“The idea is that you get lost, or at least you get disoriented, in a really interesting way,” says Juana Berrío, the director of programs for Calder Gardens, who guides me, with William McDowell, the project manager, through the grounds. “It is a place where the invitation is to go inwards.” She is planning “silent days” and visits from shamanic figures to attract a whole new demographic to Calder’s work.
Calder may be a native son for the city (he was born there in 1898), but the genesis of this institution was a halting process, spurred on by a string of determined men. More than three decades ago, there had been a failed effort to create a Calder museum; plans were even commissioned from architect Tadao Ando before running aground for various reasons. However, a Philadelphia philanthropist named H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest was unwilling to let the idea go, and all but ordered another Philadelphia philanthropist, Joseph Neubauer, to carry it through.
STUDIO EN SITU
Alexander Calder in his Connecticut studio in 1964.
Photographed by Andreas Feininger. © Courtesy of The Andreas Feininger Estate and Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NYC. Saint Louis Art Museum/Gift of the Feininger Family. Getty Images.
“The first thing you have to know about me is I’m an immigrant,” says Neubauer, simultaneously gruff and warm, when I speak to him. (He means it in the Hamilton sense: He gets the job done. Neubauer’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and he emigrated to the US as a teen.) He had been instrumental in moving the Barnes Foundation from outside Philadelphia into the center of the city—a controversial migration of the famous art collection that greatly expanded its visitorship—and so he was charged by Lenfest with giving Calder an appropriate celebration in the city of his birth. “He said, ‘Joe, you ought to do it. You’ve got to make sure that Sandy commits.’ ”
“Sandy” is Sandy Rower, the grandson of Alexander Calder and the president of the Calder Foundation. “I got a call from a guy named Joe Neubauer, who I’d never met before, proposing to do a museum in Calder’s hometown,” he says. But Rower, who describes himself to me as “more of a futurist,” wasn’t all that interested in establishing a museum to honor his grandfather: “Just kind of hermetically sealing some Calder in the space for people to read wall labels is not what we want to do,” he tells me over the phone. “Sandy and I were arm-wrestling for a bit,” says Neubauer.
