Calder and the Surrealists

We went to SFMOMA on Monday to look at the show of Calder that tries to link him with the Parisian Surrealists. It was a fun show, working for me more like a pleasant highlights of the Calder retrospective a few years back, but they completely failed to make the connection between Calder and Breton stick. I mentioned this to a fellow art lover at the North Beach Lectura Dantis, and she agreed, as do The Chronicle's Kenneth Baker and Tyler Green.

Anyway, if you are in the area, it is a good show, with a mesmerizing Picasso and lots of fun Calder works, certainly worth the time (as is the permanent collection, currently displaying a lovely Diebenkorn cityscape).

By the way, speaking of the Bay Area and one of my favorite artists, be sure to read this post about Wayne Thiebaud works and this one of a peculiar Thiebaud, totally out of the ordinary for this artist (although not out of the ordinary in terms of the painting techniques that Thiebaud was using in the fifties. He was still under the sway of Abstract Expressionist paint handling, and had not found his voice in the works that have come to characterize him).