Alexander Calder, a giant of modern art comes in Montreal

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents Alexander Calder’s first major retrospective (1898-1976) in Canada, highlighting all aspects of the American’s career as an artist who put art in motion. Conceived, organized and touring by the MBAM, the Alexander Calder exhibition: a radical inventor presents 150 works and documents to better understand the scope of this artist’s extraordinarily innovative multidisciplinary practice: from drawings to wire portraits, and from the invention of the mobile to monumental stability.

Montreal, city Calder

Montréal is home to a true cultural icon: his monumental sculpture Trois disques, or L’Homme, as Montrealers affectionately call it in memory of Terre des Hommes. Emblem of humanism in the image of Expo 67, a universal exhibition turned towards the future, Calder’s second stabile in height echoes technical progress and the work of humanity, our aspiration towards collective harmony.

Alexander Calder : A radical inventor

An engineer by training, this French-speaking and Francophile American unites poetry and science. Over the course of an international career spanning half a century, Calder has created 22,000 works and exhibited on all 5 continents. He rubs shoulders with the cosmopolitan modern avant-garde: Arp, Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Duchamp, Léger, Miró, Mondrian, Man Ray, Prévert… His art, both joyful and serious, brings audiences together from the very beginning of his career, in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, with his miniature circus shows. Today, under the big top of Montreal – the world capital of circus arts – Calder unveils his talents as a storyteller, inventor, painter and sculptor.

While he is best known for his invention of the mobile phone, he has used an impressive number of media: drawing, sculpture, painting, design and musical performances.