20th century giants get better acquainted
Pairings of ‘CalderPicasso’ point up parallels and differences
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 everchanging 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.”
Now, works by both men are in visual conversation in the first American iteration of “CalderPicasso,” a new exhibition at the de Young Museum through May 23. For fans, it is a show that will enrich your understanding of both artists and where they philosophically converge. For those less familiar with their work, this will be an introduction that places Calder and Picasso squarely in the center of the big aesthetic questions of the 20th century.
The show includes more than 100 sculptures, paintings, drawings and graphics and is divided thematically into galleries that investigate their relationships with subjects like space, void, volume and suspension. The groupings sometimes blend the artists into one another, displaying their very similar takes on the same themes.
In the first galleries, Calder’s wire 1929 “Circus Scene” and “Acrobats” sculptures evoke the same inherent interest in structure and line as Picasso’s 1927 “Figure” painting, as well as his 1928 metal study for a monument to the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
By the time you enter the final gallery and see Calder’s bronze “Dancers” (1944) and Picasso’s bronze “Vase With Flower” (1951), the men are so much in visual communion that you might mistake which work is by which artist.
The exhibition’s approach to visually pairing the artists is “more poetry than prose,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s curator in charge of American art.
“Museums usually explain, they give the chronology,” Burgard says. “This is an exhibition (where) you could go through not reading a single text panel or label and come away with inspiration about what these artists are doing, how they’re doing it and how there are both provocative parallels and distinctive differences.”
The exhibition was conceived by two of the artists’ grandsons, Alexander S.C. Rower and Bernard RuizPicasso.
After a similar 2016 show at the Almine Rech Gallery in New York (Almine Rech is the wife of RuizPicasso), it was decided that a larger museum exhibition was merited. The exhibition has been previously mounted at the Musée Picasso Paris and at the Museo Picasso Malaga in Spain.
“Something that is not well understood yet is just how powerfully influential Calder was to artists of the 21st century,” says Rower, the president of the Calder Foundation. “His influence reverberates today in generations of younger artists who continue to look to his work for inspiration, especially in terms of themes such as viewer engagement and immateriality.”
Thomas Campbell, the director
and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums, compares the exhibition’s central premise to both a conversation and a dance.
“Throughout their careers, both played on the interface between the figurative and the abstract,” says Campbell. “You see them refining, reducing, taking away and then coming back. It’s wonderfully like a kind of reintroduction to the origins of modernism.”
Here are five pairings of Calder and Picasso works seen in the exhibition:
‘Object With Red Disks,’ 1931, Alexander Calder; ‘Nu couche’ (‘Reclining Nude’), 1932, Pablo Picasso
Calder’s “Object With Red Disks” wasn’t trying to make any allusions to the real world, a philosophical turning point for the artist, Burgard says. The balanced form of the sculpture is a reminder of Calder’s early training as an engineer, and the work has been said to evoke musical notation with its stafflike parallel lines and models of the solar system.
“Nu couche” (”Reclining Nude”), one of the most famous paintings in the exhibition, is a depiction of Picasso’s mistress MarieThérèse Walter, which, Burgard says, like “Object With Red Disks,” is “dealing with universal forces. He likens her to forces of nature like fruit, flowers and vegetation.” In the arc of the figure’s arms, Burgard sees “beautiful visual analogies” to the Calder works grouped with it.
‘Vertical Foliage,’ 1941, Calder; ‘Le Chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu’ (‘The Straw Hat With Blue Foliage’), 1936, Picasso
With many Calder mobiles and sculptures often compared to leaf shapes, “Vertical Foliage” is a direct reference by the artist to that phenomenon. Even walking near it activates its moving components, adding to its treelike, natural feeling as it gently comes to life.
Picasso’s painting “Le Chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu” (“The Straw Hat With Blue Foliage”) is a work beloved by painter Jasper Johns. Like Calder, who manipulates our expectations of what natural forms are supposed to look like, Burgard says Picasso’s painting upends what we assume portraiture should be.
‘Wooden Bottle With Hairs,’ 1943, Calder; ‘Femme assise dans un fauteuil rouge’ (‘Woman Seated in a Red Armchair’), 1932, Picasso
Their exploration of shape makes this one of the exhibition’s more surreal groupings. “Both artists engage with surrealism, although neither artist really becomes a cardcarrying member of the group,” Burgard says. “The other aspect Calder and Picasso’s work shares is the suggestion that even what we consider to be inanimate objects have an animate life to them.” In Calder’s “Wooden Bottle With Hairs,” the bottle itself seems to reference the shape of a hair follicle. Picasso’s “Femme assise dans un fauteuil rouge” (“Woman Seated in a Red Armchair”) is a take on the conventional seated portrait pose that deconstructs the elements of the form until they are reduced to mere shapes in combination with each other.
‘My Shop,’ 1955, Calder; ‘L’Atelier’ (‘The Studio’), 1955, Picasso
One of the most direct comparisons in the show places two painted, sidebyside depictions of the artists’ studios, coincidentally from the same year. Like most artists, their studios were of central importance and fascination to both men. In “L’Atelier,” Burgard notes subtle tributes to the artist Henri Matisse, Picasso’s great friend and artistic rival, including in the palm fronds outside. In Calder’s “My Shop,” every item depicted in the painting, from tools to artworks, can be accounted for against a reallife counterpart. Both works prominently feature windows, a convention of the studio painting genre.
‘La Grande Vitesse,’ 1969, Calder; ‘Nu couche’ (‘Reclining Nude’), 1967, Picasso
“Amazingly, although this is a very large sculpture, it’s a maquette for an even larger piece,” Burgard says of “La Grande Vitesse.” “The final work is in front of the city hall in Grand Rapids, Mich.; you can walk under it.” Burgard finds the sloping shape of the form beautifully matched with the Picasso next to it, a female nude from 1967. Toward the end of his life, Picasso became fascinated with art by children and their “go for broke” aesthetic. At the time, the works caused outrage and were derided. The shape of the figure is similar to the curves of “La Grande Vitesse.” Both artists have embraced a whimsy by this point in their careers that is different from much of their early work.