Musée Picasso brings Calder-Picasso exhibit to American shores
While we can’t yet travel to Paris to visit the Musée national Picasso Paris, luckily the museum is loaning more than 150 works in its collection for a notable exhibition across several American museums. Calder-Picasso is the first major museum exhibition to explore the connections between two of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder.
Currently, Calder-Picasso is at the de Young Museum in San Francisco until May 23rd. The Exhibition will next be shown at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from June 26 to September 12, 2021 and then at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from October 31, 2021 to January 30, 2022.
Conceived by the artist’s respective grandsons, the exhibition examines the absence of space from the figure through to the abstract through more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs. It presents two of the most innovative figures in twentieth-century art, both of whom completely reinvented the way in which major artistic themes were approached. This dialogue between the two creators reveals the essential link that weaves itself more particularly in their exploration of emptiness, or the absence of space, which the two artists respectively approached through their works, from the silhouette to abstraction. Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) both play with the particularities of presenting and representing non-space, whether by giving form to a subtraction of mass, as in Calder's sculptures, or by expressing the contortions of time, as in many of Picasso's representations.
The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Calder Foundation, New York and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA). It was previously presented at the Musée national Picasso-Paris from February 19 to August 25, 2019 and at the Museo Picasso Malaga from September 24, 2019 to February 2, 2020. Despite the prolonged closure of museums in France, the National Picasso Museum in Paris continues its mission to promote and share Picasso's work by collaborating with these international institutions.