Jim Welling

Jim Welling, Photographer
Inge Morath, Calder With Maquette of Gwenfritz, Roxbury, 1965


This picture shows Alexander Calder walking with a three-legged table that holds a maquette of his sculpture the Gwenfritz, which is now installed outside at the Smithsonian in Washington. In the picture you see cows in the background and Calder is walking through the Connecticut landscape with hills behind. He's wearing a fisherman's sweater. There's an old wooden palette in the foreground and some weeds, just kind of a funky studio side-yard location. What I like about the picture is that it's almost as if he's taking the sculpture for a walk; it's on this bulky weird table with these very black, sharp, spiky things. In DC the sculpture looks like a gigantic bat with these big wings. It's the most sinister, ominous sculpture. Calder has domesticated it in this photograph where he's taking the sculpture out the studio. One of the things I think he's doing, that I find myself doing, is when you make something that is as strange spatially as this sculpture is, or you make an abstract photograph, you want to walk around with it, take it with you, take it inside, take it to bed, because you want to always look at it to understand the space. Calder's probably just moving the maquette outside to photograph it, but there's the sense that he can't be separated from it. The great pleasure of being an artist is that you are able look at your work in all sorts of conditions and sizes and scales; you can take it inside, take it outside. That's what I like about the picture. There's something truly wonderful about seeing these metal plates out in a landscape.