A Calder Cornucopia at Fondation Louis Vuitton

On through August 16 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Calder: Rêver en équilibre charts the many eras and iterations of Alexander Calder’s genius. Given the diversity and scale of Calder’s work, the show presents visitors with a surprisingly coherent narrative, all while including other artists like Barbara Hepworth and Paul Klee.  

Visitors are treated to the full spectrum of a life’s work: from paint, sculpture, and jewelry to tapestry and costume, Calder did it all. Born in Philadelphia to a sculptor father and a portraitist mother who had studied at the Sorbonne, Calder eventually wound up in Paris himself. Here his world expanded — he launched his Cirque Calder and developed innovative wire sculptures of acrobats, athletes, and the great Josephine Baker. He visited Piet Mondrian’s studio, had an epiphany around abstraction, and created sculptures Marcel Duchamp eventually coined mobiles, perhaps the form Calder remains best known for today.  

The exhibit fills four floors of glass-encased landscape and features Calder’s signature mobiles, early paintings, and a final hallway devoted entirely to portraits of the artist, to poignant effect. Coinciding with the centennial of Calder’s début in Paris, the show contains eerie echoes of our era, paradoxical convergences of the exaggerated and farcical, natural and refined, zany and zen. Perhaps because Calder’s work feels so alive, to stand before a painting from 1926 and realize one has traversed the last century feels somewhat unsettling, almost uncanny. 

Calder’s social circle was stacked with the who’s who of the art world — he was known to enlist the sculptor and creator of iconic lamps Isamu Noguchi as his phonograph operator for performances of Cirque Calder. He befriended Agnès Varda, who said of him, “He invented, instinctively, a way of recreating the gentle movements of trees in the wind. He reinvented the beauty of nature.” 

Considered one of the earliest forms of what is now known as performance art, Cirque Calder defies categorization other than as a unique experience, a live event so reflective of Calder’s sensibility it could have only been born of him. An excellent film offers visitors extensive footage of the circus and is worth pausing to watch in full. Whimsical, funny, unpredictable, cirque Calder became the talk of the town among the avant garde, all while remaining a family affair — his wife Louisa is shown in the wings, serving as a sort of wary foil to Calder’s larger than life operatics. 

The museum store features a robust kids section ideal for stocking up on birthday party gifts for the coming year, or you can treat yourself to a set of Fondation Louis Vuitton private label matches. For parents and grandparents especially, Rêver en  équilibre is the perfect summertime excursion, since it can coincide with a trip to the Jardin d’Acclimatation next door. And nature lovers of any age can seek refuge from the heat in the Bois de Boulogne before and after taking in the exhibit.  

DETAILS

Calder: Rêver en équilibre
Though August 16 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 av. du Mahatma Gandhi
Tickets: 18 euros, with reduced fares of 5 and 10 euros
Closed Tuesdays