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Like philanthropist and art collector Jon Shirley, I remember my first encounter with a piece by Alexander Calder. For me, it was The Eagle, arguably the crown jewel of Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park — a work that, poetically, Shirley has had a long relationship with and provided the institution funds to purchase in 2000.

He first encountered The Eagle in the early 1970s in Fort Worth, Texas. I don’t remember the exact date, but I know I was in college at the University of Washington, and had a burgeoning love for contemporary art. To see Calder’s 39-foot-tall metal sculpture “in the wild” was a formative experience that shaped how I viewed and interacted with art moving forward.

Standing on the water side of The Eagle, facing east, one can see the Space Needle — from the right angle, the city icon rises between two of the sculpture’s frontmost appendages, framed near the apex of the two “legs.” Move under the soaring red curves to the opposite side, and a tableau of another Seattle gem — Puget Sound, and beyond that, the picturesque peaks of the Olympic Mountains — backdrops the art. For me, moving around The Eagle, taking it in outside of traditional gallery walls and interacting with it, choosing how I saw the work, was a totally new way to experience art. Not to mention the size, the animalistic form, the vivid color — something about the sculpture tapped into a childlike sense of wonder that would occur again and again as I encountered more of Calder’s work throughout my life.

Jon Shirley — who last year with his wife, Kim Richter Shirley, donated a 48-piece, career-spanning assemblage of Calders estimated to be worth $200 million to the Seattle Art Museum — remembers learning about the artist as a teenager at the Hill School in Pottstown, Penn., where he studied the humanities for three years. The collection is on display through Aug. 4 at SAM, in an exhibition titled Calder: In Motion, the Shirley Family Collection.

“In my junior year, I saw the work of Alexander Calder in a book and was fascinated,” says Shirley, a former president, chief operating officer, and director at Microsoft. “I first saw it in person at the Museum of Modern Art (in New York), and was hooked immediately. At a time when I was just beginning to appreciate the visual arts, Calder’s work stood out as something truly extraordinary, unlike anything I had ever experienced before.”

The year was 1956, and the piece that caught Shirley’s eye was Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939), a site-specific mobile commissioned to hang at the top of a stairwell in the museum. One of Calder’s earliest suspended sculptures, the work is made with painted steel wire and aluminum sheets. It suggests the languid underwater movement of sea life, and casts an almost ghostly shadow onto the surrounding walls. Less than 20 years before Shirley first saw Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, as Calder started to gain recognition for his work, many people had a similar reaction — the artist’s output was simply unlike anything they had ever seen before.

“Calder is one of the most important American artists of the 20th century,” says José Carlos Diaz, Seattle Art Museum’s Susan Brotman Deputy Director for Art. “What makes his work so transformative is the way he approached sculpture, taking it from three-dimensional to four-dimensional, making work that was no longer immobile, and experimenting with materiality — transitioning into wire, and metal, and then eventually kinetic art. This would have been quite shocking at the time.”

“Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) was just around the corner,” Shirley writes about that fateful MoMA visit in a personal essay for the catalog that accompanies the Calder in Motion exhibition. “(A)nd while I also fell in love with that painting, somehow, I knew that it would never be possible for me to collect the works of Van Gogh. But perhaps it might be possible to collect Calder’s works?”

A simple thought that doubled as a sign of Shirley’s growing ambition — most teenagers want cars, stereo systems, designer clothes (Shirley would go on to race and collect vintage cars later in life), but for the 18-year-old high school senior, Calder unlocked a deep appreciation for modern art, sparking an emotional connection that would lead him to accrue (along with his late first wife, Mary, and then, Kim Richter Shirley, whom he met as a fellow trustee of the Seattle Art Museum) one of the most important private holdings of Calder’s art in the world.

So, what is it about Calder? Born in Lawton, Penn., in 1898, Calder grew up in a creative household. Both of his parents were artists: his mother, Nanette, was a painter; his father, A. Stirling Calder, was a National Academician and a sculptor. The couple immersed their children in a world full of art, and time spent in the studio was as common as playing with toys. In his teenage years, Calder showed a penchant for the mechanical, and he studied engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. In 1921, he enrolled in a public night school in New York, where a charcoal drawing class ignited in him an even deeper enthusiasm for art.

In 1922, Calder had a brief brush with the Northwest. That summer, he worked on a freighter traveling through the Panama Canal to California, and in the fall, he took a job in a logging camp in Aberdeen, Wash. The scenic location sparked his creativity, and he wrote to his mother requesting she send his painting supplies. A year later, Calder returned East, enrolling in New York’s School of the Arts Students League.

The next decade and a half would prove pivotal to Calder’s career. The artist traveled between New York and Paris (and elsewhere around Europe), living in both cities for a spell, and making friends with the likes of Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. In Paris, in 1927, Calder started working on Cirque Calder — a menagerie of miniatures made from articulated wire, bits of wood, leather, spools, and corks — a project that shot him to fame in the avant-garde set. The multi-act shows featured characters including acrobats, tumblers, a lion tamer, and a sword swallower, and their performances were different every time: Sometimes an acrobat would fall, sometimes the animals wouldn’t make it through a hoop jump. This thrilling uncertainly mimicked the anticipatory nature of the real thing, shrunken down to tabletop size.

“Cirque Calder truly was performance art 40 years before we had a name for it,” Diaz says. “He was so curious and daring — you can see his ambitious nature reflected in this particular piece.”

From his circus characters, Calder worked through mediums, first experimenting with bent-wire sculptures, then wood carvings, and eventually sheet metal. Despite the evolution of his craft, there always remained a hint of the playful, a nod to the absurd. And that’s partly where the magic of Calder lies. He once said, “That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs,” a declaration that invites viewers to take from the work — whether mobiles, stabiles (a stationary abstract sculpture, such as The Eagle), kinetic pieces, or jewelry — whatever comes from their experience with it.

“I think what resonates about Calder’s work now is the resourcefulness and creativity of his materiality,” Diaz says. “Here’s an artist who’s using wire — this mundane, cheap material. It would have been so provocative at the time. He did this in different works from different decades. Fish, for example (a 1942, found-object mobile that is part of the Shirley collection) has broken mirrors and porcelain bits. It was made during World War II, a time when materials were scarce.”

Calder would become most famous for his mobiles and stabiles, which, as seen with Fish, exude midcentury American values: strength, ingenuity, industriousness, and experimentalism in mechanics. The delicate, eye-catching mobiles (mesmerizing in motion, their connective wires branching, plantlike to link series of shapes) and heavier, grounding stabiles hint at forms found in nature such as flowers, animals, mountains, and even the occasional human, but they remain abstract enough to allow anyone’s imagination to inform the viewing experience.

A little more than 30 years after seeing Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, Shirley decided he was ready to purchase his first Calder. While on a business trip in New York in 1988, he visited Pace Gallery, which handled the late artist’s estate. “I had no introduction,” Shirley remembers. “I just walked in and asked if they had any Calders for sale. I must have looked like a real buyer as they readily agreed to show me what they had, and I picked Squarish from four offerings. I still have it, and it is in the exhibition. When it is at home, it hangs in our family room, where we watch TV and have dinner. So, I must say, I miss it.”

Shirley first built the collection with his late wife, Mary, initially focusing on pieces they liked, but later, taking a more intentional approach. Two of their early acquisitions, Gamma and Bougainvillier (a mobile and stabile, respectively, from 1947) were exceptional examples of Calder’s skill. “We realized that we now owned two very special works,” Shirley recalls. “(So), we started to focus our collecting on obtaining great works when possible. In 1998, there was the amazing retrospective of his work at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for the first time, we realized the breadth and depth of (Calder’s) work. This inspired us to build a collection that had breadth, which meant finding very early works, and then all the in-between works right up until his very last works. At some point, we realized we were putting together a collection that could go in a museum.”

As longtime Seattle residents, and fervent supporters of SAM, there was no question where the collection would end up. In an effort to make Calder’s work as accessible as possible, and hopefully inspire a new generation of creatives, the Shirleys included a $10 million endowment in their gift, which will be dedicated to additional exhibitions, education, and public programming. After Calder in Motion closes, the museum plans to continue its multiyear programming with the announcement of an exhibition that features Calder’s works in dialogue with a solo contemporary artist.

“We hope to bring more young audiences in,” Diaz says, noting that the gift allows the museum to host student visits, increasing exposure and learning opportunities. “We will also be holding free events and family days. We’re able to do this because of the extra resources that come with this gift.”

After decades of living with the collection, Shirley admits that his home feels a bit empty now, but he’s happy to share the trove of work with the city he loves. Decades from now, he hopes that others will continue to appreciate Calder’s work.

“Calder invented an entirely new way to make sculpture,” Shirley adds. “His works of 70 years ago look like they were made yesterday. Not many artists have created a whole new art form, and have created works that seem timeless. To my mind, he is the most accessible artist ever.”

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Calder: In Motion, The Shirley Family Collection
Seattle Museum of Art
Museum admission $30 (non-member)