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 María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation pays tribute to the artist through an exhibition of the four works in the Masaveu collections. Dated between 1945 and 1975, these works demonstrate the diversity and coherence of this multifaceted creator’s work. Known and appreciated above all as one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, he also explored other artistic fields such as painting, jewelry, and tapestry.

Among the small-scale works is the stabile Blue, Orange, Red, which belonged to the prestigious gallery owner Pierre Matisse, and the large-scale mobile Crag, highly representative of his mature work, lies the full sculptural imagination of Calder, who was sensitive to motion and organic forms. In the ink and gouache painting Nepal, one of his rare landscapes, the color and form resonate with the grandeur of the work’s title.

Finally, in the tapestry Le poire, le fromage et la serpent, created as part of a series commemorating the bicentennial of the United States, just after the Vietnam War (1976), she ironically alludes to American patriotism through a variation on the French saying, “entre la poire et le fromage”, which alludes to the moment end of a meal, the after-dinner conversation, as a shared and celebratory ritual, and adds the image of the snake, perhaps as a reminder of a temptation that is always lurking.