PositiveArtnet News...in middle age as he looked back on his childhood and his failed attempt to escape sculpture, the family profession. This is how Jed Perl begins his biography of Calder, which—surprisingly, given his towering stature—is the first ever written on the US artist ... Calder: the Conquest of Time traces how the artist (1898–1976) made mobiles, stabiles, and a mechanical circus cutting-edge Modern art ...more than 600-page volume... The book focuses on the first 42 years of the artist’s life, ending just before his major survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1943 ... But neither Calder nor Picasso’s work was to the taste of hard-line Communists, who preferred their propaganda with a capital 'P' and social realist in style. Being an abstract artist 'was a political act,' Perl says.
