“You stud” and “A slap on the butt to you” characterized the trans-Atlantic postcard exchanges between Joan Mir? and Alexander Calder, a Spaniard and an American whose artistic cooperation and firm friendship spanned oceans, decades and even a world war. Calder Mir?, a colossal new exhibit at the Phillips Collection, celebrates a great friendship as well as an innovative contribution to modernist and surrealist art in the pristine halls of the collection’s newly-added gallery.
Mir? had been living in Paris for eight years when Calder paid his studio a visit. Traveling within common circles of innovative writers and artists that converged in Paris in the 1920s to form the surrealist and modernist movements, Calder and Mir? maintained an exchange of ideas and inter-continental visits throughout their lives. Despite the two artists’ artistic and social closeness, the Phillips Collection exhibit, which opens on Oct. 9, is only the second time their work will be displayed together.
Calder and Mir? spoke the same language, one that was foreign within the context of previous artistic styles, but still communicated with the irreverently playful language of an inner child. A room of Calder’s sculptures is like the joyfully strewn debris of a child’s playroom. Mobiles spin from the ceilings, trapeze artists are caught mid-swing and faces smile from abstract wire twists. By the end of the exhibit, it seems perfectly logical that a hanging fish with human hands instead of fins should be constructed from wire and sea glass. His work squirms with a lighthearted humor that pokes fun at the stodgy busts and Grecian muscle definition that preceded the modernist movement. Calder draws us into his alternate universe with his playfulness.
If Calder were responsible for the floor and ceiling debris of the playroom, Mir? would be in charge of the walls. His awkward color combinations, disregard for depth perception, and intermingling of line and solid color make his paintings leap and bound across canvases that vary from hotel walls to burlap. Just as Calder uses anything from wool string to drift wood for his sculptures, Mir? was content painting on old sacks and public wall space as canvases. Looking at a Mir? painting is like peering into a wind-up music box. The shapes dance and intertwine, with figures appearing and disappearing depending on the viewer’s angle.
Mir?’s pieces have a swing to them that reflect the motion of Calder’s mobiles. (Xanax bars) He uses line much as Calder uses wire, with solid lines connecting blocks of color, bringing out an oppositional but complimentary perception of positive and negative space. His paintings are delightfully two-dimensional and unconventional.
The power of this exhibit lies in the symbiotic relationship of the two artists that compose it. Calder and Mir?’s similarly lighthearted, youthful styles and themes make it clear that that they were grown-up playmates. Calder’s Circus Scene, made of wire, wood and paint, is quite literally a three ring circus within a 3×5 foot area. There are acrobats on wires, gymnasts, clowns and horses, each one no more than nine inches tall. Similarly, Mir?’s Carnival of the Harlequin combines such images, but encloses them in a world of two dimensional color and line. The figures impishly grin out from the canvas in playful mimicry of their wire-woven counterparts.
Much as the literary world of the 1910s and 1920s combated the stuffy styles of written composition that preceded the modernist movement, Calder and Mir? sought to push the boundaries of the rules that governed artistic composition. If Calder sculpted busts, he did it with one sole coat hanger. Mir? didn’t paint portraits or bucolic landscapes. Humor, as opposed to sarcasm or bitter irony, provided an instrument for artistic transformation in their work and the works of those around them.
What’s on exhibit at the Phillips Collection is a friendship that encircled a lifetime of artistic innovation. At once irreverent, iconoclastic, abstract and hilarious, Calder and Mir?’s creative collaboration thrived on a common sense of humor in art, which beams out at us from every swinging sculpture and colorful canvas.
