Philadelphia's newest cultural institution, Calder Gardens, has opened along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, celebrating three generations of the Calder artistic dynasty. The innovative underground space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and featuring gardens by Piet Oudolf, focuses primarily on Alexander "Sandy" Calder, the renowned creator of mobiles and stabiles who had been only sporadically represented in his hometown until now.
Philadelphia has long embraced artistic dynasties, from the Peales in the 18th and early 19th centuries to the Morans, luminous 19th-century landscapists. Most famously, the Calders have adorned the city for over a century. The elder Alexander Calder created the statue of William Penn that crowns City Hall, establishing the city's skyline with a long-enforced rule that no building could rise above Billy Penn's hat. The statue radiates the benevolent dignity of a man of peace rather than the anxious arrogance of a warrior. The next generation's Alexander Calder created the beautiful Fountain of the Three Rivers on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, featuring voluptuous allegorical figures of the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Wissahickon rivers.
The new institution joins a distinguished cultural row including the Franklin Institute for science, the Free Library for books, the Rodin Museum for tormented figures, and the Barnes for eccentric juxtapositions of modern art and Pennsylvania Dutch ironwork. At the top of the drive, a Greek-temple art museum presides, with its most recent cultural icon—Sylvester Stallone as Rocky—tactfully tucked out of sight.
Herzog & de Meuron has designed a deliberately irrational exhibition space set largely below the Parkway and sheathed in reflecting steel. The building vanishes into air, as architects like to say, mirroring the gardens around it rather than asserting its own profile. Those gardens, intended to be untamed, animating, and informal, are the work of Piet Oudolf, creator of the High Line plantings in New York. Though unfinished during a recent visit, the gardens already promise to grow into wild abundance.
As visitors enter and descend, the space unfolds in a purposefully whimsical range of materials. Volcanic-seeming black rock lines a catacomb-like stairway, punctuated by a single glass window framing a lone Calder piece. Tiered seats lead down into a viewing area that doubles as an amphitheater for lectures or performances. Though buried, the sometimes monumental forms of the exhibition space rise convexly, lifting upward, while light from the Parkway pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even underground, visitors feel enlarged, not entombed, with the constant rumble of traffic from the boulevard outside preventing any tomblike atmosphere.
Alexander S.C. Rower, the current holder of the Sandy moniker and Calder's great-grandson on his mother's side, represents the Calder legacy today. He welcomed visitors to the new site by confessing he had once thought of calling it a hypogeum—a term for a subterranean temple or chamber. "I don't mean an altar to my grandfather," he quickly added, "but a place for reflection and reconnection to essence. Not a house of relics, not a memorial. A sacred space for self-cultivation."
In his sixties and taut with nervous energy, Sandy Rower knew his grandfather well and had been welcome in the studio—so long as he too was at work. "Not on homework!" he emphasized. "If you were working with your hands, it was okay. You could make a sword!" He now tries to carry his grandfather's vision forward to members of the next generation, introducing them to an art that is multivalent and unfixed, that moves to open minds.
Leading visitors through the new installation, Rower treats it less as the museum it is not intended to be—or even the cultural space it advertises itself as—than as an underground menagerie of eccentric animals, each with a temperament of its own. The mobiles are Rower's untamable creatures, swinging close to heads, shaking and shimmering unpredictably. He delights in their waywardness with the proud wariness of a zookeeper showing off his exotic charges.
"I love to dispel the bizarre things that people make up about my grandfather," Rower said, among them the claim that the mobiles were engineered. "When he was a boy, my grandfather grew up with a studio in his father's studio, and he had an intuitive sense of engineering. And then, later, his parents didn't want him to suffer as an artist does, his father being a sculptor and his mom a painter. A friend was going to study mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute—but that program was to teach you to be an executive. You learned some engineering. So his engineering background can be overstated."
Rower emphasized that his grandfather would have made mobiles without engineering at all. "None of these are engineered objects," he explained. "The outdoor works, yes, become engineered for safety and ribs and structure, but they're always governed by aesthetic choices." He noted that the gussets and bolts were designed by his grandfather, and remarkably, visitors can take even the biggest stabile completely apart and reassemble it. "One of the really unusual things about Calder sculptures is that they're all demountable—even the hundred-foot-tall ones."
The magic of the mobiles lies in their responsiveness. "Now, mobiles are not supposed to move, except when they do," Rower explained. "They're not mechanized. The poetry happens between the objects—the negative space is where the art happens. And they're not motorized! They respond not to motors but to the presence of people near them." In the intimate studio-like space of the new installation, a mobile begins to stir as visitors pass, elegantly or uneasily, shifting with the faintest disturbance. "Speak softly and it moves," Rower urged, demonstrating how the sculpture responds to human presence.
The artworks for the new installation rotate in on loan from collections around the world, with strong pieces arriving from Brazil and Taiwan for the opening. A planned side exhibit will also honor previous Calder generations, including an early bronze model of the Penn statue. The works of Rower's grandfather, taken together, have an accidental, artisanal air—more like toys improvised and reassembled than objects weighed down by deliberation.
Spending time among many pieces, visitors become acutely aware of their sheer variety. Despite generic titles, each has its own character. One mobile, a cluster of white leaf shapes strung along long horizontal arcs, has the aloof grace of an albino peacock, turning with a gavotte rhythm. Another, also built from white disks on a bending wire, evokes a mechanized Japanese cherry tree, its circles perched high on a narrow stem, not revolving so much as brushing quickly past one another. A third, of black orbs and half-moons, is less exquisite than immense, recalling the Surrealist impulse to conjure alternate universes out of abstract forms.
Each leaf in each mobile is handwrought, and the closer one looks, the more their differences surface, creating a delicate tension between the playful evocation of machine-made parts and the palpable evidence of the human touch. A paradox of modern and pre-modern art appears: father and grandfather, though realists and classicists, produced work to be fabricated by assistants from fixed models, as Jeff Koons does now, while the modernist, machine-loving son worked wholly by instinct. The mobiles stir like birds or trees; the stabiles squat, grumpy and irregular, like walruses.
In this time of cultural conflict, there is something moving about Calder's belated institutionalization. Long dismissed as a sideshow in American art, a toymaker rather than a prophet, he reminds viewers of art's primary role, which is not to issue statements but to make things—evocative things, funny things, beautiful things, trivial things. Things that may shimmy and shake, but things nonetheless, not ideological assertions. Rower is working on a book about Calder and Marcel Duchamp, noting they were the best of friends despite seeming opposites—the cerebral chess player and the circus ringmaster. "But that's the point," he said. "They both hated the idea of any kind of official art." The harmony between an object-maker like Calder and an object-denier like Duchamp suggests that the engines of art are always oscillating, reminding us that the space between animated creation and abstract concept can be as small as a whisper of wind, and that the cosmic and the comic are only a single sibilant sound apart.
