CALDER X MIES

With the exhibition Calder X Mies, Kicken Berlin pays homage to two major figures of twentieth-century Modernism. Timed for the reopening of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the concurrent exhibition there devoted to the sculptor Alexander Calder, the show is part of the collaborative project Mies in Mind, a circuit of exhibitions at thirty Berlin galleries celebrating the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies’s unique contribution to architecture, and Calder’s extraordinary sculptural output. Much as Alexander Calder and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe explored various forms of art, from sculpture and drawing to jewelry and furniture design, so generations of photographers – including Joachim Brohm, Louis Faurer, André Kertész, Klaus Kinold, Herbert Matter, Arnold Newman, and Sasha Stone, to name just a few – entered into polyphonic dialogue with the works of these two masters. Contemporary photographers like Brohm and Kinold have approached Mies’s oeuvre with a deep awareness of the history of Modernism. Calder and Mies contributed over many decades to the development of twentieth-century Modernism in architecture and sculpture. Calder was “modern from the start,” to draw on the title of a 2021 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Born into a family of American sculptors, he turned his back on tradition in order to embrace the free spirit of modern sculpture – with graphic linearity in his wire forms, movement in his mobiles, and organic abstraction in his freestanding sculpture. His canon of sculptural forms found its way into other media as well. Drawing and graphic design, even tapestry (as in the outstanding examples included here) became natural outlets for his creativity. Jewelry design was another constant for Calder. From 1929 on he began crafting pieces using brass, silver, and gold for his wife Louisa, relatives, and friends as well as for sale. In 1945 the collector Peggy Guggenheim commissioned him to create a silver headboard for the bedroom in her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice – as seen in a 1964 photograph by Raymond Voinquel.
Calder’s work inspired many of his peers. André Kertész photographed the artist and his work as early as the spring of 1929. The two met in Paris, where Calder had lived since 1926. At the time he was already presenting his first major project – the 'Cirque Calder '– live to an interested public at his studio. This miniature, moveable circus was fashioned mainly of wire and took up a theme – the circus – that would occupy him throughout his life. The Swiss photographer Herbert Matter accompanied Calder particularly intensively with this project as well as in his daily work. He documented Calder’s creations both while they were being made in the studio as well as in exhibitions; in 1944 MoMA commissioned him to make a film portrait of the artist. Among other photographers who devoted their time to Calder were portraitists like Arnold Newman and the Magnum photographer Inge Morath. Sasha Stone, another contemporary from the 1920s, was important for both Calder and Mies van der Rohe. Stone knew Calder from Paris and helped promote his work in Berlin. He arranged the first exhibition of Calder’s work in Germany, a show at Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin that opened on April 1, 1929. Calder later recalled making one of his first pieces of jewelry for a visitor to the show. Stone’s work also connects to architectural Modernism in significant ways. Today he is especially known for his photographic interpretations of the Barcelona Pavilion, the structure Mies designed for the International Exhibition there in 1929. Stone found congenial ways of visualizing the pavilion’s clear geometrical forms, the spatial lightness and transparency, the suspended boundary between inside and outside, and the materiality of glass, metal, stone, and water – all qualities that were characteristic of the new approach to building (the Neues Bauen). Decades after the pavilion was dismantled, it was possible to reconstruct it on the basis of his precise shots. Mies’s buildings and furniture designs have continued to attract the attention of subsequent generations of artists, offering the potential for appropriations and new interpretations as well as sober reflection. The recently deceased photographer Klaus Kinold, following his philosophy of showing “architecture as it is,” presented Mies’s buildings with precise and intensely observed restraint. He used color when photographing the interiors of Haus Tugendhat in Brno (designated a Unesco World Monument in 2001) after the villa was painstakingly renovated in the early 2010s. With sensitivity to its careful balance of interior space and furnishings, Kinold presented the iconic building as a true-to-life whole through large-format prints. Joachim Brohm, in contrast, regards Mies and other Modernist architectures as an opportunity to reflect on the past and explore its representation – and the potential for photographic dialogue – through contemporary means. He, too, probed the interiors of Haus Tugendhat. In his images, history overlaps with the present in half-transparent, half-opaque layers. Brohm also documented the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin during its renovation.