<\/p>\n
By KAREN ROSENBERG
\nIt\u2019s become a clich\u00e9 to describe statement-making jewelry as \u201cwearable art,\u201d but no other term quite captures the personal adornments made by Alexander Calder. His earrings, necklaces and bracelets were mini-mobiles that dangled from the wrists, necks and earlobes of sophisticates like Peggy Guggenheim and Jeanne Moreau.<\/p>\n
The Whitney Museum\u2019s current Calder show features room after room of his playful wire sculptures but none of the 1,800 pieces of jewelry he made over the course of his career. Fortunately about 90 of these pieces are being given their own exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the first museum show to focus on Calder\u2019s jewelry. <\/p>\n
The works in \u201cCalder Jewelry\u201d are wire sculptures too, only smaller, though not much smaller, really, than the components of Calder\u2019s \u201cCircus\u201d at the Whitney. They are made of the same materials \u2014 mostly brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass \u2014 and are just as self-consciously clever. All are one-of-a-kind objets d\u2019art. Calder had many opportunities to sign off on reproductions, and always refused (much to his dealers\u2019 chagrin).<\/p>\n
\u201cCalder Jewelry\u201d comes to New York from the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla. It was organized by Jane Adlin, an associate curator at the Met, with the Norton adjunct curator Mark Rosenthal and the Calder Foundation director (and Calder grandson) Alexander S. C. Rower. It can be difficult to exhibit jewelry, even Calder\u2019s resolutely unprecious metals, without creating a boutique atmosphere. Smaller objects like brooches and hair combs are clustered in vertical display cases, and even the larger necklaces get lost in the high-ceilinged galleries. Photographs of Calder\u2019s jewelry on the body are scarce in the galleries, though numerous in the unwieldy catalog.<\/p>\n
Still, the show has an intimate, even familial quality; Calder made many of the pieces as gifts for friends and relatives. Mr. Rower recalls that when he was a child, his grandmother\u2019s dressing table \u201calways seemed a mysterious altar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two cases are devoted to the jewelry Calder made for his wife, Louisa, beginning with the couple\u2019s engagement ring \u2014 a simple spiral of gold wire. Calder always returned to the spiral for birthday and anniversary gifts; he seems to have adopted this late Bronze Age motif as a personal talisman.<\/p>\n
He was also fond of initials and monograms, as evidenced by the pieces he made for friends like the curator Dorothy C. Miller and the art dealer Marian Willard Johnson. These objects are the equivalent of the wire portrait heads at the Whitney: bits of customized whimsy. More interesting are the pieces with a Surrealist bent, like the pair of earrings that spell out Joan Mir\u00f3\u2019s piquant declamation \u201cA bas la M\u00e9diterran\u00e9e\u201d (\u201cDown With the Mediterranean\u201d).<\/p>\n
Calder\u2019s jewelry appealed to women with avant-garde tastes who liked to make a dramatic entrance. Mary Rockefeller was said to have required a little elbow room when she wore her Calder necklace to art openings. Peggy Guggenheim boasted in her autobiography, \u201cI am the only woman in the world who wears his enormous mobile earrings.\u201d Two pairs of those broad and pendulous earrings are in the exhibition; they are certainly not for everyone, or at least not for the woman who might be afraid to inflict flesh wounds while air-kissing.<\/p>\n
Consider the spectacular object nicknamed \u201cThe Jealous Husband,\u201d from 1940. In this oversize necklace, a breastplate of flat curlicues of hammered wire rises into barbed coils at the collarbone. Hilton Kramer, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1976, noted the work\u2019s \u201chumor of mock aggression and shameless self-assertion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other necklaces suggest less extreme forms of body armor. An aptly titled \u201cChainmail\u201d necklace from 1940 features hand-linked circles of silver wire. An untitled piece from 1942 might be described as brass knuckles for the shoulders.<\/p>\n
Calder\u2019s necklaces and tiaras could take up a lot of space without looking heavy. His \u201cFlower Necklace\u201d (1938) is a chain of delicate silver leaves attached to a daisylike blossom, all fashioned from looped wire. In \u201cCrown\u201d (1940), clusters of brass \u201civy\u201d rise from a simple headpiece.<\/p>\n
Craftsmanship is anything but mysterious; nearly every piece consists of hammered, bent or chiseled wire. Pliers marks are visible on the unpolished surfaces. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or fashioned rivets. Some of his intricate-looking cuff bracelets, with wavy lines and zigzags, are little more than single pieces of twisted and flattened wire.<\/p>\n
In both technique and design, Calder aspired to be \u201cprimitive.\u201d Like Picasso, he had seen and collected African sculpture in Paris. Ms. Adlin points out, in her catalog essay, that Calder\u2019s bracelets and neck collars with parallel strips of wire bear a striking resemblance to the beaded corsets worn by members of the East African Dinka tribe. Other comparisons will come to mind, particularly if you wander through the Met\u2019s galleries of Celtic or Pre-Colombian art.<\/p>\n
Calder\u2019s forms weren\u2019t new, but his sense of the body as a kinetic sculpture was liberating. He convinced us that art can be precious, and jewelry need not be.<\/p>\n
\u201cCalder Jewelry\u201d continues through March 1 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.<\/p>\n
Source: www.nytimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By KAREN ROSENBERG It\u2019s become a clich\u00e9 to describe statement-making jewelry as \u201cwearable art,\u201d but no other term quite captures the personal adornments made by Alexander Calder. His earrings, necklaces and bracelets were mini-mobiles that dangled from the wrists, necks and earlobes of sophisticates like Peggy Guggenheim and Jeanne Moreau. The Whitney Museum\u2019s current Calder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[411],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n