BABE RUTH 1936

Alexander Calder made this portrait of Babe Ruth from wire, and you can see the marks of the artist's hand, bending and twisting the material. It's a drawing in space! I can imagine him there, coaxing these lines to come together to create a famous face; how he was thinking about line as volume, about the simplest way to describe a person's face and shoulders. I want to ask Calder how he managed to suggest the figure’s volume using so little. It's like a map of a head, but in three dimensions. Look at how the wire curls to suggest the curve of his cheeks and how the mouth protrudes slightly. The material is so simple, yet the effect is powerful. This work relates to Calder's other wire portraits, but also to the work of artists like Picasso, who were similarly interested in line and form. Artists are always talking to each other across time, riffing off each other’s ideas. There's something so immediate and playful about this work, it shows how abstraction can give us a new way of seeing the world.