Calder Foundation

09/03/2026

We are delighted to announce Calder au cœur de la France, an unprecedented celebration in the Région Centre marking the centenary of the artist’s first arrival in France. Calder acquired a stone house in the village of Saché in 1953 and made this beautiful part of France his primary home in the last decades of his life. Organized by the Centre Pompidou and the Région Centre-Val de Loire, the exhibition will unfold across fourteen venues—including museums, art centers, historic homes, and the region’s famous châteaux—beginning Thursday, 15 October.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/5n7xenrh

[Image: Gui (1976), The Red Feather (1975), Reims croix du sud (1969), Horizontal (1974), and Feuille d’arbre (1974) outside the Le Carroi studio, Saché, 1976. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

09/01/2026

09/01/2026

Ugo Mulas was born on 28 August, 1928. Calder first met the Italian photographer in 1962 on the occasion of the Fifth Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, for which he proposed “a stabile, which will stand on the ground, + arch the roadway.” The final result was Teodelapio, a monumental work—captured here by Mulas alongside Calder and its maquette—that still stands in front of the Stazione Spoleto today. In the years following, Mulas created a tremendous body of hundreds of photographs of Calder and his work.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/tuumxyr8

[Image: Calder with Teodelapio and Teodelapio (maquette, 1956), Spoleto, Italy, 1962. Photograph by Ugo Mulas. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Ugo Mulas Heirs]

09/01/2026

Peggy Guggenheim was born on 26 August, 1898. The American collector was a major proponent of Calder’s work and owned several important pieces, among them Arc of Petals. The iconic mobile made its debut in 1942 at Guggenheim’s famed New York City gallery Art of This Century and was later included in a presentation of her collection at the Venice Biennale in 1948, pictured here. Arc of Petals is returning to Guggenheim’s palazzo in Venice Peggy Guggenheim Venice after spending a few months on view in Paris at Fondation Louis Vuitton.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/3naxd7up

[Image: Peggy Guggenheim with Calder’s Arc of Petals (1941), Greek Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1948. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

09/01/2026

While his birth certificate indicates otherwise, Calder was born on 22 August, 1898 (see our post from 22 July for the story). On the occasion of the artist’s 40th birthday, a white cake with lavender mocha was procured for the celebration in Roxbury. “I still had my old shop in the icehouse—the new one was to be built that fall—and the electric wiring was rudimentary. The bar was in my shop and at a certain moment I was trying to plug in a light, so I did not witness the arrival of Adèle, our maid. She had placed the cake, all candles lit, on a big wicker tray. Louisa, in preparation for the festivity, had mowed the lawn that afternoon, and as Adèle stepped off the stone step of the woodshed door the cake skidded off the tray and landed upside down in the new-mown grass. To the lavender and white, a third color was added—but it was still delicious.”

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/43yukueh

[Image: Louisa Calder playing accordion for Calder and daughter Sandra, Roxbury, 1938. Photograph by Herbert Matter. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

08/25/2026

Calder’s large-scale stabile Four Planes Escarpé is currently on view on the outdoor terrace at Pace Gallery, New York. In 1956, Calder was approached by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to create a sculpture for the office complex One Chase Manhattan Plaza. The artist submitted two separate proposals for the project over the next several years, which were rejected by the Chase Art Committee in 1961 and 1966, respectively. The following year, Calder independently scaled up two maquettes related to the second submission, resulting in a pair of ten-foot-tall stabiles titled Four Planes Escarpé and Six Planes Escarpé. Alexander S. C. Rower considers: “If this had been the project for Chase Bank, it would have been thirty-five feet tall … you would have been able to walk through it. This is almost like a model for a giant sculpture.”

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/bdeskmre

[Image: Four Planes Escarpé, Pace Gallery, New York, 2026. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

08/20/2026

On view at the Seattle Art Museum, Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan pairs the legendary American modernist with one of the most exciting sculptors working today. A Calder Prize winner in 2005, Donovan chose Calder’s Jacaranda and Mountains (1:5 intermediate maquette) as touchpoints for the exhibition. Like the vast majority of Calder’s sculptures, both works are black. Donovan explains, “My primary (though not sole) focus on the color black references Calder’s use of black in many of his works as a neutralizing force that flattens sculptural shapes.”

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/363kujww

[Image: Installation view, Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan, Seattle Art Museum, 2026. Photograph by . © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

08/19/2026

The monumental stabile Nageoire is currently on view at Parque de Serralves, Porto Fundação Serralves, where it is on loan from Centre Pompidou. In 1963, Calder completed construction of a large studio overlooking the Indre Valley near his home in the small village of Saché in France. With the assistance of a full-scale, industrial ironworks that was nearby, he began to fabricate monumental works such as Nageoire. He gifted the sculpture to the Pompidou two years after it was made in 1964.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/yn2p7h3a

[Image: Nageoire (1964), Parque de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 2026. Photograph by . © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

08/17/2026

Calder’s 110-foot-high mobile White Cascade hangs in the East Court of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, where it is on public view on weekdays from 9:30am–4:30pm. A pamphlet published by the bank when the mobile was first installed describes the two-day process: “In what was the most difficult and time consuming part, the four topmost, and largest, aluminum discs—still in their protective wrappings—were joined to their respective stainless steel rods then raised one-by-one and linked together.”

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/bden9zt6

[Image: White Cascade (1975), Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2026. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

08/13/2026

Anatole Jakovski was born on this day in 1909. The French art critic wrote extensively on abstraction and dedicated his early writings to Calder and his peers. “In the beginning, [Calder] used wire—common telegraph wire—he imposed it on sculpture, canonized it, but soon the wire began to impose its own convulsions,” Jakovski wrote in 1933. “Because this ‘new material,’ perhaps the most emotive material of our time, could not be confined within the limited space of old-style sculpture and would soon demand a new conception of art ... wire soon became an autonomous element to which Calder would subordinate everything else.” Made by Calder two years before Jakovski wrote those words, Two Spheres Within a Sphere is on view in the major retrospective Calder. Rêver en équilibre at Fondation Louis Vuitton through Sunday, 16 August.

For more information: https://tinyurl.com/yku27tdy

[Image: Two Spheres Within a Sphere (1931), wire, wood, and paint. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]