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The Slim, Surreal Creations of Alberto Giacometti
On the Centenary of the Artist's Birth, a Moody Retrospective
 David D'Arcy reports for Morning Edition on the Giacometti retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
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Self-portrait, 1921
Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich.
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Dec. 17, 2001 -- To many, the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti have become icons of the anxious mood of the post-World War II era: Thin, solitary figures with long arms and legs, betraying just a hint of human form.
The Swiss artist was one of the surrealists, but found fame with a style of sculpture that was completely original.
Giacometti would have been 100 this year -- and in an appropriate gesture by the first museum to ever buy his work, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is holding a commemorative exhibition with works from Giacometti's long career. David D'Arcy reports for Morning Edition that even now, what the artist's sculptures actually express is a matter of debate.
Most art critics assumed that those thin figures were rising from the ashes of Europe after the Holocaust, embodiments of a worldview that came to be called existentialism.
Giacometti himself often said they were his homage to the ancient Greek and Egyptian art he saw and sketched at the Louvre Museum in Paris. But many critics say it is the very ambiguity of the images that give them such power.
Giacometti did not intend to become a sculptor when he began his art career in Paris. A few years before he died in 1966, he told a French television interviewer that he took up the form because it wasn't easy:
"I did not want to spend my whole life making sculpture. I started sculpting because it was the art that I understood the least about. I should have moved on to other things that suited me better, but I couldn't tolerate the fact that I wasn't suited for sculpture. So kept doing it, so I'd get it out of my system."
In a famous encounter, the head of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton, asked Giacometti whether any artist cared what a human head looked like. Giacometti said, "I do."
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Point to the Eye, 1932
Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
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That ended his relationship with the surrealists -- but the thin sculptures that began taking shape in Giacometti's studio still have echoes of the surreal, said Tobias Bezzola of the Kunsthaus Zurich, which collaborated with MoMA on the show.
The breadth of the MoMA exhibit, with about 200 works from all stages of the artist's career, proves Giacometti's skill as a painter, too. In the last decade of his life, Giacometti turned to nature, concentrating on portraits, when the trend in art was abstraction.
Six decades of Alberto Giacometti's work are on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 8, 2002.
Search for more broadcast coverage on art museums.
Other Resources
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York has an extensive Flash presentation with examples of the art in the Giacometti exhibit, along with extensive critical notes following the progression of his career.
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