For more than quarter century, Greta Greenberger ended her tours of Philadelphia City Hall at the tower, just below the bronze buckled shoes of William Penn (1892), the shady colossus that Alexander Milne Calder sculpted.<\/p>\n
From there, she\u2019d point up the Parkway to Logan Square, where on hot days children sneak into The Fountain of Three Rivers (1924), created by Calder\u2019s son, Alexander Stirling Calder, to honor the Schuylkill, the Delaware, and the Wissahickon.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d finish her lesson at the Philadelphia Art Museum, where an unearthly, white mobile, Ghost (1964), designed by the third generation of Alexander Calders, Sandy, sways ever so slightly in the Great Stair Hall.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes, I\u2019d refer to this as \u2018The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cIt tells such a wonderful story.\u201d<\/p>\n
That story will be easier to tell now, with the opening of Calder Gardens<\/a> at 21st Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway. The Gardens, focused on the work of the youngest Calder, known as Sandy, brings another opportunity to celebrate the family dynasty\u2019s in Philadelphia: three sculptors named Alexander Calder who have shaped the look of the city and beyond.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Calder family is incredibly important to Philadelphia,\u201d said Anna O. Marley<\/a>, the former chief curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), where so many Calders studied<\/a>. \u201cThey tell us so much about what it means to be an artist in the United States and how an American artistic identify was created in Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n And their work here offers \u201ca pocket history of art,\u201d in the view of Kathleen A. Foster, the Art Museum\u2019s senior curator of American art.<\/p>\n \u201cBetween the three of them, you really go from the academic realism of the grandfather through kind of shift into Art Deco and modernism in the `20s with Stirling Calder, and then all the way into modern forms, completely abstract shapes and bright colors.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018One of the greatest\u2019<\/p>\n The Philadelphia that Alexander Milne Calder, a Scottish stonecutter\u2019s son from Aberdeen, first saw in 1868 was sorely in need of a makeover. The sprawling metropolis was known for building big things like ships and rail engines and a wealth of small manufacturers that earned it the nickname \u201cWorkshop of the World.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s clear that there is no future for a city that is just increasingly based on its industrial might, on the dirt-producing, noise-producing, the squalor,\u201c says David Brownlee, emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n The boundaries of Fairmount Park had just been established the year before and plans would soon begin for a giant celebration of the country\u2019s 100th birthday, the 1876 Centennial, which would show the world the city\u2019s cultural achievements. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was unfolding, a broad boulevard lined by art and leading to what Brownlee calls \u201cone of the greatest monumental ensembles of sculpture ever created.\u201d<\/p>\n That would be City Hall, the \u00e9migr\u00e9 Calder\u2019s workplace for 22 years as he presided over the creation of more than 250 sculptures from his first floor office in the building\u2019s southwest corner \u2014 and the towering figure of the colony\u2019s founder.<\/p>\n Calder had worked at the Royal Academy in Edinburgh and on the Albert Memorial in London before sailing to America. He stopped in New York, but chose Philadelphia, armed with a letter of introduction to the city\u2019s most eminent sculptor, Joseph A. Bailly, and to the scion of a monument business, William Struthers. Calder was 22.<\/p>\n He registered that year at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation\u2019s first art school and museum, and studied \u201cantiques,\u201d drawing from plaster casts of classic sculptures. It was not long before Calder won a prized commission over one of his instructors, to sculpt the likeness of Major Gen. George G. Meade atop his horse, Baldy. Meade, who\u2019d defeated Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, later designed many of the paths and drives of Fairmount Park. His statue stands now behind the Please Touch Museum on Lansdowne Drive.<\/p>\n When Greenberger gives tours of City Hall \u2014 though retired, she still volunteers one day a week \u2014 she likes to start in the north portico, where one can sample his expansive vision. Look up to the south, and there are Africans, surrounded by tobacco leaves, a lion. To the east, people from China, Japan, India, and an Asian elephant. West are the Native Americans and pioneers, and a bear. And north is Europe, people from Germany, England, France, maple leaves, and cattle. (She isn\u2019t sure why cattle.)<\/p>\n Calder started on the Penn sculpture in 1886. The iconic figure, now visible from miles away, was the fourth version of the colony\u2019s founder that the sculptor created. Calder\u2019s models were one-tenth the size of the 37-foot high statue. His goal, according to an article at the time in The Inquirer, was to create \u201cWilliam Penn as he is known to Philadelphians; not a theoretical one or a fine English gentleman.\u201d<\/p>\n Four teams of horses drew massive plaster sections of the statue up Broad Street to the Tacony Iron & Metal Works. It wasn\u2019t until Thanksgiving 1894 that the head was lifted onto the statue atop the tower, completing Calder\u2019s colossus.<\/p>\n He was not happy with the result.<\/p>\n For most of the day, William Penn\u2019s face is shadowed. That was not the artist\u2019s intent. Calder had wanted Penn facing south, where the sun would light his youthful face and the intricate detail of his garb would be visible for all to admire. <\/p>\n But members of the Public Buildings Commission wanted Penn facing northeast, toward Penn Treaty Park, the site of the 1683 peace agreement with the Lenni-Lenape.<\/p>\n In a letter quoted in the Dec. 14, 1894 Inquirer, Calder wrote \u201cI think that you will agree that is very disappointing from every point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n While Calder lived in a number of homes around the city \u2014 a home at 2020 Bainbridge St. and a studio at 337 Broad. When he registered at PAFA, the address listed was 1903 N. Park Ave., now on Temple\u2019s campus. Decades later, his granddaughter, Margaret Calder Hayes, would remember the North Philadelphia house as \u201cgloomy\u201d \u2014 four floors with Empire furniture, a long dark hallway leading to a parlor where children were not welcome unaccompanied.<\/p>\n Calder had met his wife, the Glasgow-born Margaret Milne soon after his arrival in Philadelphia and married her after a brief courtship. <\/p>\n Three of their sons would study at PAFA and become artists \u2014 Ralph Milne Calder, and Norman Day Calder, and Alexander Stirling Calder, but it was \u201cStirling,\u201d the eldest who left the biggest mark on Philadelphia. <\/p>\n \u2018An idealist, somewhat withdrawn\u2019<\/p>\n In a remembrance kept in the PAFA archives, Alexander Stirling Calder describes art as a fallback. Ever since he was 6 and saw the great Edwin Booth play Hamlet, Stirling Calder wanted to be an actor. But he was too shy. In 1885, he enrolled in art classes at the academy\u2019s new building at Broad and Cherry, and years later recalled the first criticism of his teacher, the artist Thomas Eakins: \u201cAttack all of your difficulties at once.\u201d Eakins urged sculptors to paint, painters to sculpt, and to dissect cadavers to learn anatomy. <\/p>\n After studying at the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he returned home and won a commission to immortalize Samuel Gross with a statue that first stood on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (It\u2019s since been moved to the Center City campus of Thomas Jefferson University). At 25, he married a fellow PAFA student, Nanette Lederer, a painter. <\/p>\n To the critic Malcolm Cowley, Stirling Calder was \u201can idealist, somewhat withdrawn, wholly impractical, creating symbolic figures while brooding on the cruelty of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n Foster says that looking at the allegorical figures in Logan Square\u2019s Swann Fountain, you can see how Stirling inherited his father\u2019s traditions. <\/p>\n \u201cBut the figures have a kind of sleek, modern simplicity to them,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re more stylized. So by the 1920s the Swann Fountain represents a kind of moving from the academic past into a more expressive and abstract style.\u201d<\/p>\n The fence came off the Swann Fountain on a hot July day in 1924. The next evening, 10,000 revelers danced to tangos from a police band. Not everyone was pleased \u2014 some wondering if the average Philadelphian would grasp the significance of all that Calder had created.<\/p>\n \u201cThe meaning of works of art is just as mysterious as life itself. It can be explained in many ways by people of different philosophies. \u2026,\u201d he was quoted in the Evening Bulletin as saying. \u201cThere are lots of things in life we do not understand; art is no exception.\u201d<\/p>\n In his autobiography, Sandy Calder included a photograph of the sprawling mansion in Philadelphia where he says he was born. He called the place Lawnton. In 1898 when Calder was born, Lawnton was a neighborhood in East Oak Lane, served by the Reading Line and lined with grand homes where the wealthy went to escape the summer heat.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unlikely Calder was born there. David Brownlee has dug into the mystery of the third and most famous Calder\u2019s birthplace. While his family doctor lived in Lawnton, and it is possible that his mother delivered her son nearby, more likely, he was born near the edge of the growing city, at 1203 East Washington Lane in Germantown. City records showed that Stirling Calder rented that country place, while the family still owned a home on North Park Avenue. <\/p>\n In Margaret Calder Hayes\u2019 memoir, she described how Sandy, two years younger, went to school in Buster Brown suits his mother had sewn and by 8 had built a Noah\u2019s Ark of animals. He enrolled in Germantown Academy, when it was still in the city, but left at age 9 before moving to Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.<\/p>\n \u201cWe love to claim him, but he only went to school here as a child,\u201d Foster said of the youngest Calder\u2019s time in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n Yet in some ways, he\u2019s the essence of the city he was born in: practical, playful, unpretentious, no pushover.<\/p>\n He worked as a fireman on a steamer bound for San Francisco, spent a year keeping time in a Washington state logging camp. Trained as an mechanical engineer, he moved to New York City at age 25 to paint.<\/p>\n He is known as a 20th century modernist, the artist who put sculpture in motion.<\/p>\n After visiting Calder\u2019s Paris studio in 1931 and marveling at his sculptures that relied on little motors, Marcel Duchamp coined the word \u201cmobiles\u201d for these kinetic marvels.<\/p>\n Parisians took to him, while they scoffed at other American artists. Cowley, in an introduction to Hayes\u2019 Three Alexander Calders had a theory:<\/p>\n \u201dOf course his work in itself, continually inventive, playful, and enchanting, was his ticket of admission.” But Sandy and his wife Louisa, \u201ca beauty,\u201d Cowley wrote, entertained generously and simply. Calder was in the tradition of the Noble Savage, \u201cwho disregards social conventions and judges everything by his instinctive standards.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA big child,\u201d as his friend the playwright Arthur Miller once put it.<\/p>\n Sandy Calder created Ghost in 1964 for a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York City, that included 400 examples of his mobiles, stabiles, toys, jewelry, carvings, tapestries, etc. The Art Museum bought the 34-foot-long showpiece a year later and brought it to the city of his birth.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a colossal example of the mobile and it\u2019s majestic,\u201d Foster said. \u201cWhen it moves, it\u2019s just breathtaking, because it, it almost moves like a giant dinosaur or something. In other words, it\u2019s got long spines and fins, and it moves very slowly and grandly in the air currents in the Great Stair Hall. \u2026 It\u2019s delightful.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen every baby has a mobile hanging over their crib, you don\u2019t think about Calder as being the genesis of this. I think he would be delighted to know that \u2026 because he was such a child at heart. He managed to keep that imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, Philadelphia will be home to an institution that celebrates that imagination. It\u2019s a fitting homecoming for an artist whose life and legacy was so shaped by his family, who in turn both shaped and were shaped by Philadelphia. <\/p>\n