NEW YORK, NY.- Jon Shirley discovered Alexander Calder in a book for a high school humanities class, and then saw his work in person on a school trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“He took really simple elements, wire, steel, paint, and created a whole new art form,” Shirley said. “And all of a sudden he created sculpture that was open, that moved, and that was constantly changing. It just grabbed me.”

Soon after, he encountered “Lobster Trap and Fish Tail,” a large mobile that evokes the motion of the sea, hanging in a stairwell at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“That was an amazing experience for me, and Calder just stuck with me,” said Shirley, the former president and chief operating officer of Microsoft. Shirley purchased his first work by the artist three decades later, in 1988, and has added to his collection every year since.

The first comprehensive public display of 54 of those works, “Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection,” will be on view at the Seattle Art Museum from Nov. 8 to Aug. 4. The sculptures, mobiles, prints, paintings, illustrations and works on paper, along with 85 books and publications, will be donated to the museum upon Shirley’s death.

“Because of Jon Shirley’s meticulous collecting,” said José Carlos Diaz, curator of the show and deputy director for art at the museum, “we have representation of basically every type of work Calder did as a professional artist from the ’20s, all the way to his death in 1976. It helps us create one of the most important collections of the 20th century in Seattle.”

Visitors will also be able to see a selection of publications, photographs, a couple of Calder sculptures already in the museum’s collection, and “The Eagle,” a 38-foot-tall painted steel outdoor sculpture, an earlier gift to the museum by the Shirley family on permanent display in the museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

The gift of the Calder artworks is accompanied by a $10 million endowment and annual commitments to fund the museum’s multiyear plans that will center on Calder and his influence. Many initiatives will focus on educational programs for schoolchildren.

“Jon was the son of a naval officer and got a scholarship to attend a private boys’ school,” Shirley’s wife, Kim, said. “He never would have had the opportunity to be exposed to arts and humanities without that education.”

“It changed my life,” Shirley said. “We’ll bring a lot of busloads of kids in, because I think Calder is approachable, and is inspirational to young people.”

The exhibition and endowment are also intended to bring people back to Seattle’s downtown and to the museum, both hard hit by the pandemic, he said. “I want to see a whole new group of people come into the museum.”

“We want our museum to be more a part of the community,” Shirley said, “and to really make it energized and help it thrive.”

The museum is working in partnership with the Calder Foundation to develop a broad range of programming, including collaborations, scholarly conferences, lecture series, workshops and performances.

“The Shirleys’ vision,” said Alexander S.C. Rower, the foundation’s president and Calder’s grandson, “is to provide a forum where people can get together and discuss Calder’s genius and ideas and legacy, and how to engage and serve the public long term.”

Many events will reflect Calder’s interest in movement, choreography and sound, like a percussion concert of a 1960s composition inspired by and performed on a Calder mobile. Future exhibitions will explore topics including young, emerging and contemporary artists influenced by Calder or who work in a similar vein, as well as historically themed shows.




“But if you know nothing about Calder and you arrive in the Calder gallery in Seattle, you’ll have an experience,” Rower said. “You don’t need to know the dates and the structure of Calder’s development and all those things.”

People who discover Calder for the first time are often shocked to learn that he is no longer alive (he died nearly 50 years ago at 78 in New York City), as his works have a timeless quality that makes them feel contemporary, he said. “He’s a very present artist.”

The exhibition design is deliberately nonchronological, with time periods and miniature and monumental works mixed.

“It’s done in a way that’s very much like confetti, with artwork scattered through the galleries,” said Diaz, to encourage visitors to stroll informally through the show and view artworks from different angles, including from overlooks above the double-height galleries.

Highlights include “Bougainvillier,” a standing mobile; “Gamma,” an elegant, whimsical hanging mobile; “Mountains,” a large-scale black, sheet metal stabile (a stationary sculpture with implicit movement); and “Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong,” a sound-producing mobile of colorful, organic shapes.

“I’m super curious if there’ll be enough air currents in the gallery space to actually activate this particular work,” Diaz said.

“Fish,” a rare hanging sculpture of wire, bits of found objects, like broken pottery, colored glass, and mirror, was made during World War II, when metal and other supplies were scarce.

The American-born Calder was “very resourceful, very innovative,” Diaz said, and his influences were many, from growing up in a family of artists, the Arts and Crafts movement and engineering studies in college, to his many avant-garde artist friends, including surrealists and American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham.

While living in Paris in the 1920s, Calder created miniature circus figures that captured the action of the performances that he called “models of motion.” He later began experimenting with drawing three-dimensionally with wire.

“These figures became more and more sculptural,” said Elizabeth Hutton Turner, a professor of art history at the University of Virginia. “They became these wonderful, marvelous, transparent, drawings in air. They occupied but did not fill space.”

“Vache” (cow), a wire sculpture from this period, will be on view at the Seattle exhibition.

“Calder was always looking for the simplest means and the least amount of mass in setting up and creating his objects,” Turner said. “Sculpture was thought to be mass, and Calder is showing us that it can encompass space. Calder made it into his own genre.”

A transformative moment occurred in 1930 when Calder visited Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris, Turner recounted. Could the Dutch artist’s color swatches — shapes that he moved around on the wall to begin to compose or set a rhythm of dynamic equilibrium in paintings — be made to move, oscillate, go at different speeds?

“Mondrian rejects the idea, but Calder runs with it,” she said. The encounter led to Calder’s embrace of abstraction, to make his nonfigurative images move, and to eventually suspend them.

Painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp encouraged Calder to call these new works “mobiles,” Turner said. “They’re just these fantastic works of balance.”

“Calder is the artist who made sculpture move,” Turner said. “He develops a whole new way of thinking about movement and objects in motion, and how the movement of his objects comes to sculpt the space. Calder wanted to make things more fun to look at. He gives us a whole other perspective, a whole alternate way of seeing, and I think the world needs that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.