Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia (United States) in 1898. He followed studies in mechanical engineering, before a teaching at the Art Students League of New York (1923-1925). He stayed in Paris (1926-1927) and went to the Academy de la Grande Chaumière. In 1926, he made small animals and other articulated characters in wire and he animated them by staging miniatures in a circus spectacle ("The circus of Calder"). His first personal exhibition was organized in 1928 (New York). In 1931, "Sandy" Calder exhibited with the group Abstraction-Creation. The artist created abstract objects moved by the air or by engines which make them turn endlessly, sticking on frail stalks many black or colored metal sheets which move "poetically". Marcel Duchamp baptized them "motives". Calder invented steel sculptures anchored on the ground, either black or either red sculptures to which Jean Arp gave the name of "stabiles". These abstract forms evoked an animal and plant kingdom. With time going on, "motives" and "stabiles" took more impressive dimensions. Calder used primary colors and is useful of engineering techniques for their realization. The artist invented a multitude of variants in his joinings and received very numerous State orders (Unesco in Paris, Olympic Stadium of Mexico City, etc.). In 1952, Calder obtained the First prize of La Biennale de Venise. In 1974, Calder began the series of "Crags", hanging on "motives" to angles of "stabiles", and "Critters", black "stabiles" which seemed shadows of human forms. At the same time, Calder created an important work on paper, etchings, lithographs mostly very colored. His sculptured work, creative as well as poetic, his genius to find union between abstraction and evocation of the nature, made of Calder one of the biggest sculptors of XX° century. "How to carry out art? By masses, directions, spaces limit in great space the universe, by abstractions which do not resemble has anything of the life, except by their manner of reacting." - Alexander Calder

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