"A mobile is a little swing tune, as unique and as ephemeral as the sky or the morning. If you have missed it, you have missed it forever." — Jean-Paul Sartre
Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor whose invention of the mobile fundamentally altered the course of twentieth-century sculpture. Born into an established artistic family in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, both his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, were sculptors, he came to art by an unusual route, taking a degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919 before enrolling at the Art Students League in New York in 1923. His move to Paris in 1926 placed him among the leading figures of the European avant-garde, where his contact with the Parisian abstractionists prompted the turn toward the abstract, kinetic sculpture that would define his career.
Calder won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale, the Carnegie Prize at the Pittsburgh International in 1958, the French Légion d'Honneur in 1974, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1977. His work is held in virtually every major modern art museum in the world.