The Miniature Worlds of Mystical Formalism

Throughout the twentieth century, prominent critics drew on formalist discourses in order to frame compelling narratives on the complex relations between embodiment, gender, metaphysics, and psychoanalytic theories in modernist aesthetics. A particularly suggestive example can be found in the critic and curator James Johnson Sweeney’s interactions with the sculptor Alexander Calder. Sweeney often characterized Calder’s art as the product of a visionary child who engaged in the paradox of Serious play. As he formulated fantastic, alternative worlds populated by miniature and gigantic creatures. In so doing, Sweeney promoted a visionary formalist approach that drew on Calder’s art to present a larger, mystical vision of the expansive possibilities contained within the microcosmic world of the modern museum