How Alberto Giacometti became a legend

THE man strides forward, bent slightly at the waist as if resisting a stiff breeze. He is not so much gaunt as spectral, stretched out like chewing gum, as insubstantial as smoke. And yet, despite his frailty, he is determined, even heroic. “Walking Man I”, a bronze made by Alberto Giacometti in 1960, is a searing monument to an era of anxiety, and a symbol of endurance in the face of overwhelming odds.

During his own life Giacometti, who was born in Switzerland in 1901, sometimes seemed too outmoded and idiosyncratic to win acclaim. But his reputation has continued to grow while those of his contemporaries, who clung to modernist orthodoxy, have faded. Today his humanity and pathos appeal to audiences in a way that more formal sculptors cannot. A flurry of recent activity has solidified his place among a small group of artists, including Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo, whose work and persona have seeped into public consciousness.

A large-scale retrospective of his work opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on June 8th (Tate Modern in London hosted a similar show last year). Meanwhile the Giacometti Institute will open in Paris on June 21st. Both are projects of the Fondation Giacometti, which was established in 2003 to promote study and appreciation of the artist, and to manage the world’s largest collection of his paintings, sculptures and drawings (bequeathed by his widow, Annette). The institute will serve as a permanent exhibition space; enthusiasts will be able to make a pilgrimage to Giacometti’s studio, preserved like a holy shrine after his death in 1966 and now reconstructed.

Giacometti has also featured on the silver screen. “Final Portrait”, a homage released in America in March, stars Geoffrey Rush as the tormented genius. His stock is rising at the auction house, too. In 2015 “Man Pointing” (1947) fetched $141m, the highest price ever paid for a sculpture.

It helps that Giacometti looked the part. With his craggy features and mane of wild grey hair, his roguish charm and serial infidelities, he conforms exactly to popular notions of what an artist should be. But, says Catherine Grenier, director of the Fondation Giacometti, the artist himself was largely uninterested in fame and fortune. He insisted on following his own path, shrugging off the whims of art-scene fashion. Megan Fontanella, chief curator of the Guggenheim exhibition, says Giacometti was “an artist in some way lonely in his own time”.

After the second world war, Ms Fontanella notes, abstraction was widely viewed as the art of the future. Stubbornly, Giacometti returned to the human form. In the 1940s and 1950s he developed his signature style, creating those impossibly attenuated figures that his friend Jean-Paul Sartre compared to “the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald”. But while these fragile mortals, often so spindly that they seem to be on the point of vanishing, emerged in response to war and genocide, they embody more than horror. These “fine and slender natures rise up to heaven,” Sartre continued; “they are dancers, they are made of the same rarefied matter as the glorious bodies that were promised us.” Works such as “Walking Man I” and “Man Pointing”, both currently on view at the Guggenheim, seem damaged but aspiring, resolute in the face of adversity.

Giacometti also stood apart from his peers in his willingness to embrace the past. Rejecting the modernist exhortation to “make it new” (in Ezra Pound’s phrase), he conducted a lifelong dialogue with a sculptural tradition stretching back thousands of years. Many of his statues stand with the stiff formality of an Egyptian pharaoh; “Chariot” (1950) echoes figures unearthed from Etruscan tombs. Several early works, made while he was a member of the Surrealist movement, recall the simplified forms of ancient Cycladic art.

But his output is also distinctly contemporary. Eschewing the heroic, monumental approach which for centuries was sculpture’s default mode, his figures are evocations of disquiet and discontent that fit a world disillusioned with bombast. The bodies he models or carves have lost their physical integrity, a sense of a clear boundary between exterior and interior. They are kneaded, gnawed at, poked and gouged, reaching out across vast expanses even as they seem about to collapse under their own weight. They are rooted to the ground, their striving made more poignant by its obvious futility.

The strength of frailty

This sense of yearning and seeking, but not finding, is equally evident in his lesser-known drawings and paintings. Typical of Giacometti’s restlessness is “Yanaihara Seated Full-Length” (1957), a portrait for which the sitter posed 230 times, for five to eight hours each day. After all that effort, the subject’s features are almost entirely obliterated by a smear of brown paint—a testament to the difficulty of capturing another human being in full.

By providing resources for scholars, and facilitating exhibitions, Ms Grenier and the foundation have helped keep the Giacometti legend alive. Yet they have succeeded only because his work still resonates. A master of vulnerability, Giacometti offers solace in an age of doubt.