Art review: SAM shows Michelangelo drawings, Alexander Calder creations

The Seattle Art Museum is playing with scale at the moment. Two new shows present art by big names: a show of small works by Michelangelo — perhaps the biggest name in all of Western art history — and an exhibition of a wide variety of works, both big and small, by Alexander Calder, who made a name for himself with his counterbalanced, abstract mobiles.

Big names bring in large crowds and more revenue, which is a good thing, but are these exhibitions more about the names than the work? Sadly, yes, in the case of the Michelangelo exhibition — which is meant to highlight 12 drawings from the Casa Buonarotti in Florence. It could have been a smaller show, leaving out some of the filler (works by other artists, a coffee table with an image of the Sistine Chapel ceiling), and focusing more on the drawings. During a preview of the show, Gary Radke, professor of fine arts at Syracuse University who helped organize the show, pointed out a relief panel — a bronze copy of a Michelangelo piece — that was meant to be seen from below, as one knelt in devotion. Using a tone that was jovial, but perhaps not quite ironic, he stated: "If you've had a chance to genuflect before the genius, join us in the next gallery to see what he had for lunch."

Sure, Michelangelo's shopping list, which he illustrated for a servant, is amusing, but it's not particularly enlightening.

Don't get me wrong: This is still an exhibition worth spending time with. It's an opportunity to see evidence of Michelangelo's creative process and an incredibly rare opportunity; this is the only American venue for this exhibition from the Casa Buonarotti in Florence. In fact, there are a total of only 12 drawings by Michelangelo in all of the public collections in the U.S.; with one stop at SAM, you can take in that number.

I loved studying the sketches that Michelangelo created in preparation for some of his now-iconic works of art: the Sistine Chapel ceiling, created between 1508-12, and the Last Judgment, painted more than 20 years later on the altar wall of the chapel. These paintings are so famous, so familiar, that it is revelatory to see how Michelangelo explored, on paper, how to position faces, feet or arms, or even how to handle the entire composition of the Last Judgment.

Some of the drawings are brilliantly executed, full of nuanced shading and three-dimensionality (Michelangelo, above all, considered himself a sculptor). The muscles and figures in some sketches leap to life with only a few strokes. Other areas impatiently overlap each other and some moments are a bit fumbling.

None of the drawings was meant to be seen by the public. Art historian Radke states that Michelangelo didn't want anyone to see anything less than the perfected, finished works, and that the artist was a shrewd businessman who cultivated his an image as an inspired genius.

This is all probably true, but another reason might lie within Michelangelo's Neo-Platonism, which led him to search for the eternal, the ideal and the divine. Sketches were necessary to build toward those goals, but were far less valued by the artist because they were documents of the ephemeral, the specific and the mundane.

Luckily, some of these documents still exist, and careful looking can help us understand why Michelangelo was called, even in his own time, "divine."

Alexander Calder's works jump us forward to the 1920s and beyond to the 1970s. This is also an exhibition that is capitalizing on a big name, one that is quite popular with Seattle audiences because of the huge red-orange sculpture, "Eagle," at the Olympic Sculpture Park. Being that it's primarily drawn from one (extraordinary) collection — that of former Microsoft President Jon Shirley and his wife, Mary — the show could have been beefed up with contributions from elsewhere, perhaps including more two-dimensional works to accomplish the stated goal of providing a varied look at Calder's career, and more labeling and accompanying scholarship is needed to contextualize Calder within his modernist moments. OK, one more quibble: I wish we could walk under more of the mobiles.

But this show looks great. It's a wonderful ensemble of hanging mobiles, standing mobiles and several largeish "stabiles," as fellow artist Jean Arp dubbed the nonmoving sculptures. There's even a small assortment of jewelry designed by Calder.

After being greeted by a huge and elegant white mobile, visitors to the successive galleries find them full of vibrant yellow, red and blue shapes that gently shift in the air currents. Calder's color palette was inspired by Piet Mondrian, who reduced his paintings to primary colors and careful arrangements of squares and lines.

Calder's driving interests all revolved around balance: yes, literally, balancing the weight of his forms, but also visually balancing color, shape and line. While it's always a treat to see an individual Calder, seeing these groupings of works is enormously useful in understanding his formal approach; you can track a period of time when he put oval shapes parallel to the ground or when he painted his bases bright red for a while.

I found the small-scale sculptures especially revealing of Calder's process, allowing me to take in the overall forms and colors of several pieces at once, then look up and out to see connections with a larger mobile or stabile. It's also easy to empathize with the way Calder physically manipulated these small works, which are sculptures in their own right, not models or preparations for larger works, as both collector Jon Shirley and curator Michael Darling emphasized.

Although Calder referred to the natural world in some of his forms or titles, he was primarily an abstract artist. Because his abstract use of shape and color is so well-known, as is his favored media — painted metal and wire — it can be quite surprising to see anomalies: an almost literal depiction of Jonah and the whale, or a chunk of wood hanging next to metal shapes.

Another surprise may await many viewers in "Cirque Calder," a 1961 film that shows Calder manipulating little figurines through a circus set of his own making. As the stick-puppet acrobats fly through the air and jump through metal hoops, we can further understand the artist's interests in playing with gravity, balance, physicality, and even entertainment.

This last point is important. We may not leave this exhibition having learned a great deal about the historical context in which Calder produced his work or about his relationships with his contemporaries, like Joan Mirò, whose work in two dimensions is so similar. But this exhibition will probably delight viewers who respond to the vivid colors, the striking shapes and the motion, either real or implied. Calder's sculptures are not jarring, angst-ridden modernist works. Calder kept all of his elements in balance.