Parallax

 

Supposedly in a single day in 1951, Alberto Giacometti executed a group of approximately lifesize animal sculptures in plaster-two horses, a cat, and a dog. (The horses no longer exist.) In the mid-1950s, Giacometti told writer Jean Genet that Dog was a form of self-portrait: "One day, I saw myself in the street like that. I was the dog." In 1964, Giacometti recalled the sculpture's genesis in greater detail:

. . . One day I was walking along the rue de Vanves in the rain, close to the walls of the buildings, with my head down, feeling a little sad, perhaps, and I felt like a dog just then. So I made that sculpture. But it's not really a likeness at all. Only the sad muzzle is anything of a likeness.¹

The artist executed the sculpture immediately, "so as to get rid of the hound once and for all." In contrast to Giacometti's normally slow process of reworking portrait sculptures, the rapid modeling of the plaster animal sculpturesrecalls his Surrealist method of pulling a complete image from memory. The 1951 group represented Giacometti's last animal works.

Adapted from "Giacometti 1901-1966" (1988) by Valerie J. Fletcher.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working in Paris in the aftermath of World War II, haunted by the horrors of death and suffering yet encouraged by the war's end, Alberto Giacometti developed an expressive figurative style, portraying skeletally thin nudes with roughened surfaces. Their emaciation, anonymity, isolation, and intense stares impressed critics and the public as powerful metaphors for the human condition in a disillusioned age. In this postwar example, the pointed nose thrusts dramatically outward-aimed assaultively at the viewer, like a rifle or sword-a macabre impression accentuated by a gaping, toothless grin and hollow eyes. The head's overall shape was inspired by a bamboo-and-bark mask from the Baining people of New Britain (Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel), and by the shaved, emaciated skulls of prisoners liberated from Nazi concentration camps.

By suspending the head inside a cage, Giacometti emphasized the theme of imprisonment, but he went beyond a specific reference to war, creating a symbol for myriad states of mind. "The Nose" expresses the mental prison of one's own fears, the possibility of extending beyond physical or psychological cages, or, conversely, the need to contain or restrain the potential of an inner evil. Text adapted from "Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: 150 Works of Art" (1996), entry by Valerie J. Fletcher.

 

Throughout his life, Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, born Borgonovo, 1901–1966) was devoted to portraying the human figure in various styles and media. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study with Antoine Bourdelle, Auguste Rodin’s protégé. From 1925 to 1929, Giacometti created Cubistic works and abstract linear constructions drawing on the simplicity and totemic frontality of African carvings. These brought him to the attention of the Surrealists, with whom he became aligned until 1935.

From the mid-1930s through World War II, the artist struggled to convey in sculpture his visual concept of a model in empty space at a far distance, a preoccupation that would develop into his mature style. Giacometti’s postwar figure sculptures had skeletal bodies with gouged surfaces that surpassed the expressiveness of Rodin. The combination of fixed frontal stares and ravaged surfaces effectively keep the viewer at a distance, for seen up close the features dissolve into daubs and irregular textures.

Giacometti’s paintings have a similar effect, worked and reworked into a skein of lines and color floating in diffuse fields—reflecting the artist’s belief in the Existentialist premise that one cannot fully know or experience the reality of another person, and that this separateness underlies our daily consciousness.

Adapted from The Human Figure Interpreted: Modern Sculpture from the Hirshhorn Museum (1995), by Valerie J. Fletcher.