Calder Gardens Museum Grand Opening
Review by Ed Voves
Original Photography by Anne Lloyd
The Benjamin Franklin Parkway is a Parisian-style boulevard in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love. It extends from Philadelphia City Hall to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On Sunday, September 21, 2025, a brand new cultural institution opened its doors, adding to the Parkway's reputation as Philly's "museum mile."
Calder Gardens, dedicated to the art of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), has been on the "drawing board" of the art establishment and city planners of Philadelphia for over twenty-years. I am delighted to say that the long wait has certainly been worth it.
However, if you drive down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway or walk along, past the Barnes Foundation or one of the other museums flanking the Parkway, you may be forgiven if you comment, "I see gardens, but where's the museum?"
The actual Calder museum building is largely a subterranean structure. According to Swiss architect, Jacques Herzog, several early designs were considered and rejected because of conflict with the special ambiance of the Parkway. Instead, Herzog noted, the decision was made to proceed with a "more horizontal, nonlinear layout—a sequence of unexpected spaces that unfold and reveal themselves as visitors move through the building rather than a singular form."
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Iwan Baan, Photo (2025)
In non-architectural parlance, this means designing literally "ground-level" galleries for Calder's art, with selected masterpieces on view in the street-level landscape gardens above.
The development fact sheet is impressive, even before considering the Calder artworks. The museum and gardens "footprint" is a 1.8 acre site, with an 18,000 square ft. building, surrounded by gardens with 250 varieties of plants and flowers. Part of the building facade was constructed with blackened wood to evoke the barns of Calder's rural New England residence. The interior of the museum exudes 1950's mid-century modernism, in keeping with the cultural tempo of Calder's heyday.
Quality of this sort does not come without a hefty price tag. The Calder Gardens project expenditure totaled $90 million. But the supervising group, led by Alexander L.R. Rower of the Calder Foundation, ensured that these funds were money well-spent. Thom Collins, the head of the neighboring Barnes foundation, served on this committee, and he and the Barnes administrative staff will be responsible for the administration and operations of the new museum.
Portraits of Jacques Herzog, lead architect of the Calder Gardens Museum (photo by Gina Folly) and Piet
Oudolf, designer of the landscape gardens of Calder Gardens (photo by Tony Spencer)
Herzog and his colleagues at the Herzog-de Meuron firm were chosen for the challenging mission of designing Calder Gardens. They collaborated with Piet Oudolf, a Dutch garden planner who had gained world-wide renown for the gardens he designed for New York City's High Line urban park. Oudolf was tasked with "sculpting" a landscape to fit the oddly-configured piece of unused ground designated for the new museum in Philly.
To raise the bar even higher, the completed Calder Gardens was conceived as a place for reflection and inspiration, rather than merely galleries for displaying art.
To put such design requirements into practice - above and below ground - meant "squaring the circle." That is just what the Herzog-Oudolf team did.
Piet Oudolf's gardens have yet to fully mature, but the autumnal flowers currently on view are a dazzling sight. Overall, Oudolf's configurations of gardens and pathways fit perfectly into the "city beautiful" layout of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, as planned in the early years of the 20th century. Equally important, the gardens act as a transit way or portal into the sanctuary/museum of Calder Gardens.
Entering the Calder Gardens galleries is a process, an act of descending into an "otherworld" of sensory experience. Several monumental works, called stabiles, are positioned just beyond the doors and windows of the Calder Garden galleries. These convey an ethereal presence with looming shadows or mirror-like reflections.
Inside, the overhead lighting of the galleries is kept to a manageable minimum. This heightens the effect of beams of natural illumination which flow into the interior at strategic points.
The interior of the Calder Gardens impressed me as a "dreamtime" environment. Stark delineation of Calder's art at some points, deep-shaded pools of space where the jutting armature of stabile or the hovering form of a mobile suddenly emerge, commanding our attention.
This "dreamtime" sensation did not arise by accident. The artworks on display do not have any identifying caption information. The intention of the Calder Gardens curators is to promote a sense of communion between the viewer and the Calder work of art being viewed.
Nor does Calder Gardens have a permanent collection of its own. Every work of art is on loan, mostly from the Calder Foundation in New York City which oversees Calder's legacy. In this premier display of 31 Calder works, MOMA and the Whitney Museum have made generous loans - also without credits.
What you see today, you may not see in a few months. New examples of Calder's incredible creative achievement will be rotated-in to take the place of the mobiles and stabiles, the curious - and often humorous - hybrid sculptures and selected paintings and sketches by Calder chosen for the opening of Calder Gardens.
Alexander Calder would almost certainly have approved of this plan to emphasize the spiritual side of art over factual details. In one of his most notable observations on art, Calder joined ranks with Matisse who had famously decreed that "truth is not exactitude." Calder's comment - which dates to 1943 - is worth quoting here, as it validates the methodology of the Calder Gardens curators.
To achieve creative success, "approximation is necessary," Calder wrote, "for one cannot hope to be absolute in his precision. He cannot see, or even conceive of a thing from all possible points of view, simultaneously. While he perfects the front, the side, or rear may be weak; then while he strengthens the other facade he may be weakening that originally the best. There is no end to this. To finish the work, he must approximate."
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At the risk of immediately contradicting myself, I would recommend completing a visit to Calder Gardens with a walking tour of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Calder artworks to be found there. This may seem like the very art/historical approach which the museum philosophy rejects. But the walk will be good exercise, physical and intellectual.
Calder was a "native son" of Philadelphia, but he actually lived in the city only during his childhood years. Yet Philadelphia is indeed a great site for a Calder museum. The lives and careers of Calder's grandfather (Alexander Milne Calder) and father (Alexander Stirling Calder) are an integral part of the city's cultural legacy. And Calder himself, as we will briefly discuss, made his own mark in the city of his birth.
The Calder Gardens has a small display of art by grandfather and father which certainly sets the stage for appreciating the third generation Calder's works on view in the main galleries.
However, the best way to view the sculptures of Calder's grandfather and father is to step outside Calder Gardens and have a look for yourself. At one end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, you will see the monumental bronze figure of William Penn, created by the Scottish-born Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923). Standing 37 feet tall and weighing 53,000 pounds, it was cast in 14 pieces and erected on top of Philadelphia City Hall in 1894.
Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945) designed the art deco Swan Fountain in Logan Square, within easy eyesight of Calder Gardens (below). Enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of Art at the age of fifteen, Alexander Stirling was one of the major public art sculptors throughout the U.S. Classical art still held sway during Alexander Stirling's day, but his son would not follow in his footsteps.
Alexander Calder began creating "mobiles" in the 1930's while he was living in France. Calder was inspired by the abstract art of of his close friend Joan Miro, and by that of Piet Mondrian. The name "mobile" was suggested to Calder by Marcel Duchamp. Initially, some of Calder's mobiles were power by small motors. Later, after dedicated study and experimentation, he perfected the "floating" mobiles whose movements are the driven by the slightest of air currents.
After returning to the U.S., Calder established his studio and production facility in Roxbury, Connecticut. But it was in Philadelphia, that he scored the breakout success of his career.
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The Calder mobile now hanging over the Great Hall of the PMA is a later creation, entitled Ghost. It was made in 1964, perhaps ironically, to hang in the Guggenheim Museum for a special exhibition. Calder mobiles really don't need motors; they find ways of moving around all their own!
Calder's 1949 triumph set him on a course of international success that was still going strong at the time of his death in November 1976. He was working on a grand mobile for the new East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington D.C., set to open in 1978. The mobile was completed by Paul Matisse, grandson of the painter, who had joined the design team at Calder's request to help address problems due to the size and weight of the huge mobile. The solution was to use aluminum rather than steel.
Thus, we can consider Calder as a living example of his working creed of approximation: always searching, experimenting, testing to create mobiles which moved gracefully in the gentle air currents and in the hearts and minds of those watching from below.
When you raise your head and focus your eyes on a Calder masterpiece like the mobile, Three Segments, you are in the presence of undoubted genius.
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Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved
Original photography, copyright of Anne Lloyd
Introductory Image: Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Alexander Calder’s Tripes, 1974. (descriptive information and dimensions below).
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Exterior view of the
Calder Gardens Museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, showing
the Calder Gardens logo.
Iwan Baan, Photo (2025) Evening view of the Calder Gardens Museum. © 2025 Calder Foundation/Artists Rights Society, NY.
Portrait photos
(from left) of Jacques Herzog, lead architect of the Calder Gardens Museum (© 2025 Gina Folly) and Piet
Oudolf, designer of the landscape gardens of Calder Gardens (© Tony Spencer)
Iwan Baan, Photo (2025) Aerial view of the Calder Gardens Museum.© 2025 Calder Foundation/Artists Rights Society, NY.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Tripes,1974. Monumental Sculpture, Stabile. Sheet metal, bolts and paint: 12’ x 11’ x 9’10”. Calder Foundation, New York.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Knobs, 1976.
Monumental Sculpture, Stabile. Sheet metal, bolts and paint:11’ 9” x 5’5 ¾” x
8’1 ½”. Calder Foundation, New York.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Eucalyptus,
1940. Hanging Mobile. Sheet metal, wire and paint: 94 1/2” x 61”. Calder
Foundation, New York, gift of Andrea Davidson, Shawn Davidson, Alexander S.C.
Rower & Holton Rower, 2010.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the Calder Gardens Museum, showing Alexander Calder’s Black Widow Mobile (1948) Sheet metal, wire and paint: 128” x 99”. (Instituto de Arquitetos do Brazil; and Black Widow Stabile (1959) Sheet metal, bolts and paint: 92" x 171” x 89”. MOMA collection.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Sword Plant,
1947. Standing Mobile. Sheet metal, rod, wire and paint: 38 1/2” x 31” x 28
1/2”. Calder Foundation, New York.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Thirty-two Discs,
1951. Standing Mobile. Sheet metal, rod, wire and paint: 90” x 35" x 31”.
Calder Foundation, New York.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the
Calder Gardens Museum, ink on paper drawings from the 1930’s and an oil on
canvas painting, Untitled, dating to 1946.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Jerusalem Stabile
II,1976. Monumental Sculpture, Stabile. Sheet metal, bolts and paint: 11’9”
x 24’ x 11’11”. Calder Foundation, New York. Gift of the Philip and Muriel
Berman Foundation, 2005.
Anne Lloyd, Photos (2025) Comparative photos of
Alexander Milne Calder’s bronze model, William Penn, 1888: 28 x 9 /1/4 x
14 ¾ in., collection of the Calder Foundation, and the monumental version of
William Penn (Bronze: 36 feet tall & cast, 1893) placed on top of
Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1894.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Alexander Stirling Calder’s Swan Fountain, 1926.
Herbert Gehr, Photo (1949) Alexander Calder installing his International Mobile at the Third International Exhibition of Sculpture, Philadelphia Museum of Art, May 14, 1949. © Life Magazine. © 2025 Calder Foundation/Artists Rights Society, NY.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2023) Ghost, 1964. Hanging Mobile. Painted sheet metal and metal rods: 34' in length. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Three Segments,
1973. Hanging Mobile, Monumental Sculpture. Sheet metal, rod, wire and paint: 79”
x 16’18”. Calder Foundation, New York.
