The power of history and the potent symbol of gesture come together in this historic showing at the Maeght Foundation at St. Paul de Vence in France. To host Giacometti in all its grandeur and gravity is indeed, the chance of a lifetime. The Maeght foundation (opened in 1964) named after the late art dealer Aime Maeght, is celebrating its $2 million revamp with “Giacometti & Maeght: 1946-1966”, an exhibition curated by Maeght’s granddaughter Isabelle.
The show offers a dizzying array of the artist’s best postwar works: Ambling men, piazzas peopled with pin-shaped humans, slim-waisted women, and the elongated dog (Le Chien, 1951), his neck drooping with age or weariness or both. All told, 60 bronzes, 20 paintings, and 10 tiny plaster works, illustrate the beauteous bond between the artist and his dealer. Look anywhere and the quasi-skeletal sculptures draw you into their maw. “He was the first to take it into his head to sculpt man as he appears, that is to say, from a distance,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in the catalogue to Giacometti’s first solo exhibition, at Pierre Matisse’s New York gallery in 1948.
Stupendous in form and shape is Figurine, also known as Femme Debout, a richly-modeled rendition of the most important motif in Giacometti’s career — the standing female figure. Throughout the 1940s and until his death in 1965, Giacometti created several variations of a lone nude woman: Her long, lean body anchored with heavy block feet to a base and frozen in time. In its many sculptural incarnations, this image highlights the dramatic contours of the body and the power of a single gesture. And with its multiple and conflicting thematic connotations of stoicism, resilience, passivity, strength and vulnerability, it embodies the existentialist concerns of many artists and intellectuals working in Paris during the Cold War. Figurine, created at the height of Giacometti’s international popularity in the mid-1950s, is inarguably a quintessential image in the artist’s oeuvre that underscores the permanence of Giacometti’s place as one of the true masters of 20th century art.
With its disproportionately small head and large feet accentuated by a sloping pedestal, the overall effect of this tall, slender figure is what James Lord termed an “ascending vitality” (James Lord, op. cit., p. 356). Reflecting on the impression which the Femmes de Venise make upon the viewer, Lord concludes: “When a spectator’s attention is fixed upon the head of one of these figures, the lower part of her body would lack verisimilitude were it not planted firmly upon those enormous feet, because even without looking directly at them, one is aware of their mass... The eye is obliged to move up and down, while one’s perception of the sculpture as a whole image becomes an instinctual act, spontaneously responding to the force that drove the sculptor’s fingers. Comparable to the force of gravity, it kept those massive feet so solidly set on the pedestal that they affirmed the physicality of the figure as the one aspect of his creativity which the artist could absolutely count on, all the rest being subject to the unreliability of the mind’s eye” (ibid., pp. 356-57).
Intrinsic to detail is the charismatic display of the thin, gaunt proportions for which Giacometti is best known, and about which he commented to Sylvester in 1964: “At one time I wanted to hold on to the volume, and they became so tiny that they used to disappear. After that I wanted to hold on to a certain height, and they became narrow. But this was despite myself and even if I fought against it. And I did fight against it; I tried to make them broader. The more I wanted to make them broader, the narrower they got. But the real explanation is something I still don’t know. I could only know it through the work that I am going to do,” (David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London and New York, 1997, p. 6).
Then there is the poignancy of poise in the dog. Le Chien captures the form, character and movement of the animal. It is closely related to the artist’s lean, wiry figures that reached their ultimate form in the years following the World War II. His figures, both human and animal, were reduced to their essential form, displaying an austerity that embodies the artist’s existentialist concerns.
In 1951 Giacometti executed a sculpture of a dog, Le Chien. Referring to the work, Giacometti told his friend, the writer Jean Genet: “The dog is myself. One day I saw it like that in the street. I was that dog.” Similarly, the image of the cat can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the artist himself and, in a wider context of the post-war period, as a reflection of the lonely and vulnerable human condition, a theme that very much preoccupied the artist at this time. The show at the Maeght Foundation is a testimony to the genius of Giacometti and the inner eye of the true artist.