As a boy, Sandy was always fiddling with odds and ends, making objects for friends. When he got older he started creating wire sculptures. Sandy made a lion. Next came a lion cage. Before he knew it, he had an entire circus and was traveling between Paris and New York performing a brand-new kind of art for amazed audiences.

Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography,which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows...

Provides detailed insight into that pioneering process through reproductions of personal drawings and notes and new research from a wide range of renowned scholars, furthering our understanding of the remarkable depth of Calder's beloved mobile sculptures and entrenching his status as an icon of modernism.