Calder and the Japanese Effect: A Major Show Celebrates Pace Gallery in Tokyo

This unique exhibition effectively reveals the unexpected and largely unexplored connections between the art of the Modern American master and the Japanese aesthetic.

One of the absolute highlights of the second edition of Tokyo’s art week was the Alexander Calder show, “Calder: Un effet du Japonais,” now on view through September 6 at Azubudai Hills Art Gallery in collaboration with Pace Gallery. The exhibition celebrates Pace’s new Japanese outpost, which had its soft opening and preview timed to coincide with Tokyo Gendai. The ambitious show marks the first extensive presentation of the artist’s work in the city, following a series of institutional shows in other parts of Japan. “It took us twenty years to do a Calder show in Tokyo,” Calder Foundation president and curator of the exhibition, Alexander S. C. Rower told Observer. We had the pleasure of walking through the exhibition with Rower (whom many might know as Sandy Rower, Calder’s grandson). “This is really a gift to Japan,” he said. “He could have had a big party, but Marc [Glimcher] decided on this multimillion-dollar show instead.”

Despite Calder never actually traveling to the country and never openly claiming any direct connection with Japanese culture, the show sheds new light on how much of his art had absorbed and inventively interpreted an approach to form and space typical of the Japanese aesthetic. As Rower explained, this was probably the result of Calder’s parents collecting many Japanese tools and prints that then surrounded the artist during his youth.

Featuring around 100 works from the Calder Foundation’s collection spanning the 1920s to the 1970s, the exhibition was not conceived as a retrospective but aims instead to explore the relationship Calder’s art had with Japan and how the country’s aesthetic influenced and nourished his endless inventiveness in poetically reimagining sculptural forms. According to Rower, it’s about looking at Calder’s work with fresh eyes. The line, of course, appears as a leading element throughout Alexander Calder’s career, shaping a formal journey into the rhythm of nature and natural circles. As masters of Japanese ink painting would do, Calder was able to suggest form, space, energy and movement with nothing more than a black line.

The exhibition, which is the artist’s first solo show in Tokyo in almost thirty-five years, draws its title from the enigmatic piece positioned right at the entrance of the show, Effect Japonaise, which mirrors the beauty of a tree’s floating leaves moving with the wind and the beauty of a star suspended in the sky, also recalling the dancing movement of the fans during the traditional Kabuki dance, which can be adjusted to evoke the wind, the water, the snow and other natural phenomena.

Calder’s oeuvre is deeply imbued with the Japanese “aesthetics of emptiness,” based on a necessary dialectic relation between emptiness and presence that allows a dynamic space of transformation—a place where processes can still flow and find a balance. His sculptures appear to translate the philosophical and construction concept of “MA,” namely the interchangeable relation that needs to exist between place, space and void. Yet his use of the line on canvas often follows the lesson of Japanese traditional ink paintings, and the haboku technique in particular, where a few very rapid monochrome ink strokes can suggest a landscape not explicitly identified and, more importantly, the air circulating in between the subjects, translating a simultaneous both sensory and spiritual engagement with the scene.

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The first epiphany related to these crucial aspects of Calder’s practice comes with the first artworks we encounter in the exhibition: sketches of animals hanging on the first wall, just a few single linear traits quickly drawn on white paper to describe creatures and the dynamics between them. These works remind one of the Cirque Calder, one of his early works. Calder, in the 20s, was working as a toy designer, and in 1926 he made mechanical toys that led to the creation of his Circus, now on permanent view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. However, the Azubudai Hills Art Gallery show purposely avoids presenting his wire sculptures, focusing instead on what Calder was sharing with the Japanese traditional aesthetic and philosophical approach to the line as space: “drawing in space,” as critics describe the artist’s practice.

On the first wall, we are also invited to examine two large paintings, which are very much not what Calder fans might regard as his most significant. They’re there, Rower explained, because they were the first two works by Calder shown in Japan in 1965 as part of an extensive show of Western art in, of all places, a department store. In one, we see a view of Calder’s studio in 1955.

As we move to the second cluster of works in this survey, a series of early abstract paintings from the ’30s show how Calder was absorbing and elaborating in a very personal way the lessons of the avant-garde and the sensibility of surrealism. The burgeoning surrealist movement naturally influenced Calder, and some of its most prominent voices, including Joan Miró, André Breton and Jean Arp, became his friends. Some of Calder’s abstract paintings show his closeness with Mirò, as they shared an interest in establishing rhythmic and dialectic relations between organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn together with sharp and interlacing lines into new “constellations.”

A significant contribution in translating this formal and narrative rhythm into the space in this extensive show is provided by thoughtful exhibition design conceived of by Japanese architect Stephanie Goto, a longtime Calder Foundation collaborator. Rooted in the proportion of the geometry of a 3:4:5 triangle, the design plays with traditional Japanese materials such as cherry wood and the mysterious blackboard black paper, which create a framework where Calder’s sculptures can differently emerge or be camouflaged to create a new tension between the elements and offer new suggestive allusions to their parallels in nature.  The black paper background, in particular, allows for an entirely different experience of Calder’s use of color. The three red spheres suspended in space become the protagonists; there’s the structure, but like a trunk, it serves to elevate and connect with these suspended celestial presences.

In our walkthrough with Rower, we stopped to contemplate a curious story connected with one of the works on view that showcased the inventiveness of the American Modernist sculptor: one of the sculptures is kept together with both permanent rivets and removable screws, which let the sculpture to come apart and be reassembled. The piece is from 1945, right after the war, and Rower explained that at the time, due to the limited resources, Calder was repurposing everything he could find in the studio. Duchamp once visited him and, fascinated by the recent evolution of Calder’s work, now all made from scraps, he wanted to organize a show in Paris, suggesting they could send the sculptures by airmail. “Calder made demountable sculptures that could fit in a small package that could be in Paris the next day, where the work would be reassembled,” said Rower. “As with a teleport, you could collapse a work of art down and then send it, and then it reappears the same as what it was, which has something extremely pioneering both on a technical and conceptual level at the time.”

As we proceeded through the exhibition, we encountered the sculptures depicted in the two paintings at the entrance. One of those, in particular, seemed quite explicative of the idea of “drawing in space.” It stands in the extreme synthesis of its thin, linear sculptural body thanks to the specific inclination and angle that allows it to stand, counterbalancing the busy top part. Above, there is a strange mobile with a more symbolic appearance floating in space, reminding us of the iconography of the dragon in some ancient Asian mythology. Rower explained that this is the only piece that didn’t come directly from the Calder Foundation. In the corner, a towering black stabile is a meditation on the shape of the triangle; between compression, expansion and elevation, it eventually recalls a Pagoda, as its title suggests.

To the other side, the exhibition’s second section presents much more of what one expects to see in a show of Calder’s work, with some beautiful examples of his stabiles and gouaches carefully selected for their resonances with Japanese aesthetics and sensibility. And in between, Rower opted to include a video by John Cage filming a selection of Calder’s sculptures from different perspectives with an accompanying score of dedicated music that enhances the rhythmicity in their perception. It’s almost hypnotic and does a fine job of translating on video the actual experience of Calder’s sculptures, as they dance in a sort of ritual, moving organically like leaves on a tree.

This video and certain other works in the exhibition particularly exemplify how Calder’s idea of sculpture is all about staging constellations of forms in space, often with the ambition to replicate broader cosmic orders and processes. As in the traditional Japanese ink paintings, Calder uses empty space as the climax of action: in the dialectic between complete and void, the free space allows the void to circulate between subjects, distinguishing them, amplifying and enhancing their action bringing to fruition the height of the representation/presentation. Viewers are drawn into these endless dynamics between the form and the space, in a similar dialectic tension that characterizes all the interrelational exchanges with the outside world. Calder’s sculptures invite us to experience art from multiple perspectives, drawing visual lines in the tridimensional space—something that anticipated the research of Minimalist artists just a few years later.

A group of paintings and gouaches toward the end of “Calder: Un effet du Japonais” highlights how his use of circular lines and forms resonates with “ensō,” another key concept in traditional Japanese calligraphy and ink painting. As one of the most potent symbols of Zen 禅, the circular shape becomes synonymous with the cosmic circle enclosing emptiness. It is a symbol of the absolute, of the totality of phenomena, and at the same time, of the extreme intuition and understanding of both the formal and philosophical role of emptiness, which the art of Calder attempts to reach.

Ironically, the show’s closing piece is a metal maquette for an outdoor sculpture that recalls in its shape and movement the Great Wave by Hokusai, playing with what is arguably one of the most iconic paintings of Japanese art known by the international public, while still moving beyond such art historical stereotypes. Ultimately, Rower’s unique Calder exhibition effectively reveals unexpected and largely unexplored connections between the art of the Modern American master and Japan, demonstrating how modern art is shaped by cultural exchanges between artists operating at the historical intersection of local/nationalist resistance and the unstoppable forces of globalization.

“Calder: Un effet du japonais” is on view through Friday, September 6, 2024 at Azubudai Hills Art Gallery in Tokyo.