These qualities had come out very strongly in the Barnum cir- cus which Calder had reported on for the New York Police Gazette, and Paris in the late 1920’s was of course the last sanctuary of the un-amplified, more than life-size stage personality. In someone like Josephine Baker, who in her prime was rarely seen on film, and still less on television, the magic of direct contact was paramount. Calder got on this straightaway, and when he began to make wire portrait-sculptures, Miss Baker was one of his first subjects.

As likenesses, these portraits are to the 1920’s what Ingres’s drawings of well-heeled visitors were to the Rome of a century earlier: portraits, that is to say, in which the nature of the age is consummately brought out. Drawn in the air, and not on the flat, they have a hallucinatory vividness. Nor does that vividness depend on a safe choice of sitters: Fernand Léger, Helen Wills, Calvin Coolidge, Carl Zigrosser, and Kiki de Montparnasse have no common denominator. Set in a draught, the portraits generate a slight persistent vibration which suggests to us, against all logic, that they are actually alive: human beings fleshless and weightless but physically present.

Calder had looked at his sitters with an engineer’s eye and had taken out everything but what, finally, made them what they were. And he did it with other subjects also: Romulus and Remus were suckled for instance by an animal ten feet in length and remarkably benign for a she-wolf.

But the real success of Calder’s first years in Paris was the miniature circus. Cocteau, Léger, Mondrian, Kiesler, Varèse, Le Corbusier, and Van Doesburg were among the many people who first got to know Calder as the inventor and manipulator of this complex, elaborate, astutely economical combine-toy. As with the wire portraits, Calder had observed and analyzed the movements of everyone with the circus until he could reproduce them with everything nonessential pared away.

Opportunities for seeing the complete circus are now very rare, and its components are kept in four locked suitcases in Saché, but enough rogue animals exist on their own account for us to be able to judge that the point of the whole lay not merely in its mechanical ingenuity but in the element of individual life which Calder gave to every participant. (Very telling, also, is the tenderness with which he will fish among the débris of the studio and come up with a vagrant kangaroo, lamed in its forepaws, or a rusted equilibrist.)