"Portrait of Peter Watson" (1953)
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was, without doubt, one of the great painter-sculptors of the twentieth century. Innovator and experimenter, his relentless pursuit of capturing the appearance of a living model has led to a body of work which demonstrates the breadth and diversity of his talent and innate skill.
Giacometti’s distinctive elongated figures are some of the most instantly recognisable works of modern art. This retrospective by Tate Modern, the first of such scale held in the United Kingdom for twenty years, brings together over two-hundred and fifty works by Giacometti and showcases the development of the artist’s career which spanned fifty years.
Giacometti, Tate Modern (exhibition detail)
I have been a long-term admirer of Giacometti’s work and have been
very lucky to see a number of his painting over the years and most recently in “Pure
Presence” at the National Gallery in 2015, which was a much smaller exhibition
and left me hoping that I would get an opportunity to see a full retrospective. I had a lot of expectations.
Giacometti’s consistent return to sculpting the human head throughout this oeuvre and in particular people he
was the closest to throughout his life -
his mother, father, brother and wife - is the focus of the first room of
the exhibition. From the very early clay and plaster portraits of his teenage years such as
“Head of a Child [Simon Bérard]”
(1917-1918) through to the later bronzes of his brother Diego, all demonstrated
that Giacometti was born to sculpt. I
could have stayed in that room for hours, it really was a feast for my
eyes. German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)
once said that if she could live her life again, she would be a sculptor and
nothing more. If I had been born a
sculptor, with even a small percentage of the talent of Giacometti (and
Kollwitz), I would have been a very happy woman.
Top: "Head of a Child [Simon Berard] (1917-1918) Bottom: "Bust of Diego" (1953)
Like many artists at the
turn of the twentieth century, African and Oceanian sculpture was very
influential on Giacometti. “Spoon Woman” (1927), first exhibited in
Paris in the year it was finished illustrates just how easily the artist
assimilated the influence into his own modernist vision. Giacometti joined the Surrealist movement in
1931. It proved to be an uneasy alliance. Despite standing out for being one of the
movement’s rare sculptors, Giacometti produced some truly disturbing misogynist
depictions of women during his association with the movement. “Woman
with her Throat Cut” (1932) is surely one of the darkest works from the corners
of a Surrealist spirit and vision of women.
However in that same year, the artist also produced “Walking Woman II”, reflecting his interest with Egyptian art and this
piece thankfully shows the beginnings of his journey away from Surrealism (he
was actually formally expelled in 1935) and towards his most iconic figurative work.
"Spoon Woman" (1927)
"Woman with her Throat Cut" (1932)
Every room in Tate Modern’s
retrospective featured example after example of Giacometti’s genius. His intimate busts of his brother and wife
are completely compelling, as are his numerous painted portraits, which have
always held a particular fascination.
Giacometti, Tate Modern (exhibition view)
The overall highlight of
this retrospective for me, out of all the wonders on display, was the eight restored
original plasterworks “Women of Venice”
(1956) made for that year’s Venice Biennale. These haunting, elongated nudes
with their base-like feet recall Giacometti’s interest in Egyptian statuary and
much like his re-interpretation of Oceanian sculpture nearly thirty years
earlier, once again demonstrate the artist’s unique and contemporary vision.
"Women of Venice" (1956)
Giacometti is best
remembered for his elongated walking figures such as “Man Pointing” (1947) and “Tall
Woman” (1958), which he mostly concentrated on from the end of the Second
World War until his death in 1966. His remarkable
career traced the shifting influences and experimentation of European art
before and after the Second World War. Although
as a member of the Surrealist movement in the 1930s Giacometti devised
innovative sculptural forms, it was his work after the war which developed alongside
Existentialism and visually reflected the philosophy's interests in perception,
alienation and anxiety after the trauma of the conflict, which has ensured
Giacometti’s place in the art history canon and quite rightly too.
Top: Giacometti, Tate Modern (exhibition view) Bottom: "Man Pointing" (1947)
With the exception of the monumental figures
in the final room at Tate Modern’s retrospective, the vast interior space of
the gallery surprisingly overwhelmed the artworks as a collection. Although unexpected, it did not particularly
matter given that the individual pieces deserved equal individual attention and
overall the retrospective more than met my expectations.
Giacometti in his studio (c.1963)
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