Tony Bravo March 11, 2021Updated: March 11, 2021, 5:42 pm
Artwork by Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso is seen March 2 at the “Calder-Picasso” exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
In their groundbreaking 20th century works, Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso changed the way art approached the subject of space itself. Picasso’s paintings explode concepts of line and dimension, explored through both abstraction and representation in his art. Calder’s signature mobiles and wire sculptures make the viewer consider the area between materials as well as their ever-changing movability.
Although born only 17 years apart and moving in many of the same modern art circles, the two artists only met four times in their lives. Their most significant intersection was in 1937, at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, where Calder’s “Mercury Fountain” made its debut and Picasso famously hung his antiwar masterpiece “Guernica.”