TitleStretching Girl
Artist
Alexander Stirling Calder
(American, 1870 - 1945)
Datec. 1911
MediumBronze
DimensionsOverall: 36 1/2 × 9 × 9 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 1, 1913
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number15-S
Label TextBorn into Philadelphia's most famous family of sculptors, A. Stirling Calder began his artistic training in 1886 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied with Thomas Anshutz and Thomas Eakins. In 1890 he went to Paris, studying first at the Académie Julian under Henri Michel Chapu and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Falguière. After two years he returned to Philadelphia and began teaching modeling at the Pennsylvania Academy. In 1894 he won his first major commission, a bust of Eakins's famous subject Dr. Samuel Gross.Ill health prompted a move in 1905 to Arizona, and thus began a rather peripatetic period of Calder's life. He and his family moved on to Pasadena, California, in 1906, and in 1910 to New York, where Calder taught at the Art Students League and at the National Academy for the 1911-12 season. They returned to California in 1913, this time to San Francisco, where Calder was acting director of sculpture for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. He won the exposition's Designer's Medal for his Fountain of Energy.
The Calders made a final move in 1916, returning to New York. A number of major commissions followed: the elaborate Depew Memorial Fountain, executed in 1917 for University Square, Indianapolis, Indiana, and the figure of George Washington the statesman done in 1918 for a pier of the Washington Square Arch in New York. Calder spent the 1920s and 1930s executing other monumental works, such as the Swann Fountain for Philadelphia and a memorial to Leif Eriksson commissioned by the U.S. government for presentation in 1931 to the people of Iceland. He also developed a talent for depicting the nude and for realistic portraiture, such as the busts of his friends and fellow artists George Bellows, Robert Henri, and John Singer Sargent. His son, Alexander Stirling Calder, Jr. (1898-1976), was also a sculptor, famous as the originator of the mobile and the stabile.
According to the artist's daughter Margaret Calder Hayes, the Academy's bronze represents an impromptu pose struck by a model in the studio. It is similar to several other small bronze studies by Calder, all based on spontaneous action, the best known being "Scratching Her Heel" (1920, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Another, "Crouching Girl" (1911, unlocated), was shown at the Academy's winter exhibition in 1911.
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