The Popular Sources of Calder's Circus: The Humpty Dumpty Circus, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, and The Cirque Medrano

Alexander Calder was an artist whose work seemed to appear everywhere in the 1960s--from airports to city squares, from air planes to racecar designs. The mobile, a Calder invention of the early 1930s, was also by the 1960s as commonplace in the fabric of popular culture as it was in the world's major museums.(1) Calder never had any trouble in creating popular, easily accessible work. In fact, Calder's first major sculpture--Calder's Circus--was based on a toy (Jouffroy 14-18).(2)As an artist whose work conformed apparently to most of the critically accepted tenets of modern sculpture, Calder's reputation has always been slightly tarnished by his immense popularity (especially, he confessed, among children) in an age of inaccessible, remote art. Physically and intellectually impressive works such as the 1963 Le Guichet (the Ticket Window) for the Lincoln Center somehow does not seem quite remote enough to be an appropriate embodiment of the intellectual and social concerns and ideas of modernism. In fact most of Calder's sculptures seem to invite play. His images and their titles are often silly, funny, or even childlike.(3) He consistently deflated the image of himself, his work, and perhaps the questioner when he replied, in response to questions about his creative method: "I never know in advance what I'm going to do"; or "that piece turned out to be a cow, but the next one might be a cat. How do I know?" (Powell, n.p.). As a result Calder is generally read in the critical literature as an eccentric loner--as someone who because of his oeuvre is granted a position of significance in the art world but whose work resists categorization.(4) Calder, I believe, would not have been displeased with this position. In his choice of subject, in his physical rendering, and in his theoretical position, he actively constructed an historical place for himself outside both the American academic and European avant-garde traditions.The starting point for many of Calder's mature ideas on art was Calder's Circus. Calder's Circus had two primary sources: the Schoenhut Circus--a toy circus, produced by a Philadelphia toy company, sold mostly by mail order, and which was boasted as the undisputedly best-selling toy in America between 1903 and 1925; and the circus itself, first the 1926 performances of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey at Madison Square Garden in New York and later the Cirque Medrano in Paris from 1927 to 1930. Calder's Circus raises several important questions about Calder's art and his place in the history of American art. How, and why did Calder choose the subject of the circus for the embodiment of his fledgling ideas about art in 1925? How did Calder's interpretation of the circus differ significantly from that of contemporary European modernist artists? How did Calder use the specific imagery of Schoenhut, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, and the Cirque Medrano in Calder's Circus? When did he cease to consider Calder's Circus a private amusement and begin to regard it as worthy of serious consideration as a legitimate work of art? What effect did Calder's Circus have on Calder's career? And what effect did the popular appeal of Calder's work have on his legacy as an artist?Calder's artistic investigation of the circus had its genesis in a 1925 illustration he made for the National Police Gazette. The artist, who always seemed to have a predilection for the visually spectacular and the extravagant, was given a two-week pass by the Gazette to cover one of the last shows of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth in the "Old" Madison Square Garden building in New York (Calder, Autobiography 67, 73). The resultant drawing hardly represents how the circus seized Calder. Its lines are stilted, artificial, and awkward compared to Calder's later, brilliantly fluid use of line. But while the image itself feels stiff, this illustration was the beginning of something artistically significant for Calder. …