Alexander Calder, The Spider, 1940. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. © 2010 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by David Heald.

It’s been centuries since we stopped expecting contemporary art to be beautiful. A visit to just about any museum will yield at least a few objects that make you scratch your head. Yet we still often hold art to other high expectations. Will it be meaningful? Provocative? Intellectually engaging? If it’s not, has it missed the point? Have we? The past couple months, I’ve used this space to explore art that was disconcerting or frightening, trying to figure out what happens when you visit and revisit it. But what happens when you return to art you love?

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is currently exhibiting “Form, Balance, Joy,” an airy white room filled with Alexander Calder’s sculptures and mobiles. I don’t remember the first time I saw a Calder mobile, because it seems I’ve always known them. Calder died in 1976 and I was born two years later, so maybe I have. It’s easy art to grow up with; as fine art goes, his is especially kid-friendly, with its animal shapes, rummaged bits of glass and metal, and bright colors. (His work inspired the wonderful children’s book, The Calder Game, by Blue Balliett, as well as a wildly popular exhibit at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in 1996, the first major fine arts show at any children’s museum in the country). And then there’s the mobile form itself: we’re introduced to them as infants, and even if they’re made of cheap plastic, there’s still comfort to be found in their shape twenty or thirty years later.

And yet walking into the Calder exhibit at the MCA is somewhat overwhelming. It’s a single room filled with mobiles and sculptures with moving parts balancing on fulcrums. Spidery figures stand on white display steps, looking as though they might skitter away at any moment. Mobiles hang from the high ceiling and throw fish-shaped shadows on the walls. Red paddles move invisible boats through space, and blue and yellow spatulas scoop the air. Stand completely still and the gallery still gently spins; try to walk around a mobile and it might circle you.

Of course, revisiting familiar art gives you more opportunity to absorb the context of its creation. Calder employed the same creative reuse of found objects as Marcel Duchamp, but Calder’s results feel more whimsical than avant-garde. Living on a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, provided him with junkyard treasures like bits of red glass from taillights and scraps of aluminum cans. Those taillights found second life as lips on a sculptural face; the cans as a bird’s plumage. Calder’s background in engineering paved the way for technical achievements that probably require a more fluent grasp of physics to fully appreciate, but even from a lay perspective, the balance is magnificent. A one-inch-high sculpture is as perfectly poised as a four-feet-high one, each of them a colorful homage to those broken taillights (one begins to imagine that the Roxbury farm was also a car graveyard). An animal theme emerges in one corner of the gallery: Le phoque noir balances a beach ball on his nose and a giant fish filled with broken glass and metal curlicues darts around in circles.

Looking at art you know and love does not necessarily incite any epiphanies or any revelations. It does not necessarily provoke a moment of understanding, a moment where the challenging yields, at long last, to clarity. It doesn’t even necessarily lead to the elation one might expect from spending an afternoon in a gallery of beauty and whimsy. If anything, spending more time in the gallery steadied my initial feelings of being overwhelmed, and it reignited by love of Calder mobiles. But enjoying those  mobiles—just for the sake of enjoying them—doesn’t mean that we’ve missed out on the intellectual engagement we’ve come to expect in a contemporary art museum. Maybe those expectations are just replaced with the slow intoxication of nostalgia, a subtle glimpse into your subconscious, that allows you to surrender to the form, balance, and joy.