Alexander Calder’s whimsy shows up in wire at National Portrait Gallery

There was no decree naming Alexander Calder (1898-1976) the capital’s official artist, but walking around the Mall, you’d think there had been. His abstract sheet-metal sculptures are in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden and on the grounds of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn and American History museums, and a mammoth mobile dominates the atrium of the National Gallery’s East Building. An abundance of his works is on display in these museums as well as in the Phillips Collection.

In fact, the first notable modernist public sculpture in town was a Calder. That’s the explosive mass of black metal on the corner of Constitution Avenue and 14th Street NW, named “The Gwenfritz” after patron Gwendolyn Cafritz. It was the centerpiece of a fountain created in 1969 outside the National Museum of History and Technology and later dismantled. Now the museum, renamed the National Museum of American History, intends to return the Calder to a reflecting pool planned for the original site, though no date has been set.

And one more bit of D.C. Calder trivia: His last trip was to Washington to fine-tune plans for the massive sculpture now in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. When he returned to New York that evening in 1976, he suffered a heart attack and died.

What made him so popular? Those abstract sheet-metal sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s, and the kinetic mobiles he invented in the 1930s, were sophisticated but not aloof, whimsical but not silly. At a time when modernism was not entirely embraced, their mix of formal intelligence and accessibility appealed to nearly everyone.

It’s not surprising to learn that earlier in his career, Calder had invented another sculptural medium: wire used to make three-dimensional drawings in space. Using pliers and his bare hands, he twisted wire and combined it with other materials to create “Calder’s Circus,” a miniature troupe of acrobats, lion tamers, elephants, clowns and strongmen that he animated in performances in New York and Paris, where he and his wife lived until moving to Connecticut in 1933.

All told, he made a few hundred wire figures before abandoning the medium for abstraction in the 1930s. Among them were several dozen celebrities, athletes and art-world friends that are the main focus of “Calder’s Portraits: A New Language” at the National Portrait Gallery.

This exhibition — guest-curated by Barbara Zabel, a professor of art history at Connecticut College — includes some of Calder’s portraits in other mediums as well as images of his sitters by other artists, but the main attraction is his wire portraits, most of which were lent by the artist’s family foundation.

These radically new kinds of portraits are a breeze to understand and enjoy. Again, it’s Calder’s blend of invention with accessibility.

Among the subjects are Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Jimmy Durante, President Calvin Coolidge and other celebrities that the artist portrayed from publicity photographs. There are full-length figures of John D. Rockefeller in knickers swinging a golf club, and tennis star Helen Wills balancing on one leg reaching for a return.