“He makes a mockery of the old fashioned frozen-stone school of sculpture,” wrote the New Yorker critic in 1929, referring to the 31-year-old American sculptor Alexander Calder, maker of quicksilver wire figures that could be packed away in a suitcase, and soon to be the maker of wafer-thin mobiles that could be moved by a child’s breath. Calder’s equivalent of the bashful Medici Venus were his wirework portraits of the exuberant African American dancer Josephine Baker, her convulsive jazz-age moves and rolling eyeballs traced in wire that is wobbly yet attenuated, and seemingly sketched out in a second – a single strand per limb, a spiral for breasts, a squiggle for hair.