Calder-Picasso
Capturing the Void
“Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe./ It must not be just a `fleeting moment’, but a physical bond between the varying events in life./ Not extractions,/ But abstractions/ Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.” - Alexander Calder, “Comment réaliser l’art?”, Abstraction-Création, Art No Figuratif, no. 1 (1932)
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern masters and two of twentieth century art’s most prolific and seminal figures, innovated entirely new ways in which to interpret such grand themes as conflict, sexuality and death. Despite their seventeen-year age difference, their backgrounds are strikingly similar; each born in the late 19th century to classically trained artist fathers, their formative years marred by political upheaval in Europe. In 1931, in Paris, at Galerie Percier, Alexader Calder first exhibited his nonobjective sculptures at an exhibition entitled Alexandre Calder: Volumes-Vecteurs-Densités/Dessins-Portraits. “Looking at these new works — transparent, objective, exact,” Fernand Léger later wrote of the exhibition, “I think of Satie, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Arp — those unchallenged masters of unexpressed and silent beauty.” Picasso arrived early, before the vernissage, where he introduced himself to Calder and toured the exhibition privately, spending time with Calder’s radical new works. Picasso didn’t speak English and Calder was not particularly good at French or Spanish. Despite both artists being key figures in the Parisian avant-garde, and sharing friends, including the artist Jean Miró, they subsequently came into contact only a handful of times, though each followed each other’s work with keen interest.
Little Girl Jumping Rope, Vallauris, mixed media (1950) by Pablo Picasso © Succession Picasso 2019
AJoséphine Baker IV, steel cables (c. 1928) by Alexander Calder © 2019 Calder Foundation
The two artists would meet again, most famously, at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in 1937; when each was invited to create a work for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion, which aimed to raise both awareness and funds for the Republic’s cause in the brutal Spanish Civil War. On the ground floor Picasso presented what would become perhaps the most famous painting of the 20th Century, his monumental Guernica, a lament for the destruction of the eponymous Basque town. While Calder presented Mercury Fountain, a mesmerizing work in which mercury was poured through a series of sculptures, each created by Calder, until it reached a mobile labelled Almadén. The word resonated with Republicans. It was the name of a stronghold that held out against an offensive by Franco’s troops in March 1937, famous for its deposits of mercury, an element valued for its use in manufacturing weapons. At the time of the World’s Fair (May to November 1937) the conflict was at its height: although neither artist was especially political, both works were overtly strong statements attesting to their ideological support for the Republic. The special thing is that it was not intended to be a political commission; both artists took it upon themselves to react in such a way. Sharing strong anti-Fascist sentiments, Calder and Picasso were united in their belief that artists had a key role to play during times of war and that new art could be staged as a political and social force.
Portrait of a Young Girl, oil on canvas (1936) by Pablo Picasso © Succession Picasso 2019
Although Calder and Picasso were never friends, their careers would continue to overlap and in the decades that followed, they often had work in the same shows, with one French newspaper referring to Calder as “the American Picasso”. A vital connection between the two artists can be found in their exploration and exploitation of the void, or nonexistence as tangible matter, which both artists delineated from the figure through to abstraction, distorting volume and dimensionality, and in doing so offering alternate perceptions of reality. Both artists presented this non-space in differing ways, Calder, in his sculpture, gives definition to a subtraction of mass, whereas Picasso, in his portraiture, expresses time in motion. For Picasso his exploration of the void was personalised, focusing on the emotional inner self. In doing so, he blurred the interpersonal space between artist and subject, bringing something of himself to each character. Calder however externalized it, in part through curiosity and intellectual expansion, engaging in what he called grandeur immense, or unseen forces, that challenge our dimensional limitations. The female body is a recurring theme, “People have said that Picasso just painted the ladies he was living with,” Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist’s great grandson told AD Magazine. “But there’s more.” Woman is “the number one protagonist. It’s she who births. She who creates in a void. We are talking about the essential yin and yang function here: life and death.”
“If one occupies oneself with what is full: that is, the object as positive form, the space around it is reduced to almost nothing,” Picasso said, talking of positive-negative modalities. “If one occupies oneself primarily with the space that surrounds the object, the object is reduced to almost nothing. What interests us most — what is outside or what is inside a form? When you look at Cézanne's apples, you see that he hasn't really painted apples, as such. What he did was to paint terribly well the weight of space on their circular form” - Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, 1964.
In the late 1920’s Calder started making energetically charged sculptures of acrobats, animals and fellow artists such as Fernand Léger and Josephine Baker out of bent wire: “The shadows of these small linear constructions trace a sort of drawing on the white wall in the way of Picasso” Pierre Berthelot, “Calder”, Beaux-Arts, vol.9, 9 May 1931. Calder’s father and grandfather were sculptors in the traditional sense, who bent rod and wire into armatures to support their clay sculpting. In 1928, as a way of engaging with the traditions of his forefathers, Calder created three wire-works based on themes commonly associated with classical antiquity: Hercules and the Lion, Romulus and Remus and Spring, or rather the allegory of spring. The porosity of Calder’s wire portraits, underscored by projected shadows on the wall, extend beyond shape and line to engage multidimensional experience, thus challenging and updating traditional notions of sculpture as an art form. From the extended reach of Ball Player (1927) to the near life-size mobility of Aztec Josephine Baker (1930), these proto-mobiles, with suspension, action and fluid movements tease dynamic motion, radiating energy through the slight trembling of the wire lines.
Constellation (1943) by Alexander Calder © 2019 Calder Foundation
At around the same time Picasso had created a similar group of sculptures, using iron rods to create three versions of a charioteer. Adapted from earlier drawings, their linear character and open spaces calls to mind classic, monochromatic cubist paintings. These works of great levity didn’t resemble sculpture as people traditionally knew it. An art critic for the French newspaper Paris-Midi referred to Calder’s objects as “drawings in space”, and later the artist Julio González would repeat the term when writing about Picasso’s iron sculptures; for what they resembled most of all was drawings in mid-air.
Through these works Picasso and Calder changed the very definition of sculpture, non-space was now as important as substance. Simultaneously embracing the principles of abstraction and representation, comparisons can also be drawn between Calder’s wire sculptures and Picasso’s immediate and spontaneous line drawings, for example there is a striking resemblance between Calder’s sculpture Acrobat (1929), constructed from just one wire, and Picasso’s drawing Arlequin (1918), a figure formed from a single looping, energetic line. Demonstrative of the artists’ interest in paring down the figure to its bare essentials, Acrobat and Arlequin seem both two and three dimensional, inviting the viewer to fill in the gaps, thus creating his or her own illusionist image. When Picasso made Arlequin, he was well into working in the cubist style. It represents his exploration of fractured space, and his curiosity around the viewer piecing together a complete image. Calder flirted with cubism, as well as the myriad art movements of the day (Calder once joked that he shouldn’t be confused with “the Surrealists, the Neo-romanticists, Concretionists, Automobilistes or Garagistes”), but his treatment of transparency and space was an investigation he came to entirely separately. Acrobat looks poised to jump into the air and metamorphose into one of his later mobiles. Calder was just several years away from incorporating actual motion into his work, thereby working around the implied depiction of motion that was a preoccupation of Cubism and Futurism.
Resemblances between Picasso and Calder’s use of colour, line and form are abundantly clear, but they were essentially two disparate artists of a shared era, both drawn to the same questions in their practice, and each produced his own fascinatingly unique solutions. “A statue, made of What?” asked Tristouse. “Marble? Bronze?” “No, that’s too old-fashioned,” answered the Bénin bird. “I want to erect him a statue made of nothing, like poetry and fame.” “Bravo! Bravo!” replied Tristouse, applauding, “a statue made of nothing, of the void, that’s the very thing. When do we start?” - Guillaume Apollinaire, The Poet Assassinated, 1916.