Panel: Posing and Composing Selves
Copanelists: Jane Chin Davidson and Maile Gresham
My paper will explore portraiture, a visual form of life writing, and specifically Alexander Calder’s wire portraits of fellow artists. Instead of working with mass—shaping a lump of clay or carving a chunk of wood, traditional practice in portrait sculpture—Calder typically worked with a flexible linear material: wire. Moving from traditional to unconventional medium, Calder effectively translated mass into voids. Since wire has only one dimension, this would seem a particularly limiting choice for this genre; however, seated before his model, pliers in hand, the artist would bend, loop, and spiral wire into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance.
Calder’s method of “drawing in space” produced likenesses of a wide range of artistic personalities: several artists he befriended in Paris in the 1920s—Fernand Léger, Amédee Ozenfant, and Edgar Varèse; colleagues in New York—John Graham and Marion Greenwood; and later acquaintances— André Masson and Saul Steinberg. In Calder’s dexterous hands, these personalities come alive as provocative auto/biographical portraits. I read these portraits as cultural documents that imply narratives having to do with dynamic relational identities. Indeed, Calder’s portraits engage a complex nexus of relationships: between artist and subject, viewer and subject, and viewer and artist. I discuss the implications off such relationality, as well as how portraiture becomes a form of selfunderstanding, for artist as well as subject and viewer.
I will also explore Calder’s expatriation in France and his unique perspective on cultural difference. His portraits of French colleagues involve translation or dislocation from one culture to another, a process which resulted in a rich transatlantic dialogue. Considered as multileveled transactions, Calder’s portraits of artists give a vastly complicated and enriched picture of the artistic self—and of the shaping of new transcontinental identities in the modern era.
Barbara Zabel is Professor of Art History at Connecticut College. Much of her recent work, including Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-Garde, explores how artists responded to the advent of the machine as the governing paradigm for modern culture, and in particular, gender issues raised by machine-age art. She began her work on the portraits of Alexander Calder as part of a Joshua C. Taylor Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution.