High wire act

‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation that turned PR and branding into art forms, wanted homegrown creative heroes. In design there were Charles Eames and George Nelson with their homey hopsack suits and wash’n’wear shirts, their sensible Wasp homilies: a counterattack against imported — and often baffling — exotics from the Bauhaus.

It was the same in fine art. Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) was a roughneck from cowboy country in Wyoming who became a darling of the media, not least because of his readily reportable deplorable behaviour. And then there was Alexander Calder, not a hard-scrabble survivor at all, but born in Philadelphia to a family of artists.

True, they were doggedly traditional artists with a record of humdrum paintings and lumpen sculpture, but Calder’s parents had, importantly, spent time in Paris. Referring to his life in art, Calder neatly said: ‘I wasn’t brought up, I was framed.’