Send in the Clowns

What was it with modern artists and the circus? The Impressionists devoted some of their jauntiest canvases to clowns and acrobats; so did Toulouse-Lautrec, Chagall, and Rose-Period Picasso. Calder had a career-long love affair with the iconography of the circus, and for his early masterwork Cirque Calder (1926–31) he built a miniature one, complete with wire sword-swallowers and lion-tamers. This last example suggests why so many radical innovators admired what is basically quaint Europea