Pic(k) of the Week: La Grande Vitesse

La Grande Vitesse (1969)
Sheet metal, bolts, and paint
— Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976)
Calder Foundation, New York

In his last decade, Calder focused on large-scale public sculpture commissions. This is a model for a vibrant red sculpture installed in the plaza of City Hall in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “It’s really just for differentiation, but I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red,” Calder said in the 1960s. The bold, curving shapes summarize his lifelong interest in creating a dialogue between voids and volumes.

— High Museum placard

This is one of about one hundred artworks by Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso on exhibit at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, during the summer of 2021.

Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso are two of the foremost figures in the history of twentieth-century art. This touring exhibition, which debuted in 2019 at the Musée National Picasso-Paris and is coming to the High this summer, presents more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, and works on paper spanning Calder’s and Picasso’s careers that reveal the radical innovation and enduring influence of their art.

Conceived by the artists’ grandsons, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and Alexander S. C. Rower, and organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition focuses on the artists’ exploration of the void, or absence of space, which both defined from the figure through to abstraction.

Calder’s wire figures, paintings, drawings, and revolutionary nonobjective mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles are integrated throughout the exhibition with profoundly inventive works by Picasso in every media. The juxtapositions are insightful, surprising, and challenging, demonstrating the striking innovations these great artists introduced through their ceaseless reexamination of form, line, and space.

One impression I departed with was that THIS is a exhibiton of art that children should be taken to. Of course, neither Picasso nor Calder are juvenile in any way, but their macabre and whimsical (and mobile) exploration of forms and shapes could make many young people lifelong appreciators of art, unencumbered as they are by instilled preconceptions.

By the way, Mr. Calder may have loved red but, under the lights at the High, this official maquette (1:5 scaled-down model created in 1975) of La Grande Vitesse appeared orange. And the name? It translates from French as "the high speed" or, eponymously for its home city, as "the grand rapid."

Mais, oui!

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• Photo taken 21 August 2021. More images from the exhibit: here.


• Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of images posted on Saturdays, occasionally, but not always (as is the case today), with a good fermentable as the subject.
• Photo 34 of 52, for year 2021. See it on Flickr: here.
• Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10 II.
  • Lens: Lumix G 20/F1.7 II
  • Settings: 20 mm | 1/20 | ISO 400 | ƒ/2.0
• Commercial reproduction requires explicit permission, as per Creative Commons.


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