SAN FRANCISCO - Walk into the first of seven galleries housing the "Surreal Calder" exhibit and leave reality behind. Outside the walls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ordinary life goes on, but the real world has no place here.
Within these white rooms, bizarre shapes, some of them dangling from the ceiling, cast wispy phantom shadows on the walls. Wire, wood, paint and sheet metal create a strange reality of their own.
A burly Hercules, really just a wire outline, wrestles a vaguely delineated lion. A wooden bottle sprouts wiry hair. Wispy wire figures perform circus acrobatics while a few rooms away, planets and moons stage their own aerial act within a miniature universe.
It literally looks fantastic, but it also looks like fun. Alexander Calder (1898-1976) made an art of play, blending childlike joy with sophisticated genius.
"You probably could not name an artist in the 20th century who gave more joy to more people than Alexander Calder," said Neal Benezra, director of SFMOMA.
The word most often used to describe Calder's work is "playful," and yet his career had its roots in early 20th-century surrealism, often perceived as a more abstract, cerebral movement.
In the late 1920s and '30s, the Pennsylvania-born Calder lived in Paris, where he fell in with Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and other surrealist artists.
"All of these people considered Calder one of them," said Mark Rosenthal, the New York curator who assembled the SFMOMA exhibit, "but in the last 20 years, that's all been forgotten."
That's why Rosenthal opens the Calder exhibit with a room devoted to work by his peers. For example: Rene Magritte's small framed oil painting of a piece of cheese set in a covered glass dish; Miro's "Painting (The Magic of Color)," with its three bright dots of red, yellow and blue in wildly different sizes.
"I'm trying to root Calder in some of the ideas from which he came," Rosenthal explained.
In the center of that first room, appropriately dominating the atmosphere, is Calder's looming "Black Beast" of sheet metal and steel bolts.
Calder went on to become his own category, but the principles of surrealism -- defying convention, challenging established perceptions and embracing the cosmos -- stayed with him.
"Although Calder never became a card-carrying surrealist, he took what he wanted and needed," Benezra said.
The second gallery in the exhibit is all Calder, like the rest of the show, and contains "Hercules and the Lion," "Tightrope," "Two Acrobats" and other trademark creations wrought from wire.
In this room, visitors are greeted by Calder's first mechanized sculpture, "Goldfish Bowl," originally meant to be operated by a small hand crank when he created it in 1929. Now it stands still.
But as visitors walk through the room and into the galleries beyond, the figures seem to move, taking a new pose when seen from a different perspective. Is one goldfish fleeing from the other? Is Hercules watching?
Some of the wire pieces, with their bold, simple black lines, look like the work of classic cartoonists of the early 20th century, such as New Yorker magazine's Saul Steinberg. That's not a coincidence.
Calder and Steinberg were friends, Rosenthal said, and evidently they did recognize something they liked in each other's work. One of the Calder pieces in the show, "Ashtray Mobile" (1951), is from Steinberg's estate. Like so many of Calder's creations, the work has a visual sense of humor, with two rusty tin cans perched atop a coffee can.
Asked about the playful side of Calder's work, Rosenthal explained, "I like to use the word 'wit,' rather than 'humor.' To me 'wit' suggests looking down upon the scene, and having a take on it, but at some remove."
That amused aloofness is completely consistent with Calder's surrealist beginnings, the curator said.
"He contributes to surrealism," Rosenthal noted, "especially with his notion of creatures, but he is more inclined to approach his creatures with a sense of wit."
On confronting the 1938 sculpture "Apple Monster," a brightly painted black, green, red and blond apparition made of wire and an apple tree branch, one doesn't know whether to run or laugh, or both.
Many of the creatures and Calder's other figures, both in his paintings and his sculptures, tend to be three-legged. That gives them a slightly silly, off-kilter appearance, at least as amusing as it is menacing.
"One of the most important things surrealists talk about is the rejection of the rational, or the everyday culture of the world," Rosenthal said.
The natural opposite of the mundane workaday view is a cosmic perspective. "The underlying sense of form in my work," Calder once said, "is the system of the universe."
"Constellation Mobile" (1943) embraces that core surrealistic idea, with brightly colored wooden spheres arranged as if they were in orbit.
Surrealism dominated Calder's style from the mid-20s into the 1930s, but by the '40s he had gone beyond that, still drawing on the values of his peers and mentors.
"Calder had a longer career after this period," Rosenthal said. "He became well-known, most of all, for his mobiles."
A walk-through of "The Surreal Calder" ends with an imposing mobile looming overhead. Incongruously titled "Untitled (23 Feuilles a L'ecart)," this piece made in 1945 looks like a cascade of black leaves.
By this point, the viewer has had a short course in surrealism, starting with Calder's peers in the movement and progressing through the artist's styles and phases.
To Rosenthal, it is impossible to truly appreciate Calder, as popular as the artist's work is today, without understanding his surrealist beginnings.
"So many of the exhibitions of the last 25 years didn't include Calder in surrealism," Rosenthal said. "To structure the show in this way offers some surprises about him."
You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dtaylor@pressdemocrat.com.
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