Francesco Carelli, MD, MSc , University Milan, Rome  – Tate Modern  presents  the UK’s  first major  retrospective of Alberto Giacometti ( 1901 – 1966 ) for 20 years.

Celebrated as a sculptor , painter and draughtsman, Giacometti’s  distinctive elongated figures are some of the most instantly recognizable works of modern art.  This exhibition reasserts Giacomettì’s place alongside the likes of Matisse, Picasso and Degas as one of the great painter-sculptors of the 20th century.  Through unparallel access to the extraordinary  collection and archive of the Fondation Alberto and Annette Giacometti,  this wide ranging and ambitious exhibition brings together over 250 works.   It includes rarely seen plasters and drawings which have never been exhibited before and showcases the full evolution of Giacometti’s career across the decades, from early works such  a Head  of a Woman ( 1926 ) to iconic bronze sculpture such as Walking Man ( 1960 ).

Born in Switzerland in 1901, he moved to Paris in the 1920s where became enaged with cubism and latterly joined the Surrealist Group in 1931.  Celebrated works such as Woman with her Thoat Cut , 1932; reveal his engagement with surrealism as well as his powerful explorations of brutality and sadism.  Other works like Untitled mask, 1934, demonstrate his engagement with the decorative art, , also his preoccupation  with Egyptian and Africa art.   Giacometti, perhaps more than any other artist of his day, fused the ancient and the modern and broke down barriers between the decorative and the fine arts.

Giacometti left Paris in 1941, not allowed to come back from Nazis, relocating to Geneva until the end of the Second World War.  Having moved away from surrealism, he became interested in scale and perspective and began to work on much smaller sculptures in a more realistic style.

Working from life, his preoccupation with the alienated and isolated figure became an important motif, embodying the post-war climate of existential despair.

While he is best known for his bronze figures, here he repositioned as an artist with a far wider interest in materials and textures, especially plaster and clay.  The elasticity and malleability of these media allowed  him to work in an inventive way, continuously reworking  ed experimenting with plaster to create his distinctive highly textured and scratched surfaces.

The exhibition also explores some of the key figures in the artist’s life who were vital to his work including his wife Annette, his brother Diego and his late mistress Caroline.  His personal relationships were an enduring influence through his career and he continuously used friends and family as models.

When making his portraits, he always controlled the studio set up and confronted his models from a fixed distance of 3 meters, intense sitting , looking at eyes.  He scrutinized and re-examined their facial features, framing them in a flurry of lines and brush marks, continuously painting, overpainting and repainting. The sculptures and paintings of particularly Diego and Annette demonstrate Giacometti’s intense observation of the human face and figure,  and tracing every movement whilst seeking to translate his perception of the human into reality of a new art image. 

” After 3 days  I paint or work for Diego or Annette, I don’t recognize them anymore, they are not the same, they don’t look like themselves. I simply don’t recognize them “

Giacometti was rarely satisfied with the end result, claiming that the works lack in likeness.  Anyway ” I have the feeling , or the hope, that I am making progress each day. That is what makes me work, compelled to understand the core of life “

” When I look at the human face, you always look at the eyes. An eye has something special about it, it is made of different matter than the rest of face “.

Giacometti had a strong interest in death and the transformation of the living body into a motionless corpse; he, often, recollected how he had witnessed the death of a travelling companion at a young age, which had a traumatizing effect on his vision: ” IN a few hours he had turned into a object . A nothing. That meant, of course, that death could come at any moment, to me, to the others “.