Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens

“A master of form, fun, lightness, and surprise,” Alexander Calder is “the one 20th-century artist whom probably no one has ever disliked,” said in The Wall Street Journal . With the opening in September of Calder Gardens in Philadelphia, the American titan of kinetic art (1898–1976) joins the select group of artists worldwide who have museums all their own. Except that in this case, “‘museum’ is the wrong word,” because Calder Gardens is so unique. On an “eccentric spit of land” tucked amid the city’s extensive museum row, the building is mostly hidden below a new public garden, and visitors experience the complex as a “splendid” parade of big and small light-filled spaces that create their own sense of Calder-like movement. With his grandfather’s statue of William Penn in view atop C