In the winter of 1947, Alberto Giacometti wrote a letter to Pierre Matisse, a gallerist in New York who was organizing an exhibition of his works. “Here is the list of sculptures that I promised you,” the letter began, “but I could not make it without including, though very briefly, a certain chain of events.” The “chain of events” starts with the artist’s youth in Switzerland in the early 1900s, then proceeds to his search for new modes of artistic expression in the 1920s and 1930s. It ends in 1947, with Giacometti’s sculpted figures, frail and solitary, which his contemporaries described as icons of postwar Europe. “This is almost where I am today,” he concluded in his letter, “no, where I still was yesterday.”
Before “today,” before “yesterday,” Giacometti had studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at art schools in Geneva and Paris—years he later dismissed as the “period of the academy.” Dissatisfied with realistic representations of the human body, he turned to enigmatic forms—modeled in plaster and cast in bronze—that were inspired by his engagement both with Cubism and with non-Western art. One such work, The Couple (1927), evokes the stylization of African and Oceanic masks as well as the abstracted, geometrical compositions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Another such work, Spoon Woman (1926–27), resembles the oversized wooden ladles carved by Dan artists in Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia. At last, Giacometti was producing sculptures that corresponded to what he termed his “vision of reality.”
He exhibited these sculptures in Paris, where he settled into a small, bare-bones studio in 1926. “Everything here is prodigiously alive,” enthused author and ethnographer Michel Leiris after a visit to this studio. According to Leiris, Giacometti shared aesthetic interests and techniques with the Surrealists, a group of artists and writers who sought to overturn the strictures of modern life by activating the subconscious. Like them, he was preoccupied with mysterious dreams, memories, and impressions; like them, he was attracted to puzzling objects and spontaneous creative processes. Giacometti, Leiris claimed, had cast aside the solemn, imposing statues typical of traditional European sculpture. Instead of monuments, Leiris went on to write, Giacometti produced “real fetishes”—objects, such as Gazing Head (1928–29), detached from their surroundings and endowed with desire.
By the early 1930s, Giacometti had become a committed Surrealist. In 1933, he announced his ties to the movement in Minotaure, a journal co-edited by the Surrealist leader André Breton. “For many years I have executed only sculptures that have presented themselves to my mind entirely completed,” Giacometti explained. “I have limited myself to reproducing them in space without changing anything, without asking myself what they could mean.” An example, he wrote, was The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932), a fragile-looking structure with unexpected contents: a bird skeleton, a sheet of glass, and a spinal column, all suspended; a standing female figure in front of three panels; and an upright ellipse, also backed by a panel, with a sphere at its base. In Minotaure, Giacometti linked these objects to specific people and events from his life, many of them unsettling. The sculpture, he suggested, was a Surrealist self-portrait.
Yet the Surrealists, a famously fractious community, expelled Giacometti in 1935 for working once again with models, as he had in art school. Simultaneously, he continued working from memory. The result was a series of small human figures, begun toward the end of World War II, which secured his fame in Europe and the United States. Spindly, rough, and solitary, these figures convey the hardships and alienation of the war and its aftermath. One of their many champions was the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who credited Giacometti with introducing a “Copernican revolution” in contemporary sculpture. “He chose to sculpt situated appearance,” Sartre wrote in 1948, and by doing so, “attained the absolute.”
Over time, Giacometti increased the size of his figures, all the while elongating their torsos and limbs. “To my surprise,” he wrote in his 1947 letter to Pierre Matisse, “they achieved a likeness only when tall and slender.” A large-scale “likeness,” gaunt and alone, stands on two lofty wheels in The Chariot, from 1950. Around the same time, the artist turned to paper and canvas to portray figures in small, cluttered enclosures. Often, he used his mother, Annetta, his brother, Diego, and his wife, Annette, as models. Whether in sculpture, painting, drawing, or printmaking, “likeness”—pursued through observation and recollection—would remain Giacometti’s aim for the rest of his career.
Annemarie Iker, independent scholar, 2024
