Born in 1898 to parents who were both artists - his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter, Calder became the fourth generation to take up sculpting. His first known art tool was a pair of pliers and from the age of eight Calder was given his own workshop within the family home.
Calder's interest initially led not to art, but to Mechanical Engineering and Applied Kinetics, which he studied at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey from 1915-1919. However, after stints in various jobs from a mechanic position on a ship to a timekeeper at a logging camp, the environment around him - from the sea to mountains, inspired Calder to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.
There, in 1923, he enrolled at the Art Students League. Alongside his studies, he worked as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette which sent him to sketch circus scenes for two weeks in 1925. The circus, for Calder, came to be an unending source of interest - one that lasted a lifetime, beginning here with his inaugural assemblage Cirque Calder, a unique art piece made up of miniature performers that were designed to be manipulated manually.
In 1928 Calder was given his first solo gallery show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York, followed soon after by many others from Paris to Berlin. Upon visiting the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930, he was inspired by a wall of coloured cardboard rectangles that Mondrian would use by shifting shapes into different positions for his own compositional ideas. Calder recalled later that this visit made way for an irrevocable change of direction in his work; a 'shock', as Calder put it, into total abstraction, and further, abstract art that moved.
Numerous retrospectives of his work were held during his lifetime; the first was at the George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfields, Massachusetts, 1938, and in 1943 a second major retrospective was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this time too, Marcel Duchamp organised a show of Calder's work at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, for which Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his famous essay on the artist's work in 1946. A retrospective of his work opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964 and at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris in 1965.
Calder's Universe, his final retrospective, was held in 1976 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It was the last show Calder would attend before his death a few weeks later that November.