Calder, Spain and the 1937 Pavilion of the Spanish Republic

Lectures Calder-Picasso. María López recounts the encounter between the two great artists

On the occasion of the Calder-Picasso exhibition, Museo Picasso Málaga organized a series of lectures focused on specific aspects of the works of these creators.

María López Fernández holds a PhD in art history from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and specializes in 19th and 20th-century painting. She was the first director of the Museo Carmen Thyssen in Málaga and was Chief Conservator at Fundación Mapfre for more than ten years. The author of several books and research papers, she has also curated numerous international exhibitions, including Camille Claudel (Madrid-Paris 2007), Degas. The creative process (Madrid-Paris, 2008), Sorolla in Paris (Munich, Giverny and Madrid, 2016-2017) and Catching impressions. Small-format Sorolla (Madrid, 2019). She has worked as a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century painting for Sotheby’s, and is currently a teacher at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria and an independent exhibition curator.

In her talk on Calder, Spain and the 1937 Pavilion of the Spanish Republic, she told us how Alexander Calder visited Spain for the first time in 1930, disembarking in Málaga then continuing to Barcelona and Madrid. The circumstances that led to Calder designing his famous Mercury Fountain for the International Exhibition in 1937, to interact with Picasso’s Guernica, were filled with coincidences and random encounters that were to shape one of the most important episodes in modern art.

Audio available here (in Spanish):