When my wife saw the recent show of Picasso’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she noticed something seldom seen in an art gallery. Everyone was smiling: at the bull made from a bicycle saddle and handlebars; at the bronze baboon whose face is an amalgam of two toy cars; at the goat with massive dugs, inches from the earth, curved and solid as yams. In this Alexander Calder show, there are animals, too, and it is hard to keep the pleasure out of your face. For example, the diminutive dog whose outsized, elongated head – big ears and open, panting jaw – is a sprung clothes peg. A corgi, I’d say. Even Queen Victoria might be amused.
In Goldfish Bowl (1929), there are two prognathous wire goldfish, large and small, as sulky as pike. Calder has caught perfectly their ruthless hard mouths, as it were doubly outlined with lipstick; the fish resemble matrons of America in search of the restroom and malicious gossip. Above them are scrolls of stylised billows and, to their left, a long, wavering ladder of weed. A wonderful Leopard (1927) lies with two simple wire hoops for its raised haunches, but its long body is a tightly curled length of wire, with a necklace of crowded loops that represent the leopard’s vertebrae and the leopard’s spots. Its flat cat’s face is represented by the dressmaker’s hook from the hook and eye, which elsewhere Calder uses as the sign for male genitalia.
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