What Alexander Calder Understood About Joy

If Alexander Calder were alive to visit the kids’ department of Pottery Barn or West Elm today, he would probably feel deeply torn, which tells you a lot about America’s best-known sculptor. He might well say that the shelves of knockoff mobiles “nauseate” him, as he did when DIY mobile-making guides started proliferating among craft hobbyists in the 1950s. Gimmicky popularizing of his work pained him. Then again, he would likely take real pleasure in discovering that his greatest sculptural innovation has found new life as an enchanting crib toy.

Calder, born in a suburb of Philadelphia in 1898, came of age at a time when prominent artists and thinkers had begun to consider play a serious pastime. “Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and family jests—is play,” Vladimir Nabokov declared in 1925. By the last decade of Calder’s life—he died in 1976—the view had acquired prescriptive authority. “It is in playing and only in playing,” the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued, “that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”

It would be hard to find a more apt embodiment of that vision than Calder, who took a professional approach to play beginning in his 20s, as a designer of push-and-pull toys. Many of, , , , , . Yet his work also reflected his “whole personality,” not simply his high-spirited temperament: Calder’s sculptures are the products of a notably eclectic education. He was a student first of engineering and later of the modernist-art movements—surrealism, Dadaism, neoplasticism—that he encountered in Paris, where he lived on and off for five decades, starting in the 1920s.