The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (82 page)

(1904– ).
American painter and draughtsman. He paints with an extremely meticulous technique, usually in egg
tempera
, and often uses the poses and compositional techniques of the Old Masters. However, his subjects are taken from modern American life, on which he comments pungently and satirically. This has sometimes led to scandal, as with the work that established his reputation,
The Fleet's In
! (Naval Historical Center, Washington, 1934), portraying sailors on shore leave; it was described by the Secretary of the Navy as ‘a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl, wherein apparently a number of enlisted men are consorting with a party of streetwalkers and denizens of the red-light district’. Because Cadmus works very slowly his output as a painter has been small, but he has been a comparatively prolific draughtsman: ‘drawings are more saleable than paintings’, he writes, ‘they're less expensive.’

 
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Cage , John
.

See
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
.

 
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(1848–94).
French painter and collector. He came from a very wealthy family and for many years after his death was remembered primarily for the financial help he gave the
Impressionists
, by purchasing their paintings and sometimes by direct gifts of money. Recently, however, his own work as a painter has been reassessed and he is now regarded as an artist of considerable, although uneven, achievement. He exhibited at five of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, concentrating on scenes from everyday life. The most striking feature of his work is his interest in bold perspective effects, as in
Paris, A Rainy Day
(Art Institute of Chicago, 1877), which has become a much reproduced favourite. On his death he bequeathed his collection of sixty-five pictures to the State. Against the opposition of various academic artists representing the taste of the École des
Beaux-Arts
and the official
Salon
(
Gérôme
called the works offered ‘filth’), thirty-eight of the pictures were accepted after much wrangling and formed the nucleus of the Impressionist collection of the Luxembourg Museum. They are now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

 
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(1898–1976).
American sculptor and painter, famous as the inventor of the
mobile
and thereby as one of the pioneers of
Kinetic art
. His grand-father,
Alexander Milne Calder
(1846–1923), and his father,
Alexander Stirling Calder
(1870–1945), were sculptors and his mother was a painter, but he began to take an interest in art only in 1922, after studying mechanical engineering. From 1923 to 1926 he studied at the
Art Students League, New York
, where George
Luks
and John
Sloan
were among the teachers. Calder and his fellow students made a game of rapidly sketching people on the streets and in the subway and Calder was noted for his skill in conveying a sense of movement by a single unbroken line. From this it was but a step to his wire sculptures, the first of which was done in 1925. He also made animated toys in a similar vein. His first exhibition of such works was in New York in 1928. From this point he divided his time between the USA and France and he knew many leading avant-garde artists in France, notably
Miró
, who became his lifelong friend. In 1931 he joined the
Abstraction-Création
association and in the same year produced his first non-figurative moving construction. They were moved by hand or by motor power and were baptized ‘mobiles’ in 1932 by Marcel
Duchamp
;
Arp
suggested ‘stabiles’ for the non-moving constructions in the same year. It was in 1934 that Calder began to make the unpowered mobiles for which he is most widely known. Constructed usually from pieces of shaped and painted tin suspended on thin wires or cords, these responded by their own weight to the faintest air currents and were designed to take advantage of effects of changing light created by the movements. They were described by Calder as ‘four-dimensional drawings’, and in a letter to Duchamp written in 1932 he spoke of his desire to make ‘moving Mondrians’. Calder was greatly impressed by a visit to
Mondrian
in 1930, but his pawky delight in the comic and fantastic, which obtrudes even in his large works, was at the opposite pole from the messianic seriousness of Mondrian. After winning first prize for sculpture at the 1952 Venice
Biennale
Calder received numerous public commissions. Some of his late works are very large: the motorized hanging mobile
Red, Black, and Blue
(1967) at Dallas airport, for example, is 14m. wide. Calder also worked in a variety of other fields, painting
gouaches
and designing, for example, rugs and tapestries.

 
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(1779–1844).
English painter, a pupil of
Hoppner
. He became the most fashionable English landscape painter of his day, and was knighted in 1837. His early work had some freshness, but he settled into a conventional Italianate manner with a carefully modulated reflection of
Turner
, for the satisfaction of the larger public who could not yet stomach either Turner himself or
Constable
. In 1827 he married
Maria Graham
(née Dundas , 1785–1842), author of numerous books on topography and painting, and the two formed a society salon for artistic London.

 
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