E10 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
art
BY SEBASTIAN SMEE
IN CLEVELANDT
here are situations, ex-
treme predicaments,
which make notions
like “optimism” or “pes-
simism” seem fatuous.
You just have to get through them
— and without any guarantees
that you will.
Alberto Giacometti was the
artist who made us aware that life
itself is such a situation.
Giacometti died in 1966, hav-
ing lived through two world wars.
Born in Switzerland to an artistic
family of Italian descent, he was
at the center of cultural life in
Paris for 30 years. He became an
emblem of postwar existential-
ism and, among artists, a heroic
exemplar of a studio practice
based in unstinting observation
of the human figure.
With his sunken, line-crossed
cheeks, his dark eyes and curly
hair, Giacometti had a charisma
difficult to dissociate from his
work. Many young artists and
writers revered him and came to
Paris hoping to spot him in a Left
Bank cafe. Friends with Pablo
Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Si-
mone de Beauvoir, he was photo-
graphed by an impressive array of
the 20th century’s finest photog-
raphers.
Some of these portraits — by
Man Ray, Brassai, Henri Cartier-
Bresson, Gordon Parks, Irving
Penn and Richard Avedon — ap-
pear in a major Giacometti exhi-
bition at the Cleveland Museum
of Art (through June 12). All con-
vey a sense of his austere, quick-
silver presence. The show, drawn
from the Foundation Giacometti
in Paris, will travel to the Seattle
Art Museum; the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston; and the Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas
City, Mo.
His studio was famously de-
crepit. But in his art, Giacometti
was exacting and fastidious, bow-
ing before a classical impulse that
ran from ancient Egypt and ar-
chaic Greece through the classi-
cal French tradition, from Pous-
sin to Cézanne and Matisse.
He made his name, however, as
a Surrealist, creating, along with
an array of fetish-like objects, two
of the most indelible sculptures
associated with the movement:
“Woman with Her Throat Cut”
and “The Palace at 4 a.m.” In 1935,
after only about five years, he
disavowed Surrealism. His return
to the real epitomized a cultural
shift that, under the pressure of
poverty, political extremism and
war, could no longer tolerate
dreams, fantasies and whimsy. It
sought truth.
Giacometti spent his last 20
years sculpting and drawing por-
traits from the same four or five
people. His sculptures can be tiny
enough to fit into a matchbox or
so tall they threaten to scrape the
ceilings of large galleries. He re-
jected the impulse to harmonize
his figures with ordinary human
scale or with their architectural
surrounds, so as to dramatize
their presence.
His sculptures have the alien
force of ancient totems pulled out
of dark tombs and, at the same
time, the elusive, fragile specifici-
ty of old photographs. They are
attenuated or “flattened out,” as
the critic Jed Perl once wrote, “by
the pressure of their coming into
being.” The experience of walking
past them or around them can be
haunting. But it’s only when you
stand in front of them, or in some
way stand with t hem (from the
side or directly behind can be just
as effective) and focus in on them
that they give up their devastat-
ing secret (which is also your
secret and mine): that we’re
alone, that no one else knows
what’s in our heads and that we
will cease to exist.
Giacometti’s father was a Post-
Impressionist painter and print-
maker. His way of working, based
in close observation of fleeting
effects, had a lasting impact on
his son.
Giacometti’s Impressionistic
touch took up where Rodin’s tou-
sled, light-smashing surfaces left
off. But where Rodin mobilized
light to create effects of erotic
vitality, Giacometti expressed an
equally forceful, almost Becket-
tian or Kafka-esque sense of
stuckness and insecurity.
Giacometti’s sculptures appear
to be the result of a process of
distillation, but it depends on
how you look at it. Just as Claude
Monet was more concerned withpainting the envelope of air
around his motifs than the motifs
themselves, Giacometti tried to
sculpt the space between himself
and his subjects. That space kept
getting bigger — and his human
subjects skinnier — the longer he
looked.
And how he looked! Giacomet-
ti lavished attention on his sitters
almost as a form of prayer, a way
of approaching an essence. (“The
only truth,” wrote Frank O’Hara
in another context, “is face to
face.”) It can seem, as the critic
John Berger wrote, that their “en-
tire reality is reduced to the fact of
being seen.”
But being seen is not the same
as being known. Giacometti un-
derstood that other people are, in
the deepest sense, unknowable.
That is why he didn’t believe it
possible to finish a portrait. What
would “finish” look like? His ap-
prehension was that you could
spend countless hours in some-
one’s presence — meeting their
gaze, looking away, looking back
again, conversing, laughing,
breaking for lunch, resuming in
intimate silence and so on. You
could do all this and, far from
accumulating into knowledge
and mutual understanding, all
this experience might rather eat
away at such understanding, re-
veal it as illusory and reinforce
your ultimate isolation.
The invisible acid eating away
at his figures was not pessimism,
or doubt, or the expression of a
passing crisis. It was factual and
permanent. It was, in short, mor-
tality.
The timing of this traveling
show feels excellent. American
audiences have not had quite the
same relationship with Giacom-
etti as audiences in Europe. While
major painters in Europe and the
United Kingdom (one thinks of
Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and,
above all, Frank Auerbach) took
him as an authentic master and a
model to emulate, Americans
have treated him more as a curi-
osity.
They saw that he epitomized a
certain idea of mid-century Paris,
that he was the great visual poet
of existentialism and that his
emaciated figures had something
to do with the camps, the gulags,
the ghosts of so many murdered
still striding among the
shellshocked living. But aside
from Willem de Kooning (who
was born and raised in Holland)
and Cy Twombly (who lived most-
ly in Europe), I can think of no
important American artist who
took anything significant from
Giacometti.
Perhaps that’s unsurprising.
Giacometti was part of a genera-
tion in Europe that was neither
pessimistic nor optimistic but
rather forced by dint of circum-
stance to dispense with illusions.
It was a generation that had lost
interest in make-believe.
Americans, who did not experi-
ence war on their mainland, suc-
cumbed to some of this mentality,
but they had less reason to let go
of their illusions. And both dur-
ing and after the post-war boom,
American culture proved general-
ly more concerned with propos-
ing solutions to mortality than
honestly facing it. (Americans are
more religious, they smoke less,
they keep plastic surgeons busier,
they prefer movies about super-
heroes to those about real people,
and many of them have taken to
fantasizing about living tax-free
on Mars.) Though art lovers here
may admire him from afar, the
general public in America has
found no real use for an artist like
Giacometti.
But since taking on the mantle
of world leadership, America has
lost several draining, ill-con-
ceived wars. Life expectancy is
declining. Almost a million peo-
ple have died, profoundly isolated
in their deaths, from a respiratory
disease. Once a beacon of democ-
racy, America has been seriously
flirting with authoritarianism,
and despite overwhelming evi-
dence, it cannot get its political
class to agree that its patterns of
consumption are laying waste to
the environment.
The stories with which Ameri-
ca has long soothed itself are
falling off like dead bark. Beyond
optimism, beyond pessimism,
America is ready for Giacometti.Alberto Giacometti: Toward the
Ultimate Figure t hrough June 12 at
the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150
East Blvd., Cleveland.
clevelandart.org.CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKAmericans m ay
finally be ready for
Alberto Giacometti
PHOTOS BY ARCHIVES, FONDATION GIACOMETTI/GORDON PARKS FOUNDATIONCLOCKWISE FROM TOP MIDDLE: Giacometti’s “The Nose”
(1947–1949), “ Annette Standing” (circa 1954) and “Man With
a Windbreaker” (1953). The experience of walking past his
sculptures or around them can be haunting.
Alberto Giacometti, above, in his studio in 1 951, photographed
by G ordon Parks. Though he made his name as a Surrealist,
Giacometti w as part of a generation in Europe that was forced
to dispense with illusions — and instead seek truth.