The Pew Charitable
Trusts announced a $5-million grant to the Philadelphia
Museum of Art to present a series of outdoor installations of
work by Philadelphia-born sculptor Alexander Calder along
the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The grant will enable the
Museum, in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, to
install 10 to 15 sculptures on a rotating basis over an initial
12-year period beginning in 2001.
Sculptures of varying
scale, some of them monumental, could be placed on the
two-acre site of the forthcoming Calder Museum at Benjamin
Franklin Parkway and 22nd Street; in the garden of the Rodin
Museum directly across the Parkway; the East Terrace of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art; and other suitable locations.
Among the sculpture to be installed is Three Discs, One
Lacking (1968), which is owned by the City of Philadelphia
and is currently displayed at the Pennsylvania Convention
Center. Additional works will be installed in celebration of the
future opening of the Calder Museum, which is being
designed by the Japan-based architectural firm of Tadao
Ando. With the installation of Calder’s large-scale works
along the Parkway, Philadelphians and visitors alike will soon
be able to fully appreciate the boldness and brilliance of
Calder’s art as they approach the area where the Calder
museum will rise.
Calder Foundation Director Alexander S.C. Rower, Alexander
Calder's grandson, said: We are delighted by this
opportunity. The Calder Foundation wants to demonstrate our
commitment to the Calder Museum project by lending a
significant number of works on rotation in and around the
site. We are prepared to loan two impressive works which
can be installed this fall.
The Calder family is truly one of Philadelphia’s great artistic
treasures, said Marian Godfrey, director of the Trusts’
Culture program. This partnership with the Philadelphia
Museum of Art will provide these extraordinary works of art
the dramatic forum they deserve and transform the Parkway
into a unique kind of ‘museum’ in itself. Bringing
Philadelphia’s own Calder, Three Discs, One Lacking, to the
Parkway will be particularly pleasing. We are grateful for the
enthusiastic cooperation of Fairmount Park.
Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director and Chief Executive Officer of
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said: We are deeply
indebted to the Pew Charitable Trusts for its many
remarkable contributions to the city’s cultural life. This
particular initiative is especially exciting and comes at a
wonderful moment. Not only does it underscore the
importance of the future Calder museum, it provides
momentum for the project and further enhances
Philadelphia’s most splendid boulevard. It will be spectacular
to see the full achievement of Alexander Calder, one of the
20th century’s great artists, exhibited in the city of his birth
and in the context of the sculpture of his father and
grandfather.
Alexander Sandy Calder (1898-1976) was the third
generation of an accomplished artistic family from
Philadelphia whose work can already be seen in dramatic
succession along the Parkway. His grandfather, Alexander
Milne Calder (1846-1943), who emigrated to Philadelphia
from Scotland, created some 200 sculptural decorations
adorning City Hall, including the bronze statue of William
Penn (1886-1894) that stands atop the clock tower. His
father, Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945), who was born
in Philadelphia, created the Swann Memorial Fountain (1924)
at Logan Circle, and many other sculptures throughout the
city. At the western end of the Parkway, Alexander Calder’s
ethereal mobile Ghost (1964) is suspended in the great stair
hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation was formed by
members of Calder’s family in 1987 to promote and
disseminate Alexander Calder’s work. In anticipation of
establishing a Calder museum, the Calder Foundation
facilitated a loan in 1999 to the City of Philadelphia of a
large-scale privately owned stabile entitled Eagle (1971).
During the 18-month period in which the sculpture was on
view on the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s East Terrace, the
art museum explored the feasibility of helping to create and
oversee the operations of a Calder museum situated on the
Parkway. On February 14, 2001, Calder Foundation Director
Alexander S. C. Rower, Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street,
and representatives from the Philadelphia Museum of Art
announced the selection of this city as the Calder museum
site. The Calder museum is expected to be about four years
in the making. Former Deputy City Representative for Arts
and Culture, Diane Dalto, is serving as project director.
Alexander Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, in
1898. He graduated in 1919 from the Stevens Institute of
Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering. In
1923, after a series of assorted jobs, he entered the Art
Students League in New York and embarked on a career that
would revolutionize the course of modern sculpture and earn
him international renown. From 1926 to 1929, his miniature
wire circus sculpture and performance piece, Cirque,
brought him to the attention of the art world’s leading figures,
including Miró, Leger, Mondrian, and Picasso. He worked in a
wide range of media and is best known for inventing freely
moving constructions suspended in air (for which Marcel
Duchamp coined the term mobiles) and for his large
free-standing sculptures, stabiles. In the final decades
before his death in 1976, he devoted himself increasingly to
monumental outdoor sculpture. Many major examples lent by
the Calder Foundation can be seen in the recently opened
exhibition Grand Intuitions: Calder’s Monumental Sculpture,
at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY.
Related Links: