Current & Upcoming Exhibitions

Calder: François Premier is the first major exhibition dedicated to the pivotal and highly productive period of 1953–54, when Calder returned to live in France for the first time in twenty years. The artist and his wife, Louisa, settled in the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence and then in the small town of Saché in the Loire Valley. His productivity flourished in the Provençal landscape and the modest, solitary spaces of a seventeenth-century stone house he acquired in Saché called François Premier.

Calder au cœur de la France celebrates the centenary of Calder’s first arrival in France. To mark this anniversary, Centre Pompidou and the Région Centre-Val de Loire have come together to organize an event of exceptional scale. Presentations that reveal different facets of Calder’s art will unfold across the Région Centre in fourteen venues, including the Domaine national de Chambord, Château royal de Blois, and Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans.

Calder | O’Keeffe is the first exhibition devoted to the mutual admiration and artistic kinship between these two defining figures of American modernism. Through carefully considered pairings of paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and archival materials, the exhibition invites visitors to contemplate congruities and contrasts in their respective revolutionary approaches to abstraction, movement, and the dynamic forces that shape the natural world.

Monochrome: Calder and Tara Donovan pairs the legendary American modernist with one of the most exciting sculptors working today. A Calder Prize winner in 2005, Donovan chose Calder’s Jacaranda and Mountains (1:5 intermediate maquette) as touchpoints for the exhibition. Like the vast majority of Calder’s sculptures, both works are black. Donovan explains, “My primary (though not sole) focus on the color black references Calder’s use of black in many of his works as a neutralizing force that flattens sculptural shapes.”

Calder’s friend, the critic Giovanni Carandente, donated a large portion of his personal collection to establish a modern art gallery in Spoleto’s Palazzo Collicola in 2000. Included is a permanent installation of Calder’s work and a maquette for the city’s monumental stabile Teodelapio, which the artist executed in 1962.

One of the two tower galleries in the museum’s I.M. Pei-designed East Building boasts the world’s largest permanent display of works by Calder, including several long-term loans from the Calder Foundation.