The Louis Vuitton Foundation will present a major Calder retrospective

The Louis Vuitton Foundation will present a novel Alexander Calder centenary retrospective in 2026, the latest in a series by the Paris art institute focusing on major artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Previous monographic exhibitions at the Louis Vuitton Foundation have included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Perriand, Mark Rothko, David Hockney and Gerhard Richter, its current exhibition.

For Calder, a legendary artist known for his giant mobiles, enormous mechanical kinetic sculptures moved by energy and wind, the foundation will dedicate its entire exhibition space. And also, for the first time, the adjacent lawn, in a dialogue between the volumes, planes and movements of Calder and those of the famous silhouette of the foundation's sailboat.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation's announcement on Tuesday comes 11 days after the death of Frank Gehry, the master architect who designed its building. The art show will celebrate the centenary of Alexander Calder's arrival in France in 1926 and the 50th anniversary of his death with a retrospective covering all aspects of his work. The son and grandson of two sculptors, Calder was born in Philadelphia in 1898 and died in New York in 1976.

Titled 'Calder: Rêver en équilibre' or 'Calder: Dreaming in Balance', the exhibition covers half a century of creation, from the late 1920s and the first performances of the Calder Circus that captivated the Parisian avant-garde, to his monumental sculptures that redefined the idea of ​​public art in the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition, one of the largest to date dedicated to Calder, was conceived in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, which is the main funder. It will also benefit from loans from international institutions and prominent private collectors, bringing together nearly 300 works: mobile and stable – to borrow Calder's terminology for kinetic and static abstractions – as well as wire portraits, wooden sculptures, paintings, drawings and even jewelry.

The works of his friends Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Hélion and Piet Mondrian, as well as Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, help situate Calder's radical inventiveness within the avant-garde movement. Thirty-four photographs taken by some of the most important photographers of the 20th century (Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Gordon Parks, Man Ray, Irving Penn and Agnès Varda) show an artist walking the tightrope between art and life.

After studying at the Art Students League in New York, Calder moved to Paris in 1926. In the Montparnasse district, the artist quickly became part of what was then the world's leading art center. There he presented unique forms, figurative and refined wire sculptures that attracted critical praise and a miniature circus. Thanks to an exceptional loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first in 15 years, Calder's Cirque returns to Paris, the city where it was created. At the center of this new type of spectacle, Calder manipulates miniature acrobats, clowns and horsemen. Fernand Léger, Jean Hélion, Le Corbusier, Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian are among its spectators.

Calder's visit to Mondrian's studio in 1930 marked the abstract turning point in his work, first in painting and then in sculpture. Marcel Duchamp proposed the name “Mobiles” for the abstract and kinetic compositions that the artist presented in 1932 at the Galerie Vignon in Paris. Initially powered mechanically, then moved by light breezes, these mobiles borrowed “their life from the vague life of the atmosphere,” as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1946.

Calder returned to France after the Second World War and set up a studio in the Loire Valley village of Saché in 1953. One of his sculptures still stands in the village square.

Like his oscillating and interconnected mobile art, the exhibition is co-curated and includes contributions from Suzanne Pagé, artistic director of the Louis Vuitton Foundation; guest curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, assisted by Valentin Neuroth and Claire Deuticke; and Olivier Michelon, associate curator, assisted by Léna Lévy.