The thrill of being spooked by great art
In recent years, Tate Modern has repositioned itself so radically – challenging the Western canon of dead white males by championing women and artists from non-white, ethnic backgrounds – that its new retrospective of the Swiss sculptor-painter Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) may come as a shock. Here is a show that harks back to the programming of yesteryear: an in-depth exhibition, with more than 250 works, honouring one of the universally acknowledged greats of modern art. Where is the risk in that?
Everybody knows – or thinks they do – Giacometti’s post-war sculptures: those spindly standing women and striding men, cast in bronze. Skeletal figures seemingly stretched on a rack of anxiety, they were once considered disturbing avatars of the nuclear age. Now they are fetishes for the superrich. In 2015, Man Pointing (1947) sold at auction for more than $141 million.
Giacometti himself is barely less familiar, immortalised in black-andwhite photographs, toiling away in his garret in Montparnasse, his craggy face knitted in concentration, a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers. He remains the quintessence of Left Bank existential angst.
In the wake of recent exhibitions devoted to his work, including Pure Presence at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015, and A Line Through Time at the Sainsbury Centre last year, what else is there to say about him?
The answer is, it transpires, a surprising amount. I entered Tate’s exhibition expecting to be bored, even irritated. But I was won over, from the off, by an elegant and sometimes dramatic display, which foregrounds neglected aspects of his life and work.
The opening room is a case in point. Greeting us like a hushed, expectant audience with upturned faces, are more than 20 portrait busts and heads, arranged in a block, sculpted by Giacometti between 1917 and 1960. Here is his father, Giovanni, a Postimpressionist painter. There is his brother Diego, a layabout who ended up as his assistant and model.
As well as introducing us to Giacometti the man, the prologue makes an important art-historical point – because it showcases the variety of his work, in terms of scale, style and choice of materials. Yes, there are bronze busts, flattened like axe heads. But there are also sweet naturalistic portraits, and several works in clay and plaster, including a stylised portrait of Giacometti’s model Isabel Rawsthorne, in an “Egyptian” manner. Egyptian sculpture, as a later gallery makes plain, was one of the wellsprings of Giacometti’s art.
Next, we are plunged into Giacometti’s early years in Paris, where he moved in 1922, having grown up in an alpine valley before studying painting in Geneva. A sequence of sculptures, arranged on a long shelf, reflects his avantgarde experiments.
Above all, we are reminded of the ferocity of his vision during the Thirties, when violence and dark eroticism crackled beneath the sleek, chic surfaces of his art. Unsurprisingly, these qualities attracted the attention of the Surrealists.
Take the objects in Giacometti’s sensuous
Suspended Ball (1930-31), a version of which once belonged to “Surrealist-in-chief ” André Breton: a plaster sphere, hanging from a metal frame, nuzzles against a crescent-like wedge, like a peach fornicating with a slice of melon. Meanwhile,
Disagreeable Object (1931), a semi-tumescent, spiked phallus attached to an owl-like “head”, bespeaks deep-set sexual anxiety.
Caught Hand (1932), which snares a mannequin’s truncated forearm within a cruel metal contraption, like a horrifically rarefied torture device, is even more vicious, yet also powerful. It offers a twisted memory of a childhood accident, when Diego’s hand was crushed in a threshing machine. As for the nightmarish
Cut (1932) – a splayed nude, halfhuman and half-scorpion, with a smashed ribcage and slashed windpipe – this is, surely, one of the most macabre and unforgettable sculptures of the 20th century. Has any
artist created a more terrifying spectacle of animalistic sex?
At the same time as exorcising his own sexual demons, Giacometti was also earning a living by designing decorative objects, such as vases and lamps. A striking cabinet, offering a rich selection of his commercial work, is a coup. So is the beautiful gallery devoted to his output during the Second World War, when he was holed up in a hotel in Geneva, where he met his wife, Annette. During the war, Giacometti geared down, working on a remarkably small scale: the story goes that, packing for his return to Paris in 1945, he fitted everything he had made in Switzerland into six matchboxes. At the Tate, though, his minuscule creations have great presence, thanks to a beautifully lit, strip-like display, which wraps around three of the four walls. At this point, the exhibition enters well-mapped territory, as we encounter the elongated silhouettes and restless surfaces of the extra-terrestrial figures that Giacometti started producing after the war. The lanky, emaciated bronzes on display include Man Pointing, a woman atop a chariot, a threadbare yet charming dog, which Giacometti considered a self-portrait, and, from the Kunsthaus Zurich, Falling Man (1950), which, post-9/11, has accrued additional tragic resonance. Seemingly made of ash and bones, like survivors of some atomic apocalypse, these gaunt, shadowy creatures, with strangely swollen feet, remain powerful but offer few surprises.
By contrast, several masterworks in plaster, on loan from the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, are a revelation.
The biggest draw is a group of eight of the surviving nine Women of Venice, which have not been seen in public since Giacometti exhibited them at the Venice Biennale of 1956, when he represented France. These fragile, tapering artworks have an eerie, animated presence – because the play of light and shadow upon their flesh-coloured surfaces emphasises the nervous, nubby textures worked by Giacometti’s hands.
Once the plasters had been cast, Giacometti further enhanced their jittery character by attacking them with a knife – nicking a shoulder here, scarring a belly there. He also embellished them with paint.
Looking at his scuffed and vulnerable plaster sculptures, then, defamiliarises a revered artist. It also helps to reinvest his work in general with the atavistic magic it once had. This is especially evident in the unique plaster version, from 1947, of his well-known sculpture The Nose, which was also cast in bronze. Harking back to his Surrealist phase, while also drawing upon tribal African art and absurdist philosophy, The Nose offers an extraordinary vision, at once terrifying and silly, of a grimacing head, with a Pinocchio-like proboscis, dangling from a sharp hook in an open metal box. From the side, its silhouette resembles a revolver.
In bronze, The Nose is scary enough. In plaster, it has extra ghoulishness, because the head has the startling quality of decomposing flesh. I only wish it weren’t hidden away in a side gallery near the end.
The Nose offers a reminder that Giacometti was never afraid to tackle the biggest themes: sex, death, the nature of human existence, adrift in a godless universe.
Nobody, of course, would turn to Giacometti for ribaldry, merriment, or colour: his paintings are insistently sombre, grey affairs.
I left Tate’s exhibition spooked by its many ashen visions and apparitions – half-glimpsed phantoms summoned from the troubled nether-world of Giacometti’s imagination – which articulate the nightmares of us all. I mean that as a compliment: in the hands of a great artist, being spooked can offer a profound thrill.
From tomorrow until Sept 10. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk. Telegraph subscribers can save 20 per cent on tickets. Visit telegraph.co.uk/rewards and see ‘offers’ then ‘culture’ to claim