In her new column for Elephant, Kitty Lees delves into the archives, spotlighting one jewellery-themed work each month.
Alexander Calder’s sculptures have always behaved like living things. His great mobiles – those slow, balancing arrangements of metal shapes – refuse stillness. Beautifully suspended shapes, affectionately named: Hanging Spider, Black Dots, Tentacles, drift from one position to another; reacting sometimes to a faint breeze, other times just the opening of a door. Even the stabiles – his large, grounded sculptures, do not stand still, their steel plates arching and curving like muscles.
Despite being recognised for these varying patterns of red, yellow, black and blue, Calder was also a dedicated jeweller, making thousands of pieces throughout his lifetime. From the 1930’s onwards, his friends and family were transformed into walking mobiles when wearing the artist’s necklaces and bracelets: primitive executions in bent, curled, and twisted silver and brass.
Calder’s work in metal wire began during his years in Paris, where he famously constructed Cirque Calder – a miniature circus populated by ringmasters, lion tamers, contortionists, and acrobats. These figures, formed primarily from thick and thin gauges of wire, revealed Calder’s instinct for animating simple materials.
When explaining the project in 1929, Calder said that “as one can compose colours, or forms, so one can compose motions.” Jewellery was a natural extension of this logic.
‘Crown of Leaves’ shows the vitality of Calder’s hand. Leaves sprout from spindly, twig-like pieces of brass, clustered together imperfectly, as though they are being swept away. Like his kinetic mobiles, the headpiece feels ever so slightly off balance, and seems to play with the idea of abstraction whilst still suggesting something alive.
Calder’s jewellery was all about who was wearing it. Georgia O’Keeffe had a brooch bent meticulously into the initials “OK.” Joan Miró received a heavy brass ring cradling a fragment of porcelain; and for Peggy Guggenheim, a pair of silver earrings named simply ‘Earrings for Peggy Guggenheim”. Each piece he made was designed to move, to be worn or to perform.
In the end, his jewellery makes clear what his sculpture always implied: that for Calder, an object only became itself when moving, whether that be suspended from a ceiling or fastened to a wrist.
