Alberto Giacometti, Assiette de pommes et buste de femme, c. 1952, Graphite on card, 3-1/8 x 11-1/4".

Alberto Giacometti, Portrait de Pierre Reverdy de profil droit, 1962, Ballpoint pen on paper, 11-1/8 x 8-7/8".

Alberto Giacometti, Une page d'esquisse pour les sculptures, 1959, Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 14-1/2 x 10-1/2".

Alberto Giacometti, Fleurs, 1952, Graphite on paper, 20 x 13-3/8", Private Collection.

Alberto Giacometti, Nu couché, 1922-23, Graphite on paper, 19-7/8 x 13", Private Collection.

Peter Freeman, Inc.
560 Broadway, #602/603
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Alberto Giacometti: Drawings
May 1-June 27, 2009

While there have been previous exhibitions dedicated to specific periods of the artist's works on paper, and while drawings have always been an important component of Giacometti retrospectives, this is the first exhibition in New York devoted exclusively to the entire oeuvre of drawings by Giacometti. Curated by Meredith Harper, the exhibition presents over 30 sheets from throughout his career, providing an intense look at the artist's inimitable drawing style.

The exhibition spans almost the entirety of Giacometti's career, with equal focus on all of the artist's subjects: portraits, landscapes, interiors, still lifes, and studies related to sculpture. The earliest drawing in the exhibition, Nu couché (Reclining Nude) (1922-23), is typical of those done from life while Giacometti studied in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle. It already displays the origins of his almost "nervous" line with rapid pencil strokes and nimble shading. La Table surrealiste (1933), as suggested by the title from the artist's Surrealist period of 1929-1935, demonstrates Giacometti's translation of sculptural form into an intricate web of pen and ink in two dimensions.

Throughout his career Giacometti vacillated between working from life and his imagination, at times using only one method and at others combining the two in various works. From 1940-45 he struggled with what he considered to be too strong a focus on tiny figures, a difficulty he was only able to resolve through drawings: "But head and figures seemed to me to have a bit of truth only when small. All this changed a little in 1945 through drawing. This let me to want to make larger figures, but then to my surprise, they achieved a likeness only when tall and slender." This resolution is apparent in Nu debout dans l'atelier (1950), a work that shows, as observed by Peter Selz, the human form "reduced beyond its ultimate minimum, [and] barely able to withstand the onslaught of the void."

Among portraits exhibited are examples of those closest in his circle, including James Lord, Igor Stravinsky, and a commanding rendering of his dealer Pierre Loeb (1950) in an interior surrounded by African sculptures and works by Giacometti. Vase de fleurs (1952) is a masterful example of Giacometti's particular use of erasure in the creation of space and movement, making visual his statement, "Figures were never for me a compact mass but like a transparent construction." One of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, Giacometti consistently searched for ways to convey the modern human condition, and considered drawing an equally important medium in his dialogue between form and space.

Alberto Giacometti (October 10, 1901-January 11, 1966) was was born in Borgonovo, now part of the Swiss municipality of Stampa, near the Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a painter. Alberto attended the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin. There he experimented with Cubism and Surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading Surrealist sculptors. Hiis associates included Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Balthus.

Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model's gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out; their limbs elongated. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, "he would make your head look like the blade of a knife." After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti said that the final result represented the sensation he felt when he looked at a woman.

His paintings underwent a parallel procedure. The figures appear isolated, are severely attenuated, and are the result of continuous reworking. Subjects were frequently revisited: one of his favorite models was his younger brother Diego Giacometti. A third brother Bruno Giacometti is a Swiss architect.

In 1962, he was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, The award brought with it worldwide fame. Even when he had achieved popularity and his work was in demand, he still reworked models, often destroying them or setting them aside to be returned to years later. Prints produced by Giacometti are often overlooked but the catalogue raisonné, Giacometti – The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings by Herbert Lust (Tudor 1970), comments on their impact and gives details of number of copies of each print. Some of his most important images were in editions of only 30 and many were described as rare in 1970.

In his later years Giacometti's works were shown in a number of large exhibitions throughout Europe. Riding a wave of international popularity, and despite his declining health, he traveled to the United States in 1965 for an exhibition of his works at the New York Museum of Modern Art. As his last work he prepared the text for the book Paris sans fin, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places where he had lived.

Giacometti died in 1966 of heart disease (pericarditis) and chronic bronchitis at the Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace in Borgonovo, where he was interred close to his parents. In May 2007 the executor of his widow's estate, French foreign minister Roland Dumas, was convicted of illegally selling Giacometti's works to a top auctioneer. The auctioneer, Jacques Tajan, was also convicted. Both were ordered to pay €850,000 to the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation.

Giacometti was a key player in the Surrealist Movement, but his work resists easy categorization. Some describe it as formalist, others argue it is expressionist or otherwise having to do with what Deleuze calls 'blocs of sensation' (as in Deleuze's analysis of Francis Bacon). Even after his excommunication from the Surrealist group, while the intention of his sculpting was usually imitation, the end products were an expression of his emotional response to the subject. He attempted to create renditions of his models the way he saw them, and the way he thought they ought to be seen. He once said that he was sculpting not the human figure but "the shadow that is cast." His figures resembled the way he looked upon himself.

Scholar William Barrett in Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962), argues that the attenuated forms of Giacometti's figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism that modern life is increasingly devoid of meaning and empty. "All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces … So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life."

His work is in numerous public collections, including the Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate Britain, in Britain, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh. He created the monument on the grave of Gerda Taro at Père Lachaise Cemetery. In 2001 he was included in the Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000 exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In November 2000 "Grande Femme Debout I" by Giacometti sold for $14.3 million. Giacometti's bronze Grande Femme Debout II was bought by the Gagosian Art Gallery for $27.4 million at Christie's auction in New York City on May 6, 2008. Giacometti and his sculpture Three Men Walking appear on the current 100 Swiss Franc banknote.

Alberto Giacometti, Diego assis, 1964, Bronze, 58,5 x 19,7 x 32,5 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Geschenk Bruno und Odette Giacometti, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich

Grüner Kopf, Ägypten, um 400 v. Christus, Grauwacke, Höhe 21,5 cm, Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche, 1947, Bronze, 170 x 23 x 53 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich

Alberto Giacometti, Cube, 1933/34 Bronze, 94 x 54 x 59 cm, Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich.

Kunsthaus Zurich
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Giacometti – of Egypt
27 February-24 May 2009

Giacometti – of Egypt constitutes the first attempt to visualize the analogies between the work of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), the leading Swiss artist of the 20th century, and the visual culture of the ancient Egyptians with masterpieces from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin — including busts of Akhenaton and Nefertiti, the block statue of Senemut, and the so-called Berlin Green Head— together with sculptures, paintings and drawings by Alberto Giacometti, who was profoundly influenced by ancient Egyptian art. Visitors will be taken by Giacometti’s use of Egyptian "style," including concentration on the human form, its relation of figure to space, and basic artistic intention, which was to assure the individual an eternal present.

Giacometti was still a student when archaeologists from Berlin excavated the treasures of Akhenaton in Amarna in the early 20th century, but the young artist was immediately convinced of the Egyptian culture’s superiority to all of its subsequent counterparts. Giacometti first encountered original Egyptian artifacts in 1920 in Florence, where he was confronted with the reification of his own artistic aspirations: a distillation of reality, the living presence of humanity in a stylistic form. It was the beginning of a life-long relationship. Upon his return from Italy, Alberto presented his father and mentor Giovanni with an earnest of his maturity as an artist in the form of a masterly full-figure self-portrait. The painting, in which Giacometti styles his own features after the gaunt, elongated face of Akhenaton as a token of his respect for the ancient genre, is featured in the exhibition alongside a bust of the pharaoh himself. In Paris, as a disciple of Bourdelle’s, Giacometti tried his hand at portraying living models. He studied Egyptian artifacts at the Louvre and copied illustrations from books. Egyptian philosophy played a role in the thinking of the Surrealists, who counted Giacometti as a fellow traveller at the time, and, when his father Giovanni died in 1933, Alberto began to focus on ideas of death and the beyond. Giacometti’s Cube with an engraving of a self-portrait can be seen as the modern artist’s response to the Egyptian block statues that had so fascinated him in Florence, the most influential of which, depicting the ancient architect Senemut, will also be on show at the Kunsthaus. Giacometti began his most intensive encounter with ancient Egyptian art in 1934, when he drew himself as a "writer." What may be termed Giacometti’s "phenomenological realism," his attempt to record reality as it arises in the process of seeing, developed in the dialogue between his drawn self-portraits and his pellucid copies of Egyptian masterpieces, such as the so-called Berlin Green Head, also on display in Zurich.

In and around 1942, Giacometti drew numerous versions of the fresco of the garden of Ipy, copying it more than any other work of art. His landscapes which are obviously indebted to that work indicate his fascination by the rhythmic lines of its trees and shrubbery, and by the vibrant web of taut linear structures in which it catches life on the fly, as well as the powerful forces of nature. It had begun to dawn on Giacometti that the essence of life is motion, which Egyptian art emblematizes in the paradigmatic form of the striding figure. This ancient typology, which was to provide Giacometti with a template for his own striding men, grants the nervous subjectivity of modern perception a basic solidity. The latent movement depicted is made manifest in a given figure’s pedestal as well as in the tension between the figure and its spatial environment created by its oversized feet. While the Egyptian sculpture’s lifelike quality was a function of the Ka, or soul, immanent within it, Giacometti accomplishes the same effect in his work by way of the restlessness in the eye of its beholder, initially the artist himself, and subsequently his viewers. The Egyptian typology was to become a central benchmark for Giacometti’s postwar production. In the busts he created in the 1950s and 1960s, Giacometti dramatically increased the contrast between the chaos of his subjects’ nether parts and the life reflected in their gaze. The highest degree of this contrast, in Diego assis and Lotar III, was achieved in reference to ancient Egypt’s kneeling figures. These works testify to something many witnesses of Alberto’s working methods have also noticed: his continual renewal of the creative process, the guarantor of vitality which was perfected in the viewer’s parallel act of perception. One is reminded of the Egyptian notion that the sun god ensures the continuation of life by restaging the genesis of the cosmos anew every morning as he rises from the primeval waters.

The ancient Egyptian artifacts were on show until 15 February 2009 in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, together with 12 sculptures by Giacometti. The Kunsthaus presents 20 Egyptian sculptures — two from the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich and 18 from Berlin — in judicious juxtaposition with comparable works of Alberto Giacometti and as many as 80 other pieces by the Swiss artist, including paintings, a significant number of masterful drawings after Egyptian models, and the two books in which Giacometti drew more marginalia than in any other, Fechheimer’s Die Plastik der Ägypter and Ludwig Curtius’ Egypt volume in the handbook of art history. The exhibition was curated by Christian Klemm, conservator of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation and of the collection at the Kunsthaus Zürich. The subject of the show is considered in greater depth in a publication featuring essays by Klemm and the curator in Berlin, Dietrich Wildung, available for sale at the Museum Shop (CHF 28.-) and in bookstores.

Porträtkopf der Nofretete, Amarna/Ägypten, um 1340 v. Christus, Quarzit, Höhe 30 cm Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Stand-Schreitfigur eines Mannes, Abusir/Ägypten, um 1900 v. Christus, Holz, Höhe 10,2 cm, Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Porträtkopf des Echnaton, Amarna / Ägypten, um 1340 v. Christus, Gips, Höhe 25 cm, Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Porträtkopf des Echnaton, Amarna/Ägypten, um 1340 v. Christus, Gips, Höhe 25 cm, Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.