About Jed Perl

New York, NY

Jed Perl’s (CBA ’16) many books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, Paris Without End, and New Art City, which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year in 2005. Perl was the art critic for the New Republic for twenty years, and has written for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s,The Atlantic, and Vogue, where he was a contributing editor for a decade. He has received awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York. He teaches at The New School and is currently working on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder.

Alexander Calder Dancing

The American sculptor Alexander Calder had a lifelong fascination with the dance. During his time at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, Perl explored Calder’s interest and involvement with the dance, ranging from his collaborations with Martha Graham to a series of experiments on the theme of a “ballet without dancers” that began in the 1930s and culminated in Work in Progress, the theatrical event Calder mounted at the Rome Opera House in 1968.