Featured Author Event: Jed Perl Tonight in NYC

Join The Art Students League of New York for a Gallery Lecture by renowned art critic and Knopf author Jed Perl, as he discusses his biography CALDER: The Conquest of Time(Knopf). Tonight, February 13, from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, Jed will show why Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was–and remains–a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal.  A wine, cheese and book-signing reception will follow the lecture.  

Only now, forty years after the artist’s death, is the full story of Calder’s life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to private letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Calder’s life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York’s Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder’s lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson.

Penguin Random House author Joshua Cohen ( Book of Numbers and Moving Kings) praises CALDER: “Not all brilliant studies are definitive, and not all definitive studies are brilliant: Jed Perl’s Calder succeeds at being both. It’s a masterwork account of the life of one of America’s greatest artists that’s also an account of America coming into its own. Passionate, learned, playful and ranging, it’s as solidly-grounded as a stabile, but like a mobile it appears to defy gravity—and float.”

Jed Perl is a regular contributor to The New York Times Review of Books. He was the art critic for The New Republicfor twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, and New Art City, which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Book of the Year.