Calder’s oeuvre features spectacular shifts in scale; there are standing mobiles less than two inches high and stabiles over eighty feet high. Jed Perl writes, “[Calder] had a preternatural sensitivity to matters of size and scale, whether the relation of the part to the whole within a single sculpture or the relation of the sculpture to the men and women who looked at it, touched it, and walked around it and sometimes even through it.” The standing mobile seen here in action, Toadstool with Fea

A panoply of mobiles intermingle in Calder’s studio, two-part bronzes twist on the beach, and a standing mobile flutters against the sky in Works of Calder, a twenty-minute film that debuted at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art on 24 January 1951. Initially proposed to the artist by actor Burgess Meredith, this remarkable film features music by ‪John Cage‬ and was directed by Herbert Matter. In addition to the mind-bending fusion of art and avant-garde music, it includes an interlude of a young boy—