Museum Wednesday - Calder - Picasso

In addition to the permanent exhibition, we were fortunate to see the temporary exhibition of Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso’s work - this exhibition only opened two days ago. The exhibition includes more than 50 works - paintings, sculptures and drawings by each artist - created between 1912 and 1967; many have never been publicly shown before. The exhibition was curated by the respective grandsons of Calder and Picasso.

While not friends, the artists admired each other’s work. From early on, critics compared them; their most fabled meeting took place at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937, when Calder’s Mercury Fountain, a circular pool featuring a mobile that vibrated from the motion caused by falling mercury, was installed near Guernica, the canvas on which Picasso chronicles the destruction of a Basque village by the Nazis. Both are haunting political statements about the Spanish Civil War.

This exhibition illustrates the relationship between them through their work. The aim of the show is to highlight to the public that some of their works have extraordinary similarities.

We were unable to take photographs in the exhibition although I did manage to sneak a couple. We particularly liked Calder’s hanging mobile sculptures (mobiles) and wire ‘sculptures’.Read more