Ernst and Calder: Friends Re-united.
Sandy Calder Mobile. Musée des Beaux Arts, Tours.
Quite Poignant. Old friends Max Ernst and Sandy Calder in the same room. They would like that. Max has his hatchling turtles, Sandy has his mobile which he gave to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Tours.
Sandy invented the mobile. His kinetic sculptures, delicately balanced, suspended shapes move in response to touch or air currents. Marcel Duchamp called them mobiles. His stationary sculptures are called stabiles.
The friends are also together in the pretty little town of Amboise. They would like that too. Both are on the main drag. Can’t miss them. Sandy’s Mobile/Mabile which someone or other, not necessarily the creator, labelled ‘Crinkly’ takes pride of place near St. Florentin Church. Ernst’s Surrealist Fountain is opposite the Tourist Office.
Crinkly, Sandy Calder, Amboise.
Both gave the works of art to the town.
When Ernst was told he had won The Grand Prize for Painting at the 1954 Venice Biennale, it was an understatement to say, very welcome news. For the first time in his life he didn’t have to worry about money. For the first time in his life he had financial security. For the first time in his life, his dream of settling down in the French countryside was within his grasp. All he had to do now was find somewhere to live.
Enter Jean Davidson, future son-in-law of Sandy Calder. Sandy won The Venice Biennale prize for sculpture in 1952. Fame came late to both artists. Sandy and Max met in 1920s Paris while both were struggling to sell their work.
Davidson, French on his mother’s side, lived in Saché in the Loire Valley. He met Sandy in America when Davidson was a French Press Correspondent in Washington.
When Sandy visited Jean in France, he fell in love with the Touraine as the area is called. He used part of Davidson’s old mill house as a studio and asked him to find a house in Saché for him.
Davidson was used to artists’ needs. His father was the American sculptor Jo Davidson, famous for his realistic busts of, among many others, Chaplin, Conan Doyle, Einstein, Eisenhower, Gandhi, Kipling, Rockefeller, Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.
Davidson found Sandy a house on the banks of the Indre which the proud new owner called François Premier (Francis I) and a dilapidated farmhouse for Ernst a half hour drive from Saché called Le Pin (the pine). Not long after he moved in, Max was a guest at the wedding in Saché of Sandy’s daughter Sandra to Jean Davidson.
Sandy died in 1976 a year after Ernst. He was 78.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art).
Pamela-Shields.com
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Max Ernst: and The Genie of Amboise
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