Late in May, Calder wrote to tell his sister, Peggy, back in the States, that although he hadn’t sold anything from the Galerie Percier show, it “was a real success among the artists.” Picasso, who lived down the street from the gallery and was never one to miss a new turn in the story of modern art, appeared even before the opening. Léger, one of the most respected and adventuresome artists of the day, composed a few precious words for the exhibition’s catalog that welcomed Calder into the most exalted circles of the Parisian avant-garde: “Looking at these new works—transparent, objective, exact—I think of Satie, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Arp—these unchallenged masters of unexpressed and silent beauty. Calder is of the same line.”
While “Satie and Duchamp are 100 percent French,” Léger noted, Calder “is 100 percent American.”
Calder had been born in Philadelphia in 1898 into a family of artists. His father, A. Stirling Calder, was much admired and sought after as a creator of large-scale public sculptures in the early decades of the 20th century. His mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was an accomplished painter and a pioneering feminist. Calder had considered a career in engineering before embracing the visual arts in 1923, when he began studying at New York’s Art Students League.
Within several years, Calder’s figure sculptures had already gained him a reputation as a troubadour of the giddy high spirits of the Roaring Twenties on both sides of the Atlantic. But no one could have foreseen the breakthrough of the Galerie Percier show. Suddenly, Calder was now being embraced as a prophet of the increasingly austere mood of the early 1930s—of a world descending into the Depression and political crises on the left and the right. Working as an abstract artist, Calder was reaching for a contemplative, almost quietistic mood.
What had changed? In the years 1930 and 1931 Calder had made two life-changing decisions: He became a married man and an abstract artist. These were the foundations on which he would build for the rest of his life.