Page 25 - Studio International - February 1967

Right Naum Gabo Kinetic construction 1920
Wire, spring, motor-driven. Coll.: the artist

Below Naum Gabo Design for kinetic
construction 1922
Ink. Coll.: U.S.S.R.
Extreme right (top) At Denise René Gallery,
Movement Exhibition 1955, left to right, Soto,
Metamorphosis 1954, Painted plexiglass over
wood; Tinguely, Polychrome Meta-Mechanique
1954, Painted steel, Coll.: Mr and Mrs Max
Wasserman, Chestnut Hill, Mass.; and a
work by Vasarely
Extreme right (bottom)
Marcel Duchamp, Roto reliefs 1923
Original drawings, ink on paper 45+ x 45+ in.
Coll.: Seattle Art Museum, Seattle,
Washington
These were designed for rotation on a
gramophone turntable. In turning they
produced an illusion of the 3rd dimension.

In the '20's came further inventions by Duchamp— world. He is by far the most famous American artist of
the Roto Reliefs of 1923 (extended in 1935 and re-issued the twentieth century.
by the GALLERIA SCHWARZ, Milan, in 1964) and the One would have expected Calder to be the chef d' école.
Rotative Demi-sphere (Optique de Precision) of 1925. In the For fifteen years he had the field to himself. During that
meantime, Constructivist ideas had reached the Bauhaus, time he produced a tremendous oeuvre and also had to
largely through Moholy-Nagy, who had been much suffer a host of plagiarists at the popular level. What is
impressed by the Russian exhibition in Berlin. Many of strange is that one cannot name a single disciple of Calder.
these ideas, including motion studies, appeared in Bau- Calder had, single-handedly, established the validity of
haus teaching. Between 1923 and 1930, Moholy produced kinetic art as a branch of modern sculpture and thus
a kinetic light modulator (now in the Busch-Reisinger opened the way for all others. Yet in surveying kinetic art
Museum at Harvard), which he made the subject of a today one finds scarcely a trace of his influence in the
film: Black, White, and Grey. exhibitions. He did not indicate avenues for develop-
Alexander Calder's first exhibitions of 'mobiles' were at ment. When he went beyond mobiles, he went into
the GALERIE VIGNON, Paris, and JULIAN LEVY'S, New York, stabiles, which was in fact a withdrawal. Many serious
in 1932, twenty years after Duchamp first used that word artists, after the Second World War, recognizing this,
(for the bicycle wheel) and a decade after Gabo's dictum. began to explore movement with the greatest seriousness
Though kinetic art did not start with Calder he and and wide-ranging experiment and themselves became
Wilfred were, nevertheless, the only artists of their time leaders. The more imaginative and independent soon
to commit themselves fully to movement. Calder's very found extensive unexplored regions of possible four-
personal variation on the catenary, his simple, artless dimensional design which had never, apparently, aroused
craftsmanship, and his engaging, artless wit won both Calder's curiosity. The next generation looked beyond
connoisseur and common man and made Calder's name him, to impersonal, non-objective, Constructive art, and
and product household words throughout the civilized to the experimentalism of the Bauhaus, for a guide. Even