In the Circus c. 1936

Alexander Calder created this circus scene with ink, gouache, and collage. The image is bisected by a series of arcs, like a big top. Imagine Calder building up this surface, layering paper and paint. The textures, the tearing and sticking and blotting and drawing. What’s he trying to do? I wonder if Calder felt like a ringmaster—a master of improvisation— orchestrating an event that unfolds spontaneously. I think of other artists like Miró and Klee who were his contemporaries, also wrestling with how to create flattened, graphic, ambiguous pictorial space. See those squiggles and blocks of color, those bodily gestures, like the legs dangling at the bottom and the figure running out stage right. What does it mean to capture movement? Like a circus, the life of a painting is one of constant, restless energy, always threatening to collapse into something else. I like how it feels unresolved. It reminds me that art is never finished, only abandoned.