Jed Perl. (2017). Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Jed Perl. 2017. Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Jed Perl, Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017.

Jed Perl. Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/8C4/884/E2/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/8C4/884/E2/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780451494214
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 129629
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B06WV9JRRR
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 129629
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780451494214
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 129629
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Jed Perl

title

Calder

dateAdded

2017-11-03T19:05:00Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=3265730
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Calder The Conquest of Time The Early Years 18981940

crossRefId

3265730

series

A Life of Calder

subtitle

The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940

id

8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979

starRating

5

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: Calder_9780451494214_3265730
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 462045204
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780451494214
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 129629
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 10/24/2017
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=8c4884e2-4b93-4b36-a874-894bc8570979&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: Calder_3265730
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 129629
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B06WV9JRRR
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 10/24/2017
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=8c4884e2-4b93-4b36-a874-894bc8570979&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: Calder_9780451494214_3265730
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 462045203
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780451494214
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 129629
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 10/24/2017
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=8c4884e2-4b93-4b36-a874-894bc8570979&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Book
2. • value: color
3. • value: Historical
4. • value: architect
5. • value: Alexander
6. • value: Business
7. • value: duchamp
8. • value: photographs
9. • value: Miro
10. • value: culture
11. • value: fashion
12. • value: new
13. • value: illustrated
14. • value: York
15. • value: Writing
16. • value: surreal
17. • value: European History
18. • value: Sculpture
19. • value: abstract
20. • value: classic
21. • value: Surrealism
22. • value: World History
23. • value: Autobiography
24. • value: Picasso
25. • value: 20th Century
26. • value: for
27. • value: England
28. • value: Creativity
29. • value: painting
30. • value: arts
31. • value: gifts
32. • value: Artists
33. • value: artist
34. • value: Design
35. • value: Avant-garde
36. • value: Best
37. • value: History
38. • value: Essays
39. • value: Mobile
40. • value: Music
41. • value: popular
42. • value: Pop Culture
43. • value: Books
44. • value: Photos
45. • value: artwork
46. • value: beauty
47. • value: Paris
48. • value: french history
49. • value: mondrian
50. • value: braque
51. • value: biographies of famous people
52. • value: calder
53. • value: art history books
54. • value: alexander calder

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Perl, Jed
   • bioText: JED PERL is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine's Alphabet, and New Art City, which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Book of the Year. He lives in New York City.
   • name: Jed Perl

imprint

Knopf

publishDate

2017-10-24T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Calder

fullDescription

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics.
Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was—and remains—a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal.
     This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists—his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist—Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James—she was a great-niece of Henry James—is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance.
     Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white—including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen—further enrich the story.

seriesId

1331554

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 5, 2017
     Perl (New Art City) delivers a hulking and exhaustively researched biography of American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976), focusing on the first four decades of his life. Calder was born in Philadelphia into a dynasty of artists (his father and paternal grandfather were both sculptors with public works and his mother was a portrait painter). It was only after studying engineering and a stint working in the boiler room of a ship that Calder decided to seriously pursue art. He began as a painter but turned to creating playful kinetic wire sculptures. After a life-changing visit to painter Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in 1930, Calder began making completely abstract sculptures, which caught the attention of art-world heavyweights on both sides of the Atlantic. For the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, his subtly political Mercury Fountain was given prominent placement alongside Picasso’s Guernica, showing the world that Calder was more than modernism’s playful jester. The biography ends when Calder has entered his “classical style,” characterized by large-scale mobiles of arresting complexity. Perl throughout emphasizes Calder’s debt to the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in his ability to blend fine art with everyday objects such as children’s toys. Generously illustrated and delivered in vibrant writing (he describes one of Calder’s tabletop standing mobiles as “the spiderweb strength and delicacy of an Emily Dickinson poem”), Perl offers what will be without question the authoritative source on the man whom the French affectionately nicknamed le roi du fil de fer—“the wire king.” 400 illus.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 15, 2017
     Art critic Perl (Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, 2008) joins the select ranks of multivolume arts biographers, among them Hilary Spurling on Matisse and John Richardson on Picasso, with the first in a foundational two-book inquiry into the unusually sunny life and exuberantly radical work of sculptor Alexander Calder. The grandson, nephew, and son of artists, Calder tried to thwart his destiny by studying engineering, a fortunate detour, given the technical finesse of his future constructions. Perl incisively portrays Calder's impressive and intriguing family while tracking the bohemian, coast-to-coast upbringing of this precocious smiling Buddha of a boy, marking the genesis of his signature playful ingenuity in his youthful passions for birds and animals, toys, tools, and tinkering, skating, dancing, puns, math, science, and theater. Starting out in New York as a magazine and newspaper illustrator, Calder developed his command of line and caricature, a perfect vehicle for his sardonic, ironic, and comic spirit. In 1920s Paris, this perpetual experimentalist created a remarkably vital miniature circus and powerfully expressive calligraphic wire works, then catalyzed a kinetic revolution, creating sculptures-in-motion that inspired Marcel Duchamp to coin the word mobile to describe them. Graced with 400 photographs, Perl's dynamic and illuminating biography, as buoyant and evocative as Calder's sculptures, concludes with the ebullient and cosmic artist poised for ever more creative adventures and renown.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2017
     

     Former art critic for the New Republic, Perl draws on letters and papers not previously accessed, plus dozens of interviews, to show how groundbreaking, crowd-pleasing artist Alexander Calder started out. His peregrinations from Roaring Twenties Greenwich Village to interwar Paris, his collaboration with dance and theater artists--all are covered here.

     Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 1, 2017
     A meticulously researched biography of one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.New York Review of Books contributor and former New Republic art critic Perl (Art History/New School for Social Research; Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture, 2012, etc.) chronicles how Alexander Calder (1898-1976) grew from a crafty boy into a master sculptor who, along with Picasso and Miro, pushed the world of art toward the frontiers of modernism. Calder wrote of "trying to get at 'evolution' [from] toys to sculpture," and Perl divines exactly this thread amid a tremendous amount of source material and shows the progression from Calder's tinkering childhood to the celebrated, clowning Cirque Calder of the 1920s, all the way to Calder's inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's epochal exhibitions "Cubism and Abstract Art" and "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" of the mid-1930s. The author unveils a network of Calder's influences. "Artistic inspiration," he writes, "involves instincts, apprehensions, and revelations ranging from the subliminal to the nearly spiritual, and the zigzagging, even ricocheting connections need to be mapped in ways that defy strict rules of evidence." Calder's parents were both artists, and although they encouraged him to pursue a degree in engineering, they also exposed him to art that would later shape his career. Duchamp's 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, for example, possessed a kineticism that would eventually contribute to Calder's understanding of the vast conceptual capabilities of art. With wire fashioned into spirals and mobiles gently spinning through the air, Calder's lines would later adopt a sense of movement over time, a fourth-dimensional change through a three-dimensional space. Most triumphant is the way in which Perl explains how to read Calder's challenging forms; he clearly discusses the "difference between a volume and a void" and "the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement." "Sculpture could be a matter of lines," he explains, capable of synthesizing "science with sensibility, the engineered with the empathetic." Not only an essential record of the first 40 years of Calder's life, but an exceptional chronicle of the genesis of modernism.

     COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

165

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/8c4884e2-4b93-4b36-a874-894bc8570979/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

8c4884e2-4b93-4b36-a874-894bc8570979

starRating

5

readingOrder

1

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/8C4/884/E2/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/8C4/884/E2/{8C4884E2-4B93-4B36-A874-894BC8570979}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Art
2. • value: Biography & Autobiography
3. • value: History
4. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

10/24/2017

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780307272720

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics.
Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was—and remains—a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal.
     This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898...

sortTitle

Calder The Conquest of Time The Early Years 18981940

crossRefId

3265730

series

A Life of Calder

subtitle

The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: ART015100
   • description: Art / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945)
2. • code: ART016000
   • description: Art / Individual Artists / General
3. • code: BIO001000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Artists, Architects, Photographers