Calder vaguely remembers him as “a remote ... man is best seen in a statue of a chubby little boy that he called Man Cub. The stark-naked cub: the future mobilist. A Moving Mondrian.

There's a quality of Calder as the artisan, a man making something by hand. In a way, it's a kind of counterpoint to the Machine Age: He's part of it, but he's also critiquing its impersonality.

As a four-year-old he was the model for his dad's sculpture The Man Cub, now on display in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2. His grandad Alexander Milne Calder was also a sculptor.

As the man who wrote the catalogue essay for the Paris show pointed out, Calder's mobiles "signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves". The man's name was Jean-Paul Sartre.

Today's Google doodle shows off a very cool HTML5 feature, with a moving interactive mobile celebrating the birth of Alexander Calder, the man behind the mobile. Richard Trenholm Former Movie and ...