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Alexander Calder’s new England house helped birth his genius. A new bio offers a peek inside.

- Jennie Yabroff

In 1938 two friends threw themselves a birthday party in Roxbury, Connecticut.forty, fit, fat, and farty, the cake read, but thanks to a clumsy maid it wound up on the lawn before reaching the guests, who were more interested in liquid refreshments anyway. It was a memorable night, but far more significant was the present one birthday boy gave himself: a studio, on the ruins of a barn, where he would craft monumental sculptures and perfectly balanced mobiles.

Just as the seemingly effortless grace of Alexander Calder’s mobiles belies their precise engineering, underneath the sculptor’s party-loving exterior lay, critic Jed Perl writes in his new biography Calder: The Conquest of Time, a sophisticated artist striving for nothing less than “a new relationship between the imaginary and the real.”

Calder and his wife Louisa bought the sagging farmhouse for $3,500 in 1933, in a part of Connecticut fast becoming a mecca for the avant-garde; neighbors included poet Hart Crane and literary critic Malcolm Cowley, Calder’s cocelebrant. The Calders’ was a place where European émigrés, intellectuals, and bohemians discussed the political situation in Europe, practiced their French, and got very drunk.