NEW FOUNDATIONS

Calder Gardens in Philadelphia pays ethereal tribute to a legend of American art.

- By Chloe Schama. Photographed by Buck Ellison.

COLOR AND LIGHT Two views inside Calder Gardens, which will exhibit a rotating set of works including, ON THIS PAGE, Myxomatose, 1953; Jerusalem Stabile II, 1976; The Green Stripe. 1963; and Untitled, c. 1952. OPPOSITE: 3 Segments, 1973.

If you stand in a certain spot near the Philadelphia Museum of Art and look down the length of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, an artistic lineage unfolds: three works by three generations of Calders.

In the distance, the 37-foot-tall bronze statue of William Penn by Alexander Milne Calder (the 20th-century sculptor’s grandfather, who lived in the city for 55 years) looms atop the elaborate architectural confection of City Hall.

Midway, his son, Alexander Stirling Calder, posed three reclining Art Deco figures in a fountain, representing the three main waterways of the city. (When the fountain opened during a heat wave in 1924, thousands of people danced the tango in the streets to celebrate it.) And then, inside the museum hangs a mobile by the most famous Calder of all, Alexander Calder, its white disks floating—at once ethereal and pronounced—against the sandy-colored stone columns of the Great Stair Hall. (The father, the son, and the “unholy ghost,” Alexander Calder reportedly liked to joke of the familial arrangement.) Notoriously reluctant to participate in the naming conventions required by collectors and curators, he called this mobile Ghost.