Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture

Alexander Calder, great innovator and explorer, one of the first – if not the first – to make sculpture out of wire, virtual inventor of the mobile, has suffered the usual post-death decline in reputation. Since 1976, questions have been asked: Is he sufficiently serious? Too cheerful and optimistic? Merely decorative? Thanks to him, mobiles of inferior design began to populate children’s bedrooms, which didn’t help.

So, does this major exhibition mark a comeback for Calder? The early works, from the late 1920s, are depictions in wire – perhaps influenced by Picasso – of recognisable subjects. There’s Goldfish Bowl (1929) – the mechanism for making the fish swim no longer functions – and Medusa (c. 1930). At once you are struck by a formidable presence despite the apparent flimsiness of these squiggles of black wire. It’s something to do with the way they quiver (because so light) and cast shadows and look completely different from different angles. But Calder could only properly realise this elusive kinetic quality once he had fully embraced abstraction after his momentous meeting with Mondrian in Paris in 1930. And there were further liberations to come.

The 1932 piece, Small Sphere And Heavy Sphere, gets a room of its own with a video on the wall of it in motion. The small sphere is busy and intermittently strikes the gong as apparently intended. Otherwise it sways randomly and threatens some glass bottles. The heavy sphere is really rather useless and does little. Trembling on a highwire between comedy and disaster, the sculpture, or ‘installation’, never settles for either. Some critics have moaned, ‘Why can’t Calder be more like the Picasso of the Guernica era?’, but they’re missing the point.

Pressing on into the 1930s, Calder tried putting his motorised moving pieces into frames, before deciding that movement induced randomly by the air or passers-by was less controlling. There was then a powerful phase where he hung mysterious shapes that sway in the air before big, bold panels of colour, such as Red Panel (1936). Now these are substantial works. Finally come three sublime rooms dancing with miraculous mobiles and floor works. One is called Vertical Foliage (1941), and another Red Sticks (c. 1942). I loved Red Sticks. These are only nominally representations of nature yet their pure and ever-changing forms purposely and importantly elude meaning – so not empty and trivial. No, no, no. Minimalism this deep took a lifetime to achieve.

Until 3 April at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1: 020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk