Handmade jewelry created by Alexander Calder who was one of the most eminent and joyful sculptors of the 20th century is now on display in Balboa Park. Known for creating innovative moving sculptures dubbed mobiles, Calder also created many types of handmade personal ornaments as gifts for family members and friends. Many of the artist’s bracelets and brooches are fantastic and stylish but several necklaces are almost fiendish-looking due to their being infused with diabolical mirth and humor. When viewing this collection of extraordinary ornaments, one might legitimately wonder whether someone wears Calder’s jewelry or does Calder’s jewelry wear them.

On view at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), Calder Jewelry brings together over 90 examples of bracelets, brooches, earrings, necklaces, rings, and tiaras made by the artist. Calder fashioned many humorous caricatures of people and animals by bending plain wire with a pair of pliers; but for his jewelry pieces, he bent and hammered brass, silver, or gold wire to form his extravagant designs. The style of Calder’s jewelry is poetically ungainly—brilliant in form but distinctly hand-wrought—and almost as interesting as his renowned mobiles and his uniquely styled static sculptures, which are referred to as stabiles.

^{"Louisa Calder’s 53rd Birthday Gift"}

^{brooch, 1958. Private Collection,}

New York. ^{© 2009 Calder}

Foundation, ^{New York / Artists}

Rights Society ^{(ARS), New York.}

Photography © 2007 Maria Robledo.

Calder’s sculptures along with many of his jewelry pieces use strong, expressive lines. One prime example that shows off the artist’s facility with line is “Louisa Calder’s 53rd Birthday Gift” brooch (1958). The gold and steel brooch creates a bold, elegant pattern using nothing more than a coiled and serpentine line that gives the piece a dynamic elegance.

Several of Calder’s many ornate necklaces fuse engineering brilliance, delicate balance, and childlike imagination with potential eye-poking danger. The two most fanciful are necklaces: “Harps and Hearts” (c. 1937) and “The Jealous Husband” (c. 1940). Both pieces lie over the bust and shoulders but sport scene-stealing barbed-like protrusions that seem to float on the shoulders like sharp metal feathers. Anyone wearing such plumage would become the instant center of attention, but no one would dare get too close.

Remaining faithful to his homemade and hand-wrought aesthetic, Calder eschewed the use of precious gems, choosing instead to ornament many of his works with bits of ruby- and emerald-colored broken glass, also introducing shards of pottery as one would use pearls to infuse color and texture. In one necklace, cotton kitchen string is adorned with brass spirals and broken blue and white crockery to create a piece that in beauty rivals anything one could buy at Tiffany & Co.

^{"Harps and Heart" necklace,}

c. 1937. Calder Foundation,

New York ^{© 2009 Calder Foundation,}

^{New York / Artists Rights Society}

(ARS), New York. Photography

© 2007 Maria Robledo.

While this jewelry exhibit co-curated by Mark Rosenthal, Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Norton Museum of Art, and Alexander S.C. Rower, Director of the Calder Foundation, is fun because it offers many extraordinary items to look at, one misses the actual mobiles and stabiles that Alexander Calder is famous for. Thankfully, a companion exhibition entitled Picasso, Miró, Calder in San Diego, curated by John Marciari, SDMA’s Curator of Italian & Spanish Painting and Head of Provenance Research, is also on display at the museum. This exhibition mainly drawing upon the museum’s permanent collection, includes a few of Calder’s sculptures along with a selection of the artist’s works on paper; it also features works by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.

Picasso and Calder were both mutual friends of Miró even though the three great artists had differing artistic philosophies. All three made work that were influenced by surrealism at one time or another; but most famously, the three came together to exhibition the much vaunted Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition to celebrate the dying Spanish Republic. There, Picasso’s famous painting “Guernica,” protesting bombings of Spain by the Fascist Germans, and Calder’s remarkable “Mercury Fountain,” celebrating Spain’s mercury mines, were displayed together with a surrealist mural by Miró. The artists united in support for freedom against the Fascist tyrannies embodied by General Franco and Chancellor Hitler.

_{Necklace, 1930. Calder Foundation,}

New York _{© 2009 Calder Foundation,}

New York / Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York.

Photography © 2007 Maria Robledo.

The companion exhibit also prominently features recent and promised gifts to the museum. On display are etchings and drawings by Picasso as well as “Femme assise” (1949), a large abstracted painting of a figure presumably featuring his lover Françoise Gilot, which has been promised to SDMA. Also on view are several latter works by Miró, among which are two pieces recently donated to the museum by Helen and Sol Price.

Together both the Calder Jewelry and Picasso, Miró, Calder in San Diego exhibitions are fine complements to each other and make for fun and inspired viewing. Unfortunately, the Picasso/Miró/Calder exhibit is scheduled to be on display only until December 6, 2009; so while both exhibitions are still up, hurry in and see them together.