Alberto Giacometti: Painter and Sculptor

Author(s): Carolyn Lanchner

Source: MoMA , Sep., 2001, Vol. 4, No. 7 (Sep., 2001), pp. 6-9
Published by: The Museum of Modern Art

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4420614

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 ALBERTO GIACOMETTI:
PAINTER AND SCULPTOR
CAROLYN LANCHNER

The young Alberto Giacometti lived with a vexing

problem-should he become a painter or a sculptor?
Born and brought up in the remote Bregaglia valley in the
southeastern Swiss Alps, Giacometti had spent many
boyhood hours in the atelier of his father, the Post-
Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti. By January
of I922, some three months past his twentieth birthday,
Giacometti would seem to have resolved his dilemma by
enrolling in Emile-Antoine Bourdelle's sculpture class at
the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. After
three years of working from life with Bourdelle,
Giacometti was ready to discard the model and rely on
memory and imagination.
Influenced by Cubism and tribal art, he produced
sculpture whose originality transcends its sources.

* . . '..j?'''l.Spoons used by the Dan tribe in central Africa inspired

Giacometti's most famous and imposing piece of
the second half of the I920S. Spoon Woman (I926-27) is
the first in what would become two decades later a
procession of standing, female figures and was also the
Alberto Giacometti. first major piece to be produced in the tiny, ramshackle studio on the rue
Spoon Woman.
Hippolyte-Maindron where Giacometti would live and work until his
1926-27. Bronze.
57 x 201/4 x 8'h" (144.8 x death in I966. Massive as Spoon Woman is, she anticipates characteristics
51.4 x 21 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, of her younger, impossibly thin sisters of the I940S and I950s in her
New York. Acquired insistent symmetry, hunched, almost Etruscan shoulders, and slender, if
through the Mrs. Rita
Silver Fund in honor of more emphatic, profile.
her husband Leo Silver
Spoon Woman was a step in a development Giacometti described as working
and in memory of her
son Stanley R. Silver, at home, "forcing myself to reconstitute from memory alone what I had felt at
and the Mr. and Mrs.
Bourdelle's in the presence of the model and it got reduced...to a plaque."
Walter Hochschild Fund.
? 2001 Kunsthaus ZGrich. Giacometti here refers to a small series of flat, rectangular works including
All rights reserved.
? 2001 ARS, New
Gazing Head (I928), a hypnotically compelling piece whose abstract plaster
York/ADAGP, Paris eyes-oval depressions, one vertical and one horizontal-on an uninflected

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surface uncannily capture the living, fleeting essence of the human gaze. Alberto Giacometti.
Gazing Head.
Giacometti's lifelong pursuit of a means to render vision's intertwined
1928. Plaster, 153/8 x
complexities of outer, retinally perceived effect and inner, psychic affect is here
149/16 x 2?3/6 (39.1 x
37 x 5.5 cm). Alberto
potently resolved. Giacometti Foundation,

Giacometti produced some of his finest pieces in the first half of the Kunsthaus
I930s. Zurich.
? 2001 Kunsthaus
Such innovative works as Woman with Her Throat Cut, The Palace at 4 a.m., and
ZOrich. All the
rights
reserved. ? 2001 ARS,
exquisitely beautiful Landscape-Reclining Head and Caress (Despite Hands) of 1932
New York/ ADAGP, Paris
profoundly altered notions of sculptural form. Giacometti's sculpture required
viewer participation in a new way; it became something to be looked at from
above, to be touched and played with, even to move about within.
One of the most astonishing and little-known objects from this period,

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Projectfor a Passageway, was realized
only as a plaster model. The erotic

charge of this quiet sculpture is

manifest even before its abstract

parts cohere in the viewer's eye as _

a metaphor for the interior of a
woman's body. Gradually the real-
ization comes that this intimate

piece is intended to be a large-scale

architectural environment.
By the end Of 1934, Giacometti
had become convinced that only by

returning to life studies could his

art approach an adequate expres- 0
sion of "the totality of life." He . ---.
expected that this change in his - Q E
working habits would soon lead
him to reinvigorated means of Y
expression. The search, however, -
endured more than ten years,
including five of obsessively making
miniscule figures, none much more
than an inch high.
The scale of the tiny sculptures, i
like the exaggerated attenuation
of his post-World War II figures,
resulted from Giacometti's compulsion in the last three decades of his life to Alberto Giacometti.
The Artist's Mother.
capture "likeness." For Giacometti, likeness could most closely be approxi- 1950. Oil on canvas,

mated by an art that would show not only what has been seen but also the 353/8 X 24" (89.9 x
61 cm). The Museum of
conditions under which seeing takes place: contingent on specific moments, Modern Art, New York.
Acquired through the
light, distance, angle, and inevitably also on the identity of the artist. Whether
Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
working from his imagination or from life, Giacometti was acutely aware that
C 2001 ARS, New
York/ADAGP, Paris
no sooner is a thing seen than it becomes memory.
From about I939 to I953, Giacometti largely worked from memory and
from I950 devoted almost equal amounts of time to painting, sculpture, and, as
always, drawing. A comparison of a painting of the artist's mother, Annetta,
made in I950, and Four Figurines on a Stand of the same year reveals crossover
strategies. The space of the painting is dense, as tangible as the solid figure it
surrounds, creating a kind of interpenetration of mass and space that replicates
three-dimensional perceptual experience. Insisting on the impossible,

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Giacometti wanted to bring the illusory properties of painting to sculpture Alberto Giacometti. Four
Figurines on a Stand.
here, he elevates his figures to eye level, like a painting, on a base that assigns 1950. Bronze with golden

position with the assurance of a canvas support, and stands them on a pedestal patina, figures painted,
63?/4 x 165/16 x 125/8"
shaped to mimic foreshortening like that of the floor in the Annetta portrait. In (161.9 x 41.4 x 32.1 cm).

both painting and sculpture, the contours of the figures are elusive, heightening Alberto Giacometti
Foundation, Kunsthaus
a sense that the boundaries between space and mass are uncertain and made Zurich. C 2001 Kunsthaus
Zurich. All rights reserved.
even more so by the eraserlike brush swipes across Annetta's figure, much
C) 2001 ARS, New
as the inevitable shadow will momentarily dissolve the substance of a thin York/ADAGP, Paris

bronze figure.
Giacometti's attempts to render qualities
of one medium in another lie within his.life-
long, constant preoccupation with how to
"render my inner vision." Opening on
October ii, the day following Giacometti's
one hundredth birthday, the exhibition Alberto

Giacometti presents a comprehensive selection

of the less-known pieces of the pre-World
War II oeuvre, including unique plasters and
wooden constructions and a representative
view of the later sculptures, paintings, and
drawings.

Alberto Giacometti, on view from October 11, 2001,

through january 8, 2002, was organized by Carolyn
Lanchner, former Curator, and Anne Umland, Associate
Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum
of Modern Art; Christian Klemm, Deputy Director, Kunst-
haus Zurich, and Curator, Alberto Giacometti Foundation;
and Tobia Bezzola, Curator, Kunsthaus Zurich.

This exhibition is made possible by Joan and Preston Robert -ULN<

Tisch. Major corporate sponsorship is provided by Banana
Republic. An indemnity has been granted by the Federal
Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Additionalfunding
is provided by Presence Switzerland, Dr. and Mrs. David A.
Cofrin, Margaret and Herman Sokol, and Pro Helvetia. The
accompanying publication is made possible by the Blanchette
Hooker Rockefeller Fund.

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