James Johnson Sweeney on Alexander Calder

“The evolution of Calder's work epitomizes the evolution of plastic art in the present [20th] century...First we have a reduction of volumes to contour lines - a sort of spatial calligraphy in wire.. .Then a growing interest in the bases of plastic organization - texture contrasts, primary colors, simple rhythms. Finally a new fusion of these elements into forms.. .And it is in the ability to effect this fusion that Calder's quality lies.. .Tatlin's and Obmochu's constructions remained architecture and machines. Calder personalizes his 'mobiles' with a lyricism entirely his own - a freshness, gaiety and charm.”

“Into the plastic expression of the period he has introduced a new element - that of time. In several of his mobiles he has, as it were, underscored certain suggested compositional rhythms by actual kinetic ones. And here his work offers an interesting parallel with that of the fountain sculptors, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Rome and Florence. Just as out of their playing with water and their free and often fanciful solutions of technical problems, grew what we recognize today as some of the earliest hints of the baroque style in sculpture; so Calder's realizations, vividly vernacular to the present age as they are, offer, at the same time, more probabilities of relationship with the plastic expression of the next, than does the work of any other American sculptor today.”

“It was only a step further for Calder to bring back actual movement in place of the suggestions of it [in art]. And the immediacy of this stimulus carried with it a primitive strength of rhythmic evocation that is perhaps Calder's most striking contribution. But a still more personal and perhaps more important one lies in his recognition of another feature of natural movements - their unpredictable character and the aesthetic possibilities of the unexpected.. .Calder in adapting the natural rhythms also recognized the dramatic value of the surprise element.”