Works by Alexander Calder, one of the foremost figures of 20^th-century art, are on view at the two-person exhibition titled Calder-Picasso at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, from June 26 through September 19, 2021. This touring exhibition, which debuted in 2019 at the Musée Picasso-Paris, 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, Alexander S. C. Rower and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition focuses on the artists’ ceaseless reexamination of form, line, and space.

Exploring the visual and thematic interplay between these two masters of modern art, the exhibition highlights both the already apparent and heretofore unremarked connections. Calder and Picasso first met in Paris at the former’s exhibition opening in 1931; the two artists were aware of each other’s work, but didn’t directly comment on the other’s art on record. Calder-Picasso establishes a channel for "non-verbal communication" between two artists who were not in direct contact during their lifetimes. While their works belong to completely different categories of modern art, select works in the exhibition display striking formal similarities. One of Calder’s Constellations sculptures is shown next to Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair (1947), both for which the artists deployed colored polygons in a matrix of heavy black lines. 

The exhibition also includes other iconic wire figures, paintings, drawings, revolutionary nonobjective mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles by Calder including La Grande Vitesse (1969), Aztec Josephine Baker (1930), and Vertical Foliage (1941) in juxtaposition with those of Picasso, framing how each artist pushed the boundaries of modernism.