“Alexander Calder in Saché,” by John Russell, first appeared in the July 1967 issue of Vogue. For more highlights from Vogue’s archives, subscribe to our Nostalgia newsletter here.
By the mid-1960s, the romance between France and America had faded. When people from either side looked across the Atlantic, they saw a landscape of disappointment. Americans who grew up reading the novels and memoirs of the great expatriates encountered a new France: a busy, modern society fueled by Coca-Cola, hamburgers, and drugstores—a France as distant from the worlds of The Ambassadors or Tender Is the Night as Kosygin’s Russia was from Turgenev’s.
In this new France, the sons of former gamekeepers and handymen are more likely to quote prices for Bethlehem Steel than tend your house for ten dollars a week. The French, too, have been surprised: the typical American in France is no longer the wealthy amateur supported by Wall Street but a transatlantic executive getting by on an untaxed foreign-service allowance.
If one place and one person could counter all this, it would be the town of Saché and Alexander Calder. It’s remarkable to travel deep into the heart of France, like carving into a leg of lamb, and discover a way of life largely unchanged since Balzac’s time, along with an American resident who embodies the pioneer virtues: independence, honesty, straightforwardness, and a frank, unspoiled way of speaking. Calder is rightly credited with inventing the mobile; anyone who has seen him in Saché knows that he and Mrs. Calder have also rekindled a sense of complete trust between the French and Americans. Of course, he is a recognized genius, and everyone enjoys having a genius for a neighbor. But it’s not his genius that has salvaged something from the decline in Franco-American relations—it’s because he is clearly bigger, truer, and better than other people.
Visitors to Saché won’t find the mindless admiration that surrounded the “great men” of the 1920s and ’30s, or the circle of flatterers and agents that other artists of Calder’s age and status keep around them. He could have a large house, a secretary, and many servants, but he and Mrs. Calder do everything themselves, just as they did when they had no other choice. “I tried to think,” Mrs. Calder recently said, “if anything has really changed in our lives, and I realized that if I want to go to the airport and buy a ticket to New York, I can do it without worrying. That’s about the only difference.”
Saché was Balzac’s village, and until about a year ago, the skyline along the north bank of the Indre River had hardly changed since his melancholy “woman of thirty” experienced emotions now more fitting for a disheartened fifty-five-year-old. But today, you can follow the classic Balzac pilgrimage through the valley and see high above you the silhouettes of Calder’s large stabiles standing on the lookout near his new studio. From a distance, it’s hard to know what to compare them to—they suggest engineering, architecture, animal life, and exotic plants. Like all major works of art, they can be understood on many levels and from many perspectives. And unlike many admired modern sculptures, they don’t seem fussy or out of place when set against nature; instead, they reach an agreement with it, and both are enriched. They radiate a kind of benevolent magic, fitting perfectly with the Indre Valley, which is not a landscape suited to psychological turmoil.
Calder himself is not blind to such struggles, but his work proves that optimistic art doesn’t have to be bland. In human relationships, he is the kind of person who could reinvent society and do it better, and in his work, the dominant qualities are intelligence…Balance, clarity, generosity, and a sense of play. People sense these qualities even without knowing much about art, which is why, if you’re driving to Saché and ask for directions to his house, the neighbors won’t just point vaguely from across the street. They’ll come over, lean in through your car window, and tell you how lucky you are to be visiting.
Calder came from a family of sculptors—both his father and grandfather worked in the medium. If artistic talent were simply inherited, he might have followed in their footsteps as naturally as Churchill or Roosevelt entered politics. But creating sculptures and truly engaging with the world aren’t always the same thing. Even as a student, Calder wanted to understand what made the world tick—literally, by studying engineering, and figuratively, because the art world alone didn’t satisfy him. He had no interest in making art that simply resembled what had come before.
At that time, his father, Stirling Calder, was a respected figure in the art scene. Pascin called him “the best-looking man in our society,” and when Alexander was seventeen, his father oversaw the sculpture section of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. But the younger Calder wanted to break away, and he had the talent to do it. At the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, he earned the highest grades ever recorded in descriptive geometry. He had—and still has—a gift for approaching tasks as if he were the first to attempt them. When he went to sea as a common sailor, he did it with the spirit of a ninth-century Viking.
Working for a newspaper in St. Louis, Calder discovered provincial America with the fresh eyes of Robinson Crusoe exploring his island. At a timber plant in Independence, Washington, he saw tree stumps and distant snowy peaks as if they were new to the earth. Even now, crossing the village street he walks a dozen times a day, he remains fully present. If he was ever born with an autopilot, he discarded it long ago.
Forty years ago last summer, Calder moved to Paris, settling on a small street behind the Montparnasse Cemetery named after Daguerre. He had many skills, but they didn’t seem to fit together. It was unusual for a trained mechanical engineer to have also been a cartoonist-reporter for the Police Gazette, and it made little sense for someone who had saved thousands to study under Luks and John Sloan in New York to then sign on as a merchant seaman bound for Hull, England. By twenty-eight, he might have seemed like just another unfocused artist. Traditional art studies didn’t hold his full attention, nor did conventional art practices engage the qualities that most intrigued him. He was searching for a style that could capture humor, agility, strong personality, and poetic invention in a concise, striking way.
These traits were vividly displayed in the Barnum circus, which Calder had covered for the New York Police Gazette. Paris in the late 1920s was the last refuge of larger-than-life stage personalities who didn’t rely on amplification. Performers like Josephine Baker, rarely captured on film and never on television, thrived on the magic of live presence. Calder recognized this immediately, and when he began creating wire portrait sculptures, Baker was among his first subjects.
These portraits captured the spirit of the 1920s much like Ingres’s drawings of wealthy visitors did for Rome a century earlier—they distilled the essence of the era. Sculpted in space rather than on a flat surface, they possess a dreamlike intensity. And this vividness didn’t come from safe choices: his subjects included Fernand Léger, Helen Wills, Calvin Coolidge, Carl Zigrosser, and Kiki de Montparnasse—none of them conventional.The portraits share a common trait. When placed in a draft, they produce a faint, steady vibration that, against all reason, makes them seem alive—human figures without flesh or weight, yet physically present.
Calder observed his subjects with an engineer’s precision, stripping away everything until only their essential qualities remained. He applied this approach to other subjects as well: for instance, his Romulus and Remus were nursed by a remarkably gentle, ten-foot-long she-wolf.
But Calder’s true breakthrough in his early Paris years was his miniature circus. Figures like Cocteau, Léger, Mondrian, Kiesler, Varèse, Le Corbusier, and Van Doesburg first came to know him as the creator and operator of this intricate, cleverly economical toy. Much like his wire portraits, Calder studied and analyzed the movements of circus performers until he could replicate them, removing all nonessentials.
Today, opportunities to see the full circus are rare; its pieces are stored in four locked suitcases in Saché. Yet enough stray figures survive for us to appreciate that its appeal lies not just in mechanical ingenuity, but in the individual life Calder gave each character. Tellingly, he would often sift through studio debris to rescue a lost kangaroo with injured paws or a rusted acrobat.
Calder was widely liked then, as he is now, and Europeans were especially struck by his straightforward, undivided nature. He embodied what people expected an American to be—and much more. This did not, however, win over Louisa James’s father. Calder spotted them aboard the liner De Grasse while crossing the Atlantic westbound in June 1929. Louisa and her father were returning from a European tour that had been, plainly put, a monumental failure.
As Henry James’s nephew, Mr. James was well aware that well-born Europeans didn’t always go out of their way to meet visiting Americans, and those who did weren’t always well-intentioned. Despite high hopes of forging stylish European connections, he found himself and his daughter meeting only those loitering in hotel lobbies, and he sailed home in frustration. As the ship left Cherbourg, he repeatedly warned his daughter about coarse, uneducated American opportunists who might try to strike up shipboard conversations with young ladies. He was in the middle of such a lecture when Alexander Calder passed them on the promenade deck, turned sharply, and offered an uninvited but respectful greeting. “Ahhhh!” Mr. James hissed through his teeth, like an offended swan, “Sssss! There’s one of them already!”
Calder didn’t take long to turn that first meeting into a courtship, and Miss James soon became Mrs. Calder. Being the great-niece of Henry James is impressive, but being Mrs. Calder—and carrying it off with the poise Louisa displays in every situation—is even more so. Miró once described her as “beautiful as a classic statue,” and you don’t need to be an artist to sense the order and serenity she brings to their home. The house isn’t tidy in a conventional sense, nor is her sense of order rigid or confining.
It’s simply a place where priorities are firmly and rightly established. On the surface, the two Calders have very different styles, and he especially enjoys playing up these contrasts. But it doesn’t take long to realize that his famous grunts and abrupt interjections mask an exceptionally quick and subtle mind, just as…Mrs. Calder’s thoughts are direct and passionate, even though you can sense the subjunctive mood building two sentences before she actually uses it.
There are no dark corners in the Calders’ house, just as there are no lifeless or dull areas in his art. In both, everything is brought into the light. New visitors are often surprised to find that, even though the house sits in shadow much of the day and is partly built into rock, their first impression is one of bright, vivid color. The Touraine region is known for its cave dwellings, where people have lived under overhanging cliffs for centuries. The Calders’ home draws on this tradition but turns it inside out—transforming the cave into something like Aladdin’s treasure trove, with the rock opening up almost as dramatically as when Moses struck the stone with his staff.
Neither of the Calders cares much for conventional interior decoration. It just so happens that Calder’s sense of space is as sharp in his home as it was in his circus creations forty years ago, and Mrs. Calder understands the difference between a messy clutter and a home that truly works—enriching everyone who spends time there.
A home should be a place to relax, and since Calder’s daughter and son-in-law, Sandra and Jean Davidson, live just five minutes away, it’s natural that the “Calder complex” includes wonderful examples of his playful spirit. He takes as much delight in making birds for his grandchildren now as he did thirty-five years ago crafting a wire cigarette holder that captured the essence of an entire decade.
In his studio across the yard, he keeps an anvil small enough to fit in a pocket and a collection of worn-out tools that look useless to anyone else. When he first enters the studio, he seems dreamy and hesitant, like some large creature from the hedgerows that wandered in by accident. He settles to work calmly, with plenty of time to tease anyone nearby. But don’t be fooled—this is where masterpieces are made. And if he decides to head over to the Etablissements Biémont, the heavy engineering workshop near Tours where many of his large stabiles are fabricated, it’s immediately clear that he’s the central figure everything depends on.
Biémont’s is the kind of place where the noise could signal the end of the world. To an outsider, it often looks as if everyone is under some collective hallucination—one older employee rolling inside a stainless-steel cylinder while another straddles a hollow drum, hammering it with the largest mallet this side of Wagner’s Ring cycle.
But the delusion is ours, not theirs. In reality, this is a precision workshop of the highest order. It was here that Calder created, among other works, the forty-six-ton stabile for Montreal’s Expo 67. He is as comfortable in this massive engineering facility as he is in the seemingly chaotic solitude of his own studio. Many well-known artists have enlisted professional engineers over the past decade, but Calder is the only one who can out-talk them in their own language. These enormous new works blend architecture, engineering, plant life, and the world of elephants and giraffes. If not anchored properly, a hurricane could send one slicing through a ten-story building and out the other side.
Yet the complex calculations don’t diminish the emotional impact of these pieces. The leaf-like forms in “Cactus” are as moving as anything in Matisse’s late cutouts, and the powerful muscle shape in “Bucephalus” is as stirring as any dinosaur anatomy. Calder is just as much himself in these gigantic works—you can easily drive a truck through the fifty-eight-foot-tall “Teodelapio”—as he is in the toys he makes for his grandchildren or in works like “Chien.”He painted a sign that said “Méchant” (meaning “naughty” or “mischievous”) outside the front gate. Calder is a genuine person, not a polished imitation, so everything he creates—no matter the size—reflects his true self. If you ask him about it directly, he’ll dodge the question with self-mockery or make a quick escape to his well-stocked wine cellar. But even though he’d never say it himself, we can acknowledge that the place the guidebooks insist on calling Saché-Balzac might just as well be renamed Saché-Calder—and it would be all the better for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of helpful FAQs about From the Archives Alexander Calder at Home in Saché
General Information
Q What is From the Archives Alexander Calder at Home in Saché
A Its an exhibition or archival feature that showcases the personal life and work of the famous American sculptor Alexander Calder at his home and studio in the French village of Saché
Q Who was Alexander Calder
A He was a pioneering 20thcentury American artist best known for inventing the mobile and creating large stationary abstract sculptures called stabiles
Q Where is Saché and why is it important
A Saché is a small village in the Loire Valley of France Its important because Calder established a home and studio there which became a creative sanctuary and a hub for his artistic community away from the hustle of Paris and New York
Visiting Viewing
Q Where can I see this exhibition or archive material
A It is typically presented by a museum or institution that holds Calders archives such as the Calder Foundation or a major art museum You would need to check their website for current and upcoming showings either inperson or online
Q Is this a physical exhibition I can visit or is it online
A It could be either From the Archives often refers to a physical display of rarely seen documents photographs and objects However many institutions also create extensive online features digital collections and virtual tours based on their archives
Q What kind of things will I see
A You can expect to see personal photographs of Calder and his family letters sketches home movies and documents that offer a behindthescenes look at his creative process and daily life in France
Deeper Insights
Q How did living in Saché influence Calders work
A The rural setting and spacious studio in Saché allowed him to work on a much larger scale The tranquility and connection to nature are often reflected in the organic playful forms of the sculptures he created there
Q Whats the difference between a mobile and a stabile