U.K. to date, and the first to focus on his interest in what curator Ann Coxon calls “the mechanics of the spectacle.”

On display through April 3, the show brings together about 100 works, many on loan from the Calder Foundation and major museums around the world, including Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art and the Whitney in New York. The exhibition focuses on a brief, productive period early in the artists’ career during which he turned from figuration toward abstraction—inventing in the process the mobile.

Calder’s interest in performance informed his practice for decades. The artist, who collaborated with composers Virgil Thomsonand John Cage and choreographer Martha Graham, often referred to his works as “ballet-objects” and spoke about their movements as dances. “With a mechanical drive, you can control the thing like the choreography in a ballet!” he said in 1937.

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