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