Alberto Giacometti: Deconstructing and Reinventing Traditional Figurative Sculpture (Prompt 8)

          In 1945, coinciding with the end of World War II, Swiss born painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti returned to Paris from Geneva where he had spent the war years. Already having established himself as a well-respected surrealist artist in the early 1930’s, Giacometti returned to Paris with a different way of perceiving the world. Roman Jacobson points out in his book On Realism in Art, “that [just one year later] Giacometti suggested that the aesthetic framework within which he was experiencing the outside world had become transformed.”¹ In other words, this pivotal moment in history not only affected the way that Giacometti perceived the world, but also the way this was visually articulated through his work. Not surprisingly, the end of World War II became a reference point in history and art textbooks alike, sharply defining the pre- and postwar periods. To summarize the thoughts of many scholars, this date marks a defining moment in art. In his book, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, art historian Harold Rosenberg reminds us that W. H. Auden once called the period after World War II "the age of anxiety," while art became "the anxious object."² Consistent with these observations were the sculptural works of Alberto Giacometti after his move to Paris. In his works, Giacometti reduced the use of materials and formal language providing his figures with the highest level of expression. He transformed the idealized human figure into a semi-abstract human form to commemorate lives lost to war and to serve as a symbol of recovery from the fear and anxiety felt by a post war society. 

                             Image: Three Men Walking, II 1949, Bronze

                                                  Bibliography

1. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Iconic Experience in Art and Life, Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti    Standing Woman,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no.5 (2008) pg. 2 http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/5/1

2. Auden,Wystan Hugh. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (United Kingdom, 1947), quoted in Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New American Library, 1969)