Alberto Giacometti
The Swiss sculptor having another moment
Alberto Giacometti: A Line Through Time Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich
What is it about Alberto Giacometti? Earlier this week, only three months after a major Giacometti exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern announced that a full retrospective for the Swiss-born sculptor will be the centrepiece of its programme for 2017.
Meanwhile, another substantial exhibition, Alberto Giacometti: A Line
Through Time, replete with several spectacular international loans – including Spoon Woman (1926-27), an important early work inspired by African art – opens today at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.
Giacometti, it’s clear, belongs to that exclusive club of alpha modern artists, alongside Picasso and Matisse, whose work endlessly fascinates gallery-goers. In a sense, this is remarkable, since, unlike Matisse, Giacometti did not wish to enrapture the eye with gorgeousness. Rather, his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, which remain synonymous with post-war angst, have a decidedly downbeat quality.
Moreover, you’d think that there would be nothing new to say about Giacometti, who is best known for his drastically elongated, bleakly heroic bronze figures, standing and walking by themselves in an empty, godless universe. Yet, against the odds, the new show, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death, suggests that, actually, there is.
It doesn’t offer a comprehensive overview of Giacometti’s life and art. Instead, it sheds fresh light on the artist by focusing on several specific themes.
After a conventional introduction, featuring his early 1920 self-portrait in oils, as well as the Sainsbury Centre’s own haunting pencil-on-paper self-portrait from 1935, the show pauses to explain Giacometti’s relationship with the connoisseurs Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who amassed an important collection of his art before founding the centre during the Seventies.
Robert and Lisa first met Giacometti in Paris in 1949 and became good friends with him, despite the fact that the artist didn’t speak any English. Six years later, they invited him to make a series of drawings of their teenage children, David and Elizabeth. Giacometti, who famously considered most of his output a failure, was so dismayed by the results of a session drawing David in 1955 that he refused to hand over any of the sketches – until he succumbed to Lisa’s enterprising persuasion. Recognising that Giacometti’s young wife, Annette, was in need of a raincoat, Lisa offered to buy her a decent one after returning to London. The receipt for the Aquascutum mackintosh that she subsequently sent to Paris is in the show. It cost £27 6d and delighted Alberto and Annette so much that the artist released three drawings of David. At this point, the exhibition examines Giacometti in the context of post-war Paris, where he returned, to his squalid, dusty studio in Montparnasse, in late 1945, after a spell in Switzerland during the war. It is instructive to consider his work alongside paintings and sculptures by artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier and Germaine Richier, who all convey something of the broken, bomb-scarred textures of the city. They suggest that Giacometti was far from alone in articulating the pervasive new spirit of austerity amid the rubble. Richier’s small bronze figure Man-Bird (1954), with its scytheshaped skull, has a witchy, nightmarish ferocity. The work in this section, though, is patchy: a painting of a female nude by Francis Gruber, in the Sainsbury Centre’s collection, is memorably awful. But this is offset by a brilliant display case nearby, which intermingles pocket-sized sculptures by Giacometti with examples of the Cycladic, Egyptian, Etruscan and Roman art that inspired him. This game of spot-theGiacometti is trickier than it first appears, revealing the extent to which this pioneer of modern art kept one eye on antiquity. The best part of the exhibition, however, is the finale, which focuses upon Giacometti’s influence on post-war British art. The ICA held a groundbreaking exhibition of his work in 1955, but it had already been recognised by British artists: Lucian Freud and William Turnbull, for instance, both met Giacometti in Paris in the aftermath of the war. The satisfaction of this final gallery is that it showcases a generation of British artists who were brilliant in their own right. Giacometti’s influence is apparent everywhere, but, for the most part, it was refashioned into something exciting and new by Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Turnbull, and their contemporaries. These talented youngsters did not feel squashed by Giacometti’s presence but instead channelled his aesthetic to forge their own strong artistic identities.
Chadwick’s fraught figures have the tense, nervous energy of a frightened cat with its fur standing on end, while Bernard Meadows’s Maquette for Crab (c. 1951-52) and Geoffrey Clarke’s Fawn (1951) are full of menace, mischief, and flair. Even Turnbull’s bronze
Acrobat (1951), which is obviously indebted to Giacometti’s sombre figures, boasts a freewheeling, priapic energy all its own.
Elsewhere, there is a memorable juxtaposition of Giacometti’s The Cage
( first version), from 1950, a bronze sculpture from the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland, with the Sainsbury Centre’s Study of a Nude (1952-53) by Francis Bacon – making plain the source of the threatening, box-like forms that often surround figures in the latter’s paintings.
Not all of the art in this room is first-rate: the sculptures of the once-lauded Robert Clatworthy have been forgotten for a reason. Clumpy and formally conservative, they lack the poise and energy of work by his peers.
The curators also wish to rehabilitate the reputation of Isabel Rawsthorne, the well-known muse of both Giacometti and Bacon, as an artist in her own right – but the hesitant paintings on display lack self-confidence and gusto.
Still, the final gallery of the exhibition, full of surprising connections and eye-catching work, is a great success, turning Giacometti’s oft-told story into an innovative, and memorable, celebration of British art.