Many are surprised to discover that Alberto Giacometti, associated primarily with elongated figures like the six-foot tall 1948 bronze illustrated here, is Swiss.
In fact, he was from a distinguished family of creators in the Italian-speaking Bergell area of canton Graubünden. Both Giacometti’s father Giovanni and Giovanni’s cousin Augusto figure among the top Swiss artists of the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, and art market prices for their work are high – earlier this year, for example, a painting by Giovanni Giacometti sold for over $279,000 at a Christies auction.
On the same day that the Geneva show previewed, one of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures fetched over $19 million at Sotheby’s New York.
Giacometti In Geneva
The Rath show is the first comprehensive retrospective of Giacometti’s work ever held in Geneva – also surprising, since the artist spent several years in this Swiss-French city, first at art college before moving on, in 1922, to Paris which he called home for the rest of his life while retaining close ties with Switzerland. From 1942 to 1945, a concatenation of war-related circumstances led to his living in Geneva and in his modest room cum studio at Hôtel de Rive on rue Terrassière in the Eaux-Vives section the work he did proved seminal to the post-war creative burst that established him as an art great.
As he had in Paris, where together with his brother Diego he created decorative objects for a decorator, in Geneva Giacometti ‘’supported himself by making furniture and doing interior decoration work passed on to him by his [architect] brother Bruno,’’ according to biographer Edward Lucie-Smith.
Giacometti had ties to art publisher Albert Skira’s short-lived (1944-1946) Geneva-based publication Labyrinthe, for which he wrote several pieces including the autobiographical Le rêve, le sphinx et la mort de T.[The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T.] printed in 1946.
And it was in Geneva that Giacometti met 20-year-old Annette Arm. James Lord quotes the artist as saying he married Annette (in 1949) because she had the same name as his mother Annetta – surely not the most felicitous reason for tying the knot, and although Annette was a favorite model the relationship was complicated not least by Giacometti’s liaisons with prostitutes. Some years before Giacometti’s death in Chur (Switzerland) in 1966 the couple separated although Annette continued to look after her husband’s house and health needs.
Sculpture Giacometti Produced In Geneva
The Geneva years coincided with a creative crisis during which Giacometti found himself unable to model figures more than a few inches high. This had started in Paris in the late ‘30s, and continued for about a decade.
Edward Lucie-Smith, in Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists (1999), quotes Giacometti as saying: ‘’To my terror the sculptures [portraits] became smaller and smaller. Only when small were they like, and all the same these dimensions revolted me, and tirelessly I began again, only to end up, a few months later, at the same point.’’
Buying into an exaggeration Giacometti himself perpetuated, Lucie-Smith relates that the artist’s total Geneva production ‘’fitted into half-a-dozen matchboxes.’’ The pieces were small but even without their relatively large bases they weren’t that small, as a photograph by Eli Lotar of Giacometti working on one in his Hôtel de Rive room (published in Labyrinthe in October, 1944) shows.
Alberto Giacometti: From Surrealism To The ‘’Truth Of Seeing’’
Some 15 years earlier, Giacometti had been invited to join the surrealist movement and did, but he didn’t stay long. Realizing the figurative route his art was again taking (working from the human body was a surrealist no-no) he left before he could be officially ‘’excommunicated’’ from the group. He had turned to abstraction and surrealism after having despaired of ever being able to express what he wanted using figuration; now, he was again tackling the human form.
The elongated style which emerged after the decade of reducing his work was often called ‘’existentialist’’, not least due to Giacometti’s friendship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. His figures were seen as a reflection of the emptiness and meaninglessness of life. But observers like Lucie-Smith consider them an expression of his emotional response to his subjects, adding: ‘’Part of his art-historical importance springs from his defense of figuration at a time when the advantage was with abstract art.’’
However there was more to it than that as Dan Hofstadter writes in a 1985 New York Times review of Lord’s Giacometti biography: ‘the sculptor was obsessed with registering the psychic truth of seeing – the moment when the observation of brute likeness turns to intimate recognition.’’
The Giacometti Exhibition At Musée Rath
And it is that quality of ‘’intimate recognition’’ that leaps forth with powerful energy in the beautifully presented exhibit in the Rath’s newly modernized rooms. It is discernible in the abstract and the surrealist work, but more particularly – with the return to modeling from human sitters – in the exquisite mini-encapsulations of the core essence of those sitters including three heart-breakingly beautiful figurines of the artist’s young nephew Silvio Berthoud, which are among the few pieces Giacometti is known for sure to have made during the Geneva years.
Finally, around 1947, it is as if the artist felt the confidence to take that essence and make it quite literally soar, although it is interesting to note that for the maquettes of the unrealized giant Chase Manhattan Plaza project in New York (1959) he reverted to miniature format. Giacometti's figures are indubitably modern, yet their still dignity and authority defies easy categorization and they also possess an ageless archeaological quality like sculpture from lost civilizations reaching across time.
This must-see exhibition (the English-language catalogue to which is due out soon) is presented in collaboration with the Zurich Kunsthaus's Alberto Giacometti Foundation which possesses the largest museum collection of his work anywhere.
Until February 21, 2010. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesday, noon to 9 p.m. Admission: 10 Swiss francs. Tours in English: November 22, 2009 (3 p.m.); January 13, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
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