Alberto Giacometti at the Tate Modern in July 2017

Alberto Giacometti at the Tate Modern, Sunday July 16^th 2017

Born in Italian Switzerland in 1901, Alberto Giacometti was the son of a significant post-impressionist artist and much of his early work was imitative of his father’s style.  He was later galvanised to move to Paris in 1922 where he encountered the works of the cubists and the surrealists.  His early busts are conventional, typical works, completely classical in impulse.  He liked to work with soft, malleable materials like clay or plaster rather than in bronze.  However, he eventually found the financial help he needed to transform his works into bronzes.  His later style emerged gradually.

In his early period Giacometti was equally a painter and a sculptor, his busts were usually intimate portraits of close friends and family members.  Giacometti’s engagement with the surrealists is clearly reflected in his work of the 20s and 30s in Paris when he also became fascinated with the creation of mechanical sculptures composed of wood, wire and metals that depict puzzling paradoxes such as Caught Hand (1932) and Hour of the Traces (1932).  In 1932 Giacometti’s first solo exhibition was held at the Pierre Cole gallery, one of the first visitors was Pablo Picasso.

Caught Hand depicts a hand and forearm trapped by a diabolical machine that has no point of origin or seeming purpose.  In Hour of the Traces a heart is suspended from a platform from which a metallic ladder or scaffold points upwards.  Conventional symbols are upended and elemental, mysterious objects point to an empty, desolate sky bereft of anything and certainly not a reclining sky god or harping cherubs.  Other work is less successful as it struggles to free itself from the necessary influence of cubism.

As always at the Tate Modern the true subject is the audience, for “Giacometti” is merely a cipher meaning an assemblage of people who have an investment in the artist.  Giacometti’s art manages to forge such a bond.  The sequence of trivial, unconnected events that unfold are also ground breaking and omnipresent.

Giacometti’s chronology follows a typical trajectory.  Giacometti cannot afford models so he discovers his younger brother Diego (1902-1985) who moves into Giacometti’s studio in Paris then acquires one himself beside his brothers.  Giacometti’s studio was situated in a modest district in Paris, near the Gard Montparnesse.  Giacometti had many haunts, the bars and night clubs of the quarter.  His wife Annette and latterly his mistress Caroline also pose for him.

His works sometimes resemble the works of Henry Moore.  Indeed, he was influenced by ancient sculpture just as Moore was.  Like other Modernists (Joyce, Eliot) Giacometti returned to Biblical or Classical examples to shape his own ambivalent response to modernity.  The presence of ancient Egyptian art in Giacometti’s iconic, informatic worldview is counter-balanced by the violence and barbarism unfolding around him.  By 1940 the artist was in Geneva, visiting his mother, when the Germans occupied Paris.  When Giacometti attempted to return his visa was revoked forcing him to spend the war years living in a hotel in Geneva.  Possibly he was fortunate since he did not suffer the persecution that other members of the Parisian avante garde were exposed to.  His work would have been marginalised by the new regime.  Perhaps he realised this would be the outcome of his move to Geneva.

After the war years Giacometti’s style began to crystallise.  After his escapades with cubists and surrealists, his encounter with modernism, his style began to epitomise his personal art trajectory and place in the art factory.

Giacometti is defined also by the correspondence he received from the main Surrealist instigator, Andre Breton.  This detailed correspondence is bereft of Giacometti’s letters to Breton.  Perhaps he never replied to Breton?  Giacometti is listed in catalogues alongside Max Ernst, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso but he was simultaneously being featured in the world of haute couture.  Coco Chanel poses in her new dress design, Bolero, in an edition of Harper’s Bazaar.  Behind her, Giacometti’s surreal swans are in flight.  His work was featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue among other commercial outlets important to Giacometti in the 1930s.  He produced lamps, vases, jewellery and bas relief in collaboration with interior designer Jean-Michel Frank.

A sculpture by Giacometti from the 1930s Woman with her Throat Cut points to surrealism as a point of influence.  An alien creature writhes in its death throes, at the same time it could be regarded as a work rejected by Dali’s studio.  Spoon Woman (1927) is comprehensible as a form pointing simultaneously towards a ceremonial spoon from the Dan culture of West Africa but also to cubism.  Transpositions, re-imaginings and bizarre conjunctions passed onto him from the surrealists and cubists that are essentially derivative reflecting on this phase of Giacometti’s art when he had outgrown the influence of his father’s post-impressionist painting and was struggling to find a voice.  The haunted figures reminiscent of the survivors of Auschwitz or Nagasaki, ghosts that somehow materialise in the mind of the artist, premonitions of horrors and symptomatic of the perceived decaying sense of spirituality that confounded the post-war world.

Giacometti was also working on a series of remarkable portraits after the war, of family and friends, but also of considerable yet controversial figures such as Jean Genet.  He was called upon to work on a set design for Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot but neither Beckett nor Giacometti could find any worth in the tree that he designed for the set and it was eventually discarded.   Two minimalists attempting to change a light bulb without a sense of the scope of electricity.

Giacometti’s portraits and sculptures are intensely conceived.  For Giacometti, the eyes are the window to the soul.  Each portrait is squeezed painfully into a tiny area, the artist’s intensity is immediately loosened then dissipated into its context.  Little is said about Giacometti’s political associations in the exhibition yet his relationship with the Surrealists points to an obvious point of political disembarkation and an orientation towards Freudianism too.  After the war, he gravitated towards an existentialist awareness compounded by the wider crisis unfolding around him and minimalism too.  When Giacometti left Switzerland at the end of the war all the art he had conceived in Geneva could have been fitted into three match boxes.  But art does not have to be monumental in scale or grandiose to be art and the obvious example of the large scale yet superficial and tedious aesthetic of Social Realism.  Neither did he gravitate towards the Communist camp as Picasso eventually did. 

Giacometti suffered from bronchitis and died in 1966 just before a planned trip to London, where his work was to be promoted at the Tate gallery.  His presence is still palpable and he is said to influence audiences and artists everywhere.

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, July 2017