The unlimited world of Alberto Giacometti reveals an infinite intensity in his early pre-war sculptures, some of which stand only inches tall.
Get closer……yes, closer…
Taking a careful look at Giacometti’s early works at Luxembourg & Dayan
Take a good look at the sculptures currently on display at Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery in New York’s Upper East Side and you will feel your self acutely drawn into these compelling miniature masterworks. Alberto Giacometti’s early sculptures may look small but they are immense reservoirs of emotion, expression, and genius – which is, and always will be, Giacometti’s famously celebrated signature style. Intimate Intensity is a show fully loaded with the subtleties of creative greatness and the irreducibility of the impassioned virtuosity of this immortal artist.
Walking Man, Giacometti’s take on an ancient Egyptian convention
Each sculpture exhibited reveals a dynamic and unrelenting pursuit of irregular perfection. The expressionistic forms of his sculptures are battlegrounds of plaster, clay, and bronze that seem at war with the emotions of love, despair, and exaltation of an artist who was famously never quite satisfied. As seen in the 2017 biopic Final Portrait starring Jeffery Rush, Giacometti’s restlessness is what brought the artist, his sitters, and now his audience to the extreme lengths of an intensified excellence – achieved at the price of endless trials and errors. Casimiro Di Crescenzo (the show’s curator and a leading Giacometti scholar) reminds us how much pure intention each figure is imbued with, saying that: “Each figure represents a specific. For example, in this portrait [below], there are eighteen poses. The portrait you see is the final. But there are seventeen he had to cancel. That was his way to create.” Giacometti’s famous determination is palpable in the work held within these miniature homages.
Yet if they are homages, why then are they atomized? Why does Giacometti choose to remember his late wife, for instance, in a bust no bigger than an inch or two?
#infinitesimal
At a time when the world’s stage was shifting dramatically, where histories were being radically re-shaped by global forces, and when the dignity of human life was under the severe threat by an oncoming World War II, Giacometti reduced the scale of his efforts to the elemental expression of self: memory. These sculptures aim to preserve the core of identity in a world that was being torn to shreds. “Anguish of the war was a constant in his life. The atelier was his battlefield,” says Casimiro as he remarks on the harshness of late 1930’s Europe.
The distance of memory by which these little “votive” figurines are produced add a layer of purest nostalgia to their imperfect faces and queer little bodies. As the material laps and overlaps liberally over itself the nostalgia is brought to life with light hitting it from every possible natural angle as our views shift as we get closer to see what looks like raw material commanding its own presence. Paraphrasing the artist himself, Casimiro quotes Giacometti’s claim that “‘This kind of erratic art, represents more reality than the Greeks did!’ He was trying to find a new way of representation of the human being. Not what the western tradition saw, but what he saw.” And truly, after just a short exposure to these sculptures, one has an immediate sense of realness, animation almost, from them.
Intimate Intensity runs from Nov.11 – Dec.15 and is no small delight! Within the limited boundaries of these diminutive figures an immense presence is evoked – Alberto Giacometti, a giant in the world of twentieth-century art.
