"Savage and deliberate": Alexander Calder's wearable art.

Even seasoned aficionados of twentieth-century art may be astonished when they walk into the exhibition Calder Jewelry at the Norton Gallery of Art in West Palm Beach and see that the great abstract sculptor Alexander Calder was also a prolific jewelry maker. Up until now, the artist's work in this medium has been largely relegated to a small area in the grander surveys of his career, and indeed, the discovery that he made jewelry at all is often met with surprise. This article, like Calder Jewelry, seeks to shed light on this little-known aspect of the artist's work while bringing it to a new audience of collectors and scholars. Of particular note is how the jewelry informed, and was informed by, Calder's unparalleled kinetic sculpture, especially in the beginning stages of his career.

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Calder fashioned his earliest works of jewelry as a child, remembering later that, "My sister had quite a few dolls for which we made extraordinary jewelry from beads and very fine copper wire that we found in the street left over by men splicing electric cables." (1) Though an unusually creative child, whose parents were both artists (his father was a classically trained sculptor and his mother a painter), his future as an artist was far from predestined. After graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1919, with a degree in mechanical engineering, Calder spent the next several years toiling at a series of engineering jobs that he found unfulfilling. It was while working as a timekeeper in a logging camp in Washington State in 1923 that he was inspired to try his hand at painting. "Through some business connection, father had known a certain Canadian engineer ... I went to Vancouver and called on him, and we had quite a talk about what career I should follow. He advised me to do what I really wanted to do.... So, I decided to become a painter." (2) He returned to New York City, where his parents were living, in order to devote his time to his nascent artistic career.

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