bibliostructures

The wire is the link between the jewelry and Calder’s mobiles and sculpture.”There are pieces that are vaguely leaf-like, which is true of his mobiles,” said Rosenthal. “They are biomorphic, curvilinear. And like his earliest mobiles he used found objects — little stones found on the beach or he would break up bottles and use pieces of broken glass. He did the same thing with the mobiles.”

Throughout his life, Calder produced more than 1,800 jewelry objects, each made entirely by hand. His first pieces date back to the 1920s — pieces made for his older sister’s dolls.

“The jewelry has a relationship to his formal sculpture,” said Alexander S.C. Rower, chairman and director of the Calder Foundation, as well as the artist’s grandson. “They move when you wear them. They are really exotic.”

As an adult, Calder made countless gifts of jewelry for his wife, Louisa James Calder, so many that her dressing table became a kind of private shrine to his devotion.

“My grandmother had hundreds of pieces,” said Rower. “The first piece of jewelry he made for her was a little bracelet that read Medusa. They met on a cruise ship and she had long ringlets, and Medusa was his nickname for her.”

“In the late ’30s and early ’40s, the jewelry was the coolest thing for a woman to have,” remarked Rosenthal. “It was not expensive, $25 for a necklace even in the early ’50s.”

Female fans would hold “Tupperware parties,” offering Calder pieces for a good price to their friends.

“My grandfather would pack up a box of jewelry –we have one of these boxes in the show — and send them off to a woman patron who would have a little Calder party and then send the money back to him in the same box,” said Rower. “He needed to make a living during the war and thought jewelry making could provide a secondary income.”

TC Palm

manuscript page for ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

SO here, under airtight, light-shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats’s infatuation across five decades, the muse – well, really, the furnace – for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage. As far as actual marriage, Gonne became expert at wielding the word “no.”

Bound in white vellum, the notebook served as their metaphysical marital bed. Yeats used it to keep track of their shared fixation with the occult and each other. One morning in July 1908 Gonne wrote from Paris to report that she had been seized by a vision. “I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how?” she wrote. “At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.”

Yeats taped the letter into the notebook. Now, a century later, that book is on display at the National Library of Ireland, opened to a page that is just barely visible under the indirect lighting prescribed for aged ink treasures. Yet every syllable – every comma-deprived sentence, every curve in her script, every ampersand – is legible. Next to the display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. If needed, Gonne’s handwriting can be deciphered on a pop-up screen that types out her fevered scrawl.

New York Times. Jim Dwyer. July 20. 2008