Developing the Sculpture
In June, 1913, Calder returned to San Francisco to stay till the Exposition was well started. On the grounds he established a huge workshop. Then he began the practical developing of the designs, a great mass, which had already been carefully sifted. Hitherto, in American expositions the work had been done, for the most part, in New York, and sent to its destination by freight, a method costly in itself and all the more costly on account of the inevitable breakage. San Francisco, by being so far from New York, would have been a particularly expensive destination. From every point of view it seemed imperative that the work should be done here.
In a few weeks that shop was a hive of industry, with sculptors, students of sculpture front the art schools, pointers, and a multitude of other white-clad workers bending all their energies toward the completion on time of their colossal task. A few of the sculptors and artisans Calder had brought from New York. But most of the workers he secured in San Francisco, chiefly from the foreign population, some of them able to speak little or no English.
The modeling of the replicas of well-known art works were, almost without exception, made in clay. Most of the original work was directly modelled in plaster-staff used so successfully throughout the Exposition. For the enlarging of single pieces and groups the pointing machine of Robert Paine was chosen by Calder. It was interesting to see it at work, under the guidance of careful and patient operators, tracing mechanically the outlines and reproducing them on a magnified scale. For the finishing of the friezes the skill of the artist was needed, and there Calder found able assistants in the two young sculptors, Roth and Lentelli, who worked devotedly themselves and directed groups of students.
In all the sculpture Calder strove to keep in mind the significance of the Exposition and the spirit of the people who were celebrating. With him styles of architecture and schools were a minor consideration, to be left to the academicians and the critics. He believed that sculpture, like all other art-forms, was chiefly valuable and interesting as human expression.