Giacometti at Tate Modern

GIACOMETTI 

11th June 2017. London

Rows and rows of heads greet you. Carved from wood, sculpted from plaster, cast in bronze, they stare straight ahead from on top of their pedestals. The style changes dramatically throughout the crowd of faces— there are affectionate, realistic portraits and flattened, cubist renderings. One marble bust has an Egyptian quality, smooth and noble. They vary in scale too, from the life-size to the miniature. They all lead, of course, to what everyone came to see. The last rows of busts are bronzes, long, thin, and textured— Giacometti. 

It’s an absolutely brilliant introduction to a surprisingly wonderful exhibition. To be clear, I didn’t expect to dislike the exhibition, but I didn’t expect it to teach me anything about Giacometti’s practice either. I thought I knew everything there was to know, and I was merely excited to see the sculptures that filled my art history textbooks. 

This first room told me that things weren’t going to be as straightforward as I had anticipated. In those first rows of busts, the ones I never would’ve thought to attribute to Giacometti, the evolution of his practice was immediately discernible. In those sculptures, there was evidence of the art that inspired him as a child, of his Cubist and Surrealist periods, of his interest in materiality. In just the introduction, the exhibition sought to disarm and excite, a trend that only continued as I moved further into the show.

The following rooms held more treasures. Along the lefthand wall of the second room, there was a shelf of small sculptures, moving from Cubist figures to unsettling Surrealist objects. In the centre of the space, among others, his Suspended Ball swung almost imperceptibly from side to side. Evidence of Giacometti’s decorative work, lampposts and wall decor, came next, a rare glimpse at his commercial practice. 

It was a shock to move from those small, sweet details to what followed— five large scale pieces from his early period, a capstone on his cubist and surrealist experiments. I spent ages standing in front of Woman with Her Throat Cut, trying to reckon it with what I knew of his practice. It had always puzzled me, always seemed to be out of place in his career, and I was delighted to see such an disturbing and incongruous piece included so prominently.

Of everything in the exhibition, however, the presentation of Giacometti’s wartime output was a real highlight for me. Minute sculptures, they sit in a small, brightly lit cabinet that wraps three-quarters of the way around the room. The scale speaks to the hardship of the period, but more so, they tell of Giacometti’s drive to create and affirm the strength of his vision . While they are impossibly small— apparently when he returned to Paris in 1945, they all fit in six matchboxes— they have a remarkable presence that no photograph could hope to portray. This small room was worth the price of admission alone. 

The exhibition charts a familiar course from here and hits all the points you’d expect from a Giacometti exhibition. There are brilliant examples of his textured, elongated figures, including Falling Man and a threadbare dog. While they’re expected, they are still able to delight and move. 

Interspersed, however, there is more to surprise— the curators have included a selection of his plaster sculptures including a selection of nine woman first displayed at the 1956 Venice Biennale. While his bronze pieces have become so popular as to be in danger of losing their uncanny power, the plaster pieces have lost none of their eerie qualities. 

They’re fleshy and the evidence of their construction is plain. You can plainly see where Giacometti cut into them with knives and, in that context, splashes of dark paint read like blood. They seem to be decomposing and bleeding as they stand in front of you.

When you turn from these ghoulish pieces to the three towering bronze figures that close the exhibition, you see Giacometti in a new light.