Calder-Picasso: Two giants of modernity meet at the de Young museum
Triple Gong, ca. 1948. Brass, sheet metal, wire, and paint, 39 x 75 x 2 3/4 in.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
.-The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are presenting Calder-Picasso at the de Young museum. Conceived by the artists grandsons Alexander S. C. Rower and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, it is the first major museum exhibition to explore the formal resonances between the works of Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, two of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century. In more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographsincluding many iconic worksthe exhibition presents a compelling presentation of the artists exploration of the void, or the absence of space, which they defined from the figure through to abstraction.
Not all two-artist shows are a perfect coupling. The current
Calder-Picasso exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, for example, offers only a faint echo of the revelations provided by
Calder Miro at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC in 2004 (co-organised with the Fondation Beyeler in Basel), although a number of significant pieces by Calder appeared in both. But then, the respective artists’ relationships with each other might explain the disparity in depth between the two projects.
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Joan Miro (1893-1983) began a lifelong friendship and correspondence from their first meeting in 1928. Calder and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), though long aware of and mostly appreciative of one another s work, met only twice. The guiding spirits of the De Young’s exhibition the artists’ grandsons, Alexander S.C. Rower and Bernard Ruiz Picasso, effortfully seek some new common ground in a dialogue printed in the catalogue. But the
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 masterp