Alberto Giacometti, whose well-known attenuated figures epitomized post-World War II angst, has long been acknowledged as a major twentieth-century sculptor. Yet the extent of his artistic production is broader than many people realize, encompassing uncounted hundreds of works in several styles and media, including painting and the graphic arts.
This fall the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is presenting a retrospective of his work, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), which will subsequently travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rather than being an exhaustive survey of Giacometti's prolific output, the exhibition emphasizes quality and variety, with over fifty sculptures, thirty paintings, and twenty drawings. The works date from 1922, when the twenty-year-old artist left his native Switzerland for Paris, through 1965, when ill health forced him into a hospital. Over the last ten years several Giacometti retrospective have been shown in Europe, but the Hirshhorn exhibition is the first presentation in the United States since 1974. With loans from public and private collections in Europe and North America, this exhibition includes recognized masterpieces and also several works rarely or never before shown publicly in this country.
Born in a mountainous, Italian-speaking region in southeastern Switzerland, Alberto Giacometti was raised in an artistic family. As the eldest son of Giovanni Giacometti and godson of Cuno Amiet--both Post-Impressionist painters with established reputations--Alberto received encouragement and training at home. He began drawing around 1910-12, undertook painting and watercolors in 1913-14, and made his first sculpture in 1915. The nascent artist developed his skills in his father's studio and at boarding school through 1919, when he enrolled in art school in Geneva. After studying independently in Italy in 1920-21, he decided to devote his efforts to sculpture. In January 1922 he settled in Paris--then capital of the art world--where he remained for the rest of his life, with regular visits to his family homes in Stampa and Maloja.
In Paris Giacometti studied nearly five years under Antoine Bourdelle, a prominent sculptor and former assistant to Auguste Rodin, although his attendance became increasingly sporadic and ceased altogether in 1927. As Giacometti began working independently, he entered a productive and innovative period, abandoning the representational styles of his youth to experiment with a variety of avant-garde modes in sculpture. In The Couple (1926) and Spoon Woman (1926-27), he adapted radical anatomical distortions from African sculpture, simplifying their shapes into geometric silhouettes. Spoon Woman, for example, was originally inspired by wood spoons carved by the Dan people of West Africa, but Giacometti translated the forms into virtual abstraction on a monumental scale.
Flirtation With Cubism
Giacometti then turned to Cubism, which had first been developed in Paris by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and others during 1907-1921. Though Giacometti later ignored or belittled his early abstract works, two stereometric Compositions from 1927 demonstrate his mastery of the Cubist idiom. He subsequently experimented with flattened forms, as if challenging the actual substance of sculpture, as in his marble Gazing Head of 1927-28.
In 1929-30
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