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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tBut what had brought Calder to the French countryside in the first place, and how did the place change how he worked?<\/p>\n
\n\tTo find out, ARTnews<\/em> spoke with Rower, who was 13 when his grandfather died. After he completed a quick, \u201cenergetic reading\u201d on me, which first mistakenly concluded I had been a sculptor in my youth but was amended to predict I would become one later, possibly in my 60s, Rower started with recounting Calder\u2019s postwar story. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe backstory is that during WWII, all of Calder\u2019s friends were trying to come to America and be refugees,\u201d he told me. Calder wrote to the State Department and successfully urged them to let in artists from Europe, such as Fernand L\u00e9ger and Andr\u00e9 Masson. He eventually housed Masson and his young family, who all slept in Calder\u2019s Connecticut barn-studio. After the war, Masson insisted Calder come to Aix-en-Provence, but it didn\u2019t take much convincing. With his wife, Louisa, and their two daughters, Calder packed their things and joined their friends in southern France by 1953.<\/p>\n \n\tLater that year, the Calders discovered Sach\u00e9 in central France, where another friend (and later son-in-law) was living: the French-American journalist Jean Davidson. Calder soon bought a house in Sach\u00e9 on Davidson\u2019s land, in exchange for three mobiles. From that moment on, \u201cSach\u00e9 just very naturally evolves into this hub. They have grandchildren there, and it becomes their homestead,\u201d Rower said.<\/p>\n This conversation has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n ARTnews:<\/strong>What was special and inspiring about the French countryside to Calder, that might have led to the works we\u2019re seeing here in Paris?<\/strong><\/p>\n Alexander S. C. Rower:<\/strong> I wouldn\u2019t say that France, or the countryside, was inspiring to him. He wasn\u2019t making works related to what he was experiencing in the village and region. He was using being there to quiet his nervous system. He\u2019s already a super famous guy when he shows up in 1953, and he has lots and lots of commissions. He\u2019s this worldly character, and he needs to have quietude. That\u2019s what Sach\u00e9 really deeply represents. It wasn\u2019t the architecture, the chateaux in the region.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Calder\u2019s own words, he said he was trying to return to the \u2018medieval\u2018\u2014he\u2019s talking about simple things, like going to this one place with a wood oven for baking bread, and another place that has this flock of goats and they\u2019re making cheese. He liked the people that had maybe more challenges in life, but also had more authenticity, and he felt he was that way. He grew up with absolutely no money. His mom was a painter. His dad was a sculptor. He had to fend for himself. So the countryside in France, it\u2019s still quite like that.<\/p>\n Did that simpler life away from it all change his work?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIt definitely changed his work, but didn\u2019t inspire his work. I\u2019d say that he then had the chance with the big open skies to dream about bigger sculpture. He also was achieving success. By 1962, he found a big industrial iron works to execute his major works. He already had a smaller one in Connecticut that was making all the big works, and now he needed one in France, and the very biggest works were executed here in France. For that first group of works completed in 1963, they were all made for his own account. He commissioned seven outdoor sculptures, because he had enough money to make what he wanted to make.<\/p>\n What was his studio<\/strong>in France<\/strong>like?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe wagon shed, or remise<\/em>, he converted to his studio was a very small space. A highly productive space. He made so many works there of the late period. Some of the 1950s, but mostly \u201960s. Most of the sculpture made in the 1960s was made in that studio. Everything else before that was made in Connecticut, which was his number one studio.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen he arrived in France in 1953, he made four outdoor sculptures, standing mobiles that you put in your garden, one of which was Les Granettes<\/em> (1953). He made lots of smaller works, but he didn\u2019t make any big sculptures [in France that year].<\/p>\n And yet he started to think more about making large-scale works in Sach\u00e9?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tSach\u00e9 is this little town where Henri de Balzac used to go and write, and it\u2019s very flat. There\u2019s nothing mountainous in the region, and the idea of monumental sculptures coming up out of the landscape is pretty obvious. It\u2019s big sky country. Maybe the sky, you could say, was inspiring, because a big dynamic black form against the sky is terrific.<\/p>\n Why did you love about this place as a child?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tSeeing Calder hard at work in France was a great pleasure. To go to the foundry, and see how he talked to the guys. He loved the guys that helped him execute his works. He wasn\u2019t dismissive. He wasn\u2019t offhand. He wasn\u2019t at a distance. He was really connected with them. He gave them all gouaches and stuff. The welder was the guy he really liked. He\u2019d come bring him a bottle of wine and talk about welding.<\/p>\n I wonder whether they kept any of those artworks he gave them. <\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThey\u2019ve all sold them. They\u2019ve all come to market, and the grandchildren have sold them for education or whatever. Calder would have loved that. It\u2019s just as it should be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/alexander-calder-exhibition-hauser-and-wirth-paris-1234804262\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/CALDE146361-Calder-sitting-copy-2.jpg?w=1024″] If you\u2019ve ever looked long and slow enough at Alexander Calder\u2019s mobiles made of wire-suspended, leaf-like metal shapes painted solid colors, you likely know that they are as much about their sculptural form and silhouette as they are about the breathing air, light, shadow, and nature all around them. They shiver, drift, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2228641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2228641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2228641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2228641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2228641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/CALDE146361-AR6228042.jpg?w=400\")
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