The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson is hosting a programme of guest works in connection with the exhibition Masaveu Collection. Twentieth-Century Spanish Art: From Picasso to Barceló. Pieces by twentieth-century artists represented in the Masaveu collections are being shown periodically to lend greater visibility to these holdings and add a dynamic dimension to the main exhibition of Spanish art from that century.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Alexander Calder (1898–1976), the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson is paying homage to the artist with the display of his four pieces in the Masaveu collections. Dated between 1945 and 1975, the works evidence the diversity and coherence of this multifaceted creator’s proposals.

Although primarily known and admired as one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century, he also explored other artistic disciplines such as painting, jewellery and tapestry. Between producing the small-format Blue, Orange, Red stabile, which belonged to the prestigious art dealer Pierre Matisse, and the large-format Crag mobile, highly representative of his mature period, Calder deployed his entire sculptural imagination with a sensitivity to the use of colour and organic forms that evokes parallels with his friend Joan Miró. In the watercolour Nepal, one of his rare landscapes, primary colours and geometry are sufficient to capture the grandeur of a place.

Lastly, the tapestry La Poire, Le Fromage et Le Serpent (The Pear, the Cheese, and the Serpent), made as part of a series to commemorate the bicentenary of the United States, just after the end of the Vietnam War (1976), makes ironic reference to American patriotism through a variation on the French saying, “entre la poire et le fromage” [between the pear and the cheese], which alludes to the lingering moments at the end of a meal as a shared celebratory ritual, with the added image of the serpent perhaps serving as a reminder that temptation is always lurking.