The Calder Foundation owns more than 1,300 artworks by Alexander Calder—quite a few of them worth millions—and a trove of some 130,000 documents from his archives. But the Manhattan-based organization’s greatest asset may be its president, Alexander S.C. Rower, the artist’s grandson and namesake, who has spent nearly 40 years promoting the work of the great 20th-century modernist. Rower can recite the history of practically any Calder piece, from delicate wire earrings to monumental sculptures— the result of a childhood spent tinkering in his grandfather’s studios in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Saché, France. When Calder died, in 1976, the then-13-year-old Rower found himself answering questions from dealers, collectors, and curators.
Today he supervises a team of 14 employees, including five full-time archivists. In addition to helping museums mount exhibitions of Calder’s…
