Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940 by Jed Perl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940 by Jed Perl Jean McGarry (bio) Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940, (Knopf, 2017), 704 pp. Almost from the moment the lights went out in the Fogg Museum, several decades ago, and something marvelous lit up on the screen, I was smitten. This was a venture into a yearlong survey of art. The experience wasn't only a plunge into whatever dazzled on the screen—from Bodhisattva [End Page 610] to Jackson Pollock, Fellini to Orson Welles—it was the reading list, which exposed me to the eye-opening analyses of Heinrich Wolfflin, Edwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim, and many more. The popular course was taught by the entire History of Art department, with each specialist rolling in to talk about his favorite period and (male) artist of that period: Van Eyck, da Vinci, Poussin, Corot, Picasso. The lectures were absorbing; they pinpointed the formal qualities and methods that distinguished each era in what was assumed to be the march of pure progress in the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was the most influential course I'd ever taken, but it wasn't, strictly speaking, my first encounter. Art—in reproduction—was part of everyday life in an old-fashioned Catholic upbringing, one where the visual surrounding was enriched by "holy" cards, month's minds, mortuary remembrances that, as often as not, featured a miniature of an Italian masterpiece: Madonnas, Crucifixions, saints and martyrs. In grammar school, pupils took dictation in the form of brief visual analysis of, say Madonna of the Chair, or Light of the World. Even then, I was mystified, and somehow gratified, by the terms perspective, chiaroscuro, light source, addressed to the picture on a postcard. Part of this exercise was practice in penmanship (via the Palmer Method), so there was a link between the painter's application of eye and hand, and the child's. Although later on, on the basis of that single course, I'd write my college thesis on Hieronymus Bosch and take a trial of graduate school in art history, with the promise of rigorous study of art (never, alas, to be completed), it was the early initiation that led to a lifetime of pleasurable reading of monographs and surveys of painting and sculpture. I wasn't so much a museum-goer as a devotee of writing about art. A second important stage in the process was a dive into the work of John Ruskin, especially Modern Painters, a work composed in defense of the mystifyingly vaporous landscapes and seascapes of J. M. W. Turner. A childhood with no toys or friends, and the daily task of memorizing a passage from the Bible, left the young Ruskin with nothing to do in his idle hours but study the trees, plants, rocks, and clouds he found in the back garden. By the time he was 29, and himself a talented draughtsman, he had acquired the expertise (and pure moxie) to take on the entire history of Western landscape painting in order to make the case for what the greatest painters had gotten wrong. A born pedant, Ruskin spent half of this hefty volume defining what nature really looked like: a wave, branch, a mountainous ravine. For Ruskin, the writer and the lawyer for the defense, this was a task of the eye, mind, and lexicon, because, in addition to seeing straight, he had to find words to impress upon the reader the subtle differences separating beauty and accuracy from the laughably misshapen. Which is a very roundabout—and I hope not too egocentric—way of saying that, with a solid amateur's appreciation for the art of writing about art, I found the first volume of what is to be a two-part biography of Alexander Calder a thrilling read, remarkable as Modern Painters—not [End Page 611] just for clearing the stage for the arrival of the genius (although the author, Jed Perl, does that), but for giving the reader the keenest, most delectable sense of what artistic creation must feel like. Not a summary, not a guess, not from the horse...