When I was growing up, a poster for Calder’s Circus hung in my aunt’s living room. Her home was filled with exquisite things, but to me this picture of a lion with a sunburst of a head, made of yarn and fabric, balanced on a spindly wire body, was by far the most excellent.
I can’t remember a time when Calder’s Circus wasn’t a part of my visual imagination. Yet I’d never encountered it in person until seeing High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100, currently at the Whitney Museum. For anyone who isn’t familiar with it, the circus is a vast array of small kinetic figurines and props that American artist Alexander Calder constructed, mostly with wire, cork, wood, and textiles, between 1926 and 1931. The lion is just the beginning: There’s a ringmaster, sword-swallower, trapeze artist, tightrope walker, belly dancer, elephants, camels, and more. The Whitney, which acquired the complete circus in 1982, is also displaying large figurative wire sculptures, arranged so their shadows cast dramatic silhouettes, as well as the five suitcases the artist used to transport his coterie, and a film of Calder mobilizing his little performers.
Detail of a lion sculpture in High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 at the Whitney Museum (this and all ensuing photos are by Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Calder was inspired to create the circus after attending a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus show at Madison Square Garden in 1925 to illustrate an article for the National Police Gazette (on view here), and spending two weeks studying the performers at the Ringling Bros. training grounds in Sarasota, Florida. He moved to Paris the next year, where he began to fabricate his own circus props and players from wire and wood armatures embellished with fabric. The figures have specific and detailed garments and gestures, and their simple but expressive faces feel idiosyncratic, partly because many are based on actual circus performers: The ringmaster was modeled on Fred Bradna, an Alsatian performer-turned-ringmaster with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, for instance, and the lion tamer who’s almost eaten in the film on view is a version of the famed animal trainer Clyde Beatty.
In Paris, Calder joined avant-garde art circles and held circus performances for artists including Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. He mounted his first exhibition of the circus in 1928, at Weyhe Gallery in New York, but he continued to use the figures to stage performances for decades.
Alexander Calder, “Wire Sculpture by Calder” (1928)
The Whitney’s darkened rooms and hushed atmosphere drive home the fact that these are artifacts in need of care and conservation. Watching Calder animate them in the film, which alternately zooms out to show him manipulating the moving sculptures and zooms in to focus on their world, makes the real things in the vitrines feel frozen in time. The curators do their best to enliven the sculptures by arranging tableaus that we can take as jumping-off points for our own imagined circus dramas rather than static displays. Though it’s no substitute for seeing them in motion, it makes the viewing experience more fantastical.
In a short video from 2015, the Whitney’s conservation team discusses the challenge of imbuing the sculptures with life. It’s heartening to hear museum specialists talk about precious objects with such generosity of spirit. The artist’s legacy and the project’s art-world exhibition and performance history have endowed it with an institutional pedigree. But the film shows another side: the artist at play, projecting himself into his created world. Whether you see it in person or on a poster, Calder’s Circus is for everyone.
Calder’s Circus detail
Calder’s Circus detail
Installation view of Calder’s Circus
Alexander Calder, Calder’s Circus, detail of sword swallower (1926–31); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (© 2025 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photograph Ron Amstutz)
Suitcases from Calder’s Circus (1926–31); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (© 2025 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photograph Ron Amstutz)
High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100 continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan) through March 9, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Jennie Goldstein and Roxanne Smith.
