Alexander Calder
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40 free Alexander Calder trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Alexander Calder changed what sculpture could be. Before him, statues stood still on a pedestal; after him, a sculpture could hang from the ceiling and drift, or arch over a city plaza so that people walk underneath it. His work gave art two new words, mobile and stabile, and it is enjoyed by children and critics alike. This quiz follows him from a childhood among artists to a career that took in a hand-operated miniature circus, monumental steel landmarks on both sides of the Atlantic, stage sets, a racing car and even a jetliner. You will meet the painters and writers around him, the family of sculptors he came from, and the stories behind his best-known public works. The questions range from easy to challenging, so they suit a middle school art class as well as museum regulars. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the set can be played online or printed for the classroom.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which carmaker's Art Car series began in 1975 when Alexander Calder painted a racer bound for Le Mans?
BMW
BMW got its first Art Car when Calder painted a 3.0 CSL for his friend, the French racing driver Hervé Poulain. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein later painted cars for the same series.
Q 02Before turning to art, Alexander Calder earned a 1919 degree in which subject at a New Jersey college?
Mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering was his choice because his artist parents did not want him to follow them into art. He later admitted he was not sure what the term meant when he signed up.
Q 03Finding motors monotonous, Alexander Calder made hanging mobiles that are moved by what instead?
Air currents
Air currents, or a light touch, set his hanging sculptures turning from about 1932. With no motor fixing the pattern, the movement became far less predictable.
Q 04What flows through the fountain Alexander Calder built for Spain's pavilion at the 1937 world's fair?
Mercury
Mercury runs through it in honor of Almadén, a Spanish mining region that had been besieged by Franco's troops. The fountain now sits behind glass in Barcelona because the vapor is toxic.
Q 05Alexander Calder's 25-foot stabile Bent Propeller stood for three decades outside which New York landmark?
World Trade Center
World Trade Center towers rose beside it until September 11, 2001, when the sculpture was crushed under falling rubble. Only about 40 percent of it was ever recovered.
Q 06Which president gave Alexander Calder a posthumous Medal of Freedom at a ceremony his family boycotted?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford gave the award ten days before leaving office, two months after the sculptor died. The family stayed away to press for an amnesty for wartime draft resisters.
Q 07The stabile trophy Alexander Calder designed for the National Magazine Awards is shaped like which animal?
An elephant
An elephant gives the award its nickname, the Ellie. Calder's earliest known sculpture, modeled in clay when he was a small boy, was the same animal.
Q 08Which bird names the 53-foot Alexander Calder stabile unveiled in Chicago's Federal Plaza in 1974?
Flamingo
Flamingo was the first artwork commissioned under the federal Percent for Art program. Chicago declared its unveiling day Alexander Calder Day and marked it with a circus parade.
Q 09Which French artist coined the name mobiles in 1931 for Alexander Calder's first motor-driven sculptures?
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp chose the word as a French pun, since it can mean both something that moves and a motive. He later helped organize a 1943 New York retrospective of the sculptures.
Q 10In which city, home since 2025 to the museum Calder Gardens, was Alexander Calder born in 1898?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is also where his grandfather and father, both sculptors named Alexander, made their best-known public works. Art by all three generations lines one of its parkways.
Q 11Alexander Calder's grandfather sculpted the 37-foot statue of which colonial founder atop a city hall?
William Penn
William Penn's statue was cast in 14 sections by Alexander Milne Calder. For decades an unwritten agreement kept every building in the city below the brim of its hat.
Q 12Which material did Alexander Calder bend into portraits and animals, a technique called drawing in space?
Wire
Wire let him trace a whole figure with a single line. Calder is credited with inventing this kind of sculpture while living in France in the 1920s.
Q 13Which color is so closely tied to Alexander Calder's giant steel stabiles that a shade of it carries his name?
Red
Red in a bright vermilion shade, now nicknamed after Calder, covers many of his outdoor giants. He chose it for one Illinois plaza so the steel would stand out against dark office towers.
Q 21In which state did Alexander Calder and his wife buy the Roxbury farmhouse where they raised two daughters?
Connecticut
Connecticut became home in 1933 after his years in France, and he made his first outdoor sculptures there a year later. He later kept a second studio in the French village of Saché.
Q 22For which Spanish painter and lifelong friend did Alexander Calder set a shard of porcelain in a brass ring?
Joan Miró
Joan Miró was one of the avant-garde artists Calder befriended in France. The fountain Calder built for the 1937 world's fair is now displayed at the Barcelona foundation named after his friend.
Q 23Alexander Calder's pen-and-ink drawings of animals illustrated a 1931 edition of which classic book?
Aesop's Fables
Q 14Alexander Calder showed in a 1955 exhibition at Galerie Denise René, a landmark for which branch of modern art?
Kinetic art
Kinetic art is art in which real motion is part of the work, and Calder's mobiles are among its best-known examples. The same show included the motor-driven machines of Jean Tinguely.
Q 15Which New York institution ran a public fundraising drive in 1982 to keep Alexander Calder's miniature circus?
Whitney Museum
Whitney Museum supporters raised more than a million dollars in about two weeks, because Calder's estate had to sell the circus to settle taxes. The museum also holds the largest body of his work.
Q 16Alexander Calder's largest sculpture, an 85-foot steel giant, stands beside a soccer stadium in which capital?
Mexico City
Mexico City received it for the 1968 Olympics, one of 19 artworks along a Route of Friendship. It rises beside the Estadio Azteca, where fans have reportedly mistaken it for a public urinal.
Q 17Alexander Calder designed poster prints protesting which war?
Vietnam War
Vietnam War opposition outlived him: in 1977 his family skipped a White House ceremony held in his honor to call for an amnesty for draft resisters.
Q 18By which nickname, also used by the grandson who founded the Calder Foundation, was Alexander Calder known?
Sandy
Sandy was what classmates called him, and his college yearbook praised his constant mischievous grin. His grandson Alexander Rower, who set up the foundation in 1987, goes by the same name.
Q 19A 1930 visit to which Dutch painter's studio shocked Alexander Calder into making fully abstract art?
Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian had arranged his studio like one large artwork, and it impressed Calder so much that he gave up figures for pure shapes. Within a year he was making abstract sculptures that moved.
Q 20Which Michigan city has an Alexander Calder stabile in its official logo, on a plaza locals named for him?
Grand Rapids
Grand Rapids received the first public artwork funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1969. Its French title, La Grande Vitesse, means the great swiftness, a play on the city's name.
Aesop's Fables came out the same year Calder's sculpture turned abstract. His prints soon followed, with thin lines tracing geometric shapes in place of figures.
Q 24A wartime shortage of which metal led Alexander Calder to carve the wooden sculptures called constellations?
Aluminum
Aluminum was scarce during World War II, so Calder returned to carving wood. The result was a new, open form of sculpture, and it led to the wall-mounted towers he devised in 1951.
Q 25Which Dallas-based airline hired Alexander Calder in the 1970s to paint a full-size jet as a flying canvas?
Braniff
Braniff got its jet after Calder first turned down the adman behind the idea, thinking he was being asked to paint a toy. Told it was a real airliner he agreed, and a second jet followed for the US Bicentennial.
Q 26Alexander Calder's 1958 standing mobile Spirale was made for the headquarters of which United Nations agency?
UNESCO
UNESCO received a mobile built on both sides of the Atlantic: the steel base was made in France by the designer Jean Prouvé, and the moving top in the United States.
Q 27Alexander Calder's miniature circus crossed the Atlantic and later reached a museum packed inside five what?
Suitcases
Suitcases were enough because most of the performers stand only about six inches tall. Calder worked them by hand while kneeling on the floor, as an assistant played records for the music.
Q 28Which artist named Alexander Calder's motionless abstract sculptures stabiles, to set them apart from mobiles?
Jean Arp
Jean Arp coined the word a year after another artist friend had named the mobiles. Calder's stabiles later grew into steel giants several stories tall.
Q 29Which collector wore one Alexander Calder earring and one by Yves Tanguy to open her New York gallery in 1942?
Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim mismatched the earrings to show equal loyalty to abstract art and Surrealism, which hung in separate rooms. She also commissioned a silver headboard from Calder, hung with dangling fish.
Q 30Which French philosopher wrote the catalogue essay for Alexander Calder's 1946 show at Galerie Louis Carré?
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre's essay helped the show make a huge impact in postwar France. Calder had taken several works apart and sent them by mail, despite strict limits on parcel size.