Cleveland Museum of Art’s big exhibition on Alberto Giacometti shines light on a modern master’s obsession with the human figure

CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s tempting to view great art through the prism of contemporary events, and that’s especially true in the case of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s big spring exhibition on the work of Alberto Giacometti.

A Swiss modernist who spent much of his career in 20th-century Paris, Giacometti is known chiefly for sculptures of gaunt, shell-shocked human figures that wander distractedly across city squares, alienated from themselves and each other amid the psychic wreckage of World War II and the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War.

The angst embodied by Giacometti’s art seems particularly relevant following Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin’s troops bomb civilian targets and send millions of refugees fleeing to safety.

Working in the decades between Hiroshima and the American buildup in the Vietnam War, Giacometti portrayed an emaciated, uprooted, and pock-marked humanity living in a world on the brink — a precarious state of existence at least partially reprised by the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler.

But the coincidence of the show’s timing with the invasion of Ukraine is just that. If the exhibition underscores some of the ways in which Giacometti’s work remains powerfully apropos now, it reveals others that are equally compelling, if not timeless.

Being and nothingness

In his devotion to the human figure, Giacometti sought to express what it means to be human and to be aware of the nothingness beyond existence — without any reassurances provided by religious faith. That, too, makes his work enduringly relevant, no matter the context.

The ragged, wrinkled faces of Giacometti’s portraits, particularly those of his wife, Annette Arm, and his brother, Diego, embody a notion of beauty based on lived experience. Like the faces in Rembrandt’s late portraits and self-portraits, they bear signs of having struggled with hard choices.

With piercing eyes, determined gazes, and deeply lined faces, they confront the mysteries of being alive, underscored by their rough, expressive surfaces, which radiate a vital sense of the artist’s restless, searching touch.

“Bust of Annette VIII,’’ of 1962, part of a series Giacometti undertook before his death in 1966 at age 65, gazes intensely at the viewer, but also beyond, toward some imaginary horizon that remains beyond reach.

The elongated proportions and abrupt leaps in scale in Giacometti’s art convey a sense of extreme pressures that alter the spaces surrounding the sculptures in ways that simply can’t be conveyed by a photograph.

These illusionary force fields can’t be understood on a printed page or a screen. They have to be experienced in person, and that, too, makes them deeply human.

“Tall Thin Head,’’ 1954, portrays a distorted bust of a man whose mouth is open as if he were trying to speak. Compressed on both sides, he appears in both profile views like a face on a coin. But his eyes, nose, and mouth wrap weirdly around the front of the sculpture, creating a wafer-thin face squashed from both sides by some kind of invisible, crushing pressure.

The sculpture, like others in the exhibition, suggests the presence of a distorting force field, like the gravitational lensing discovered by Einstein that bends light from distant stars as it passes around closer bodies, like our own sun, on the way to Earth. Among other things, Giacometti’s art appears to embody the era in which theories of relativity changed understandings of time and space forever.

Contemporary spirits

Giacometti’s art looks and feels particularly modern in part because he was close friends with existentialist philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, author of the movement’s key text, “Being and Nothingness,’' and Simone de Beauvoir, author of “The Second Sex,’' which attributed womens’ existential dilemma to gender-based inequities.

The existentialists explored the capacity of individuals to exercise freedom and responsibility through action, creating anxiety and doubt over choice and meaning from moment to moment in an absurd, violent, and unjust world governed by chance.

Giacometti was part of a fertile cultural scene in postwar Paris, documented avidly by photographers including Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Gordon Parks, who flocked to his tiny, poorly heated Montparnasse studio. There, they portrayed the craggy, hollow-cheeked artist as something of an embodiment of his own work.

Examples of such images, on view in the exhibition, include Cartier-Bresson’s blurry shot of Giacometti at a gallery, smoking a cigarette as he moves a sculpture, walking quickly through space like his skinny, elongated “Striding Man I,’’ in the foreground.

Yet if Giacometti’s art seems synonymous with the existentialist moment, it also has a totemic, atavistic quality. His work evokes ancient Egyptian tomb sculptures, or perhaps Greek Cycladic idols, like the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 5,000-year-old “Stargazer.’’ It yearns after qualities that feel eternal, not just part of the modern era.

Co-organized with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, which manages the artist’s estate and owns extensive examples of his work, the exhibition emerged out of discussions with the Cleveland museum that started several years ago, led here by William Robinson, the Cleveland museum’s senior curator of modern art.

With more than 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints, the show is based on the premise is that American audiences should be reintroduced to one of the major figures of modern European art after decades in which his work hasn’t received much attention, particularly beyond major East and West coast institutions.

Since the 1970s, there have only been a handful of exhibitions in the U.S. devoted to Giacometti, including one that appeared in Cleveland in 1974.

Obsession with the body

The main thrust of the new exhibition, which opened in Cleveland a week ago and will travel to the Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, is to focus on the human figure as Giacometti’s all-consuming interest in the final two decades of his life, from 1945 to 1966.

The show passes quickly over Giacometti’s exploration of Surrealism in the 1930s when he developed a vocabulary of abstract forms that earned the praise of Andre Breton and other leaders of the movement.

Giacometti suffered rejection by Breton after he returned to sculpting the human figure from live models later in the 1930s, but in a way, he was returning to his roots, as the show demonstrates.

Early in his career, Giacometti developed notions of three-dimensional space that surfaced in landscapes he painted in his native Switzerland. Those little-known connections are thoroughly explored in the exhibition, illustrating his development with an unexpected depth.

Born in a mountain village in Switzerland northeast of Milan, Italy, and a few miles north of the Italian border, Giacometti was the first son of the important late 19th- and early 20th-century post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti.

After enrolling in art academies in Geneva in 1919, the younger Giacometti settled in Paris in 1922 to study sculpture. He spent most of his life there, rarely traveling apart from a sojourn in Switzerland during the Nazi occupation of World War II.

As the exhibition indicates, Giacometti’s early facility with landscape hinted at his later explorations of sculptural space and form.

In a 1919 sketch of mountain meadows near Stampa, where he grew up, Giacometti pressed his ink pen heavily into the paper at places where stands of trees meet a meadow on a hillside, thickening his line there. It’s as if he were exploring the scene not just optically, but through touch, feeling his way along the curves, hollows, and seams of the landscape.

The same sense of physical touch characterizes the luminous oil painting, “Mountain at Stampa,’’ 1917-20. Shining from behind him, orange-amber sunlight appears to flatten an Alpine peak. But Giacometti sharply indicates a cleft near the summit where the sun casts a sharp shadow, slicing into a solid mass and creating a sense of three-dimensionality.

The exhibition’s text panels and labels emphasize the ways in which the sometimes bulbous bodies in Giacometti’s sculptures echo the mountain shapes he painted as a youth.

But the cleft in the mountain summit at Stampa also anticipates the ways in which Giacometti came to describe facial features with a precise, cutting intensity.

He used his brush as a young artist the way he would later dig into clay with a penknife to sculpt the intensely three-dimensional faces of his figures – a technique captured beautifully in a short film on display in the show, documenting the mature Giacometti at work in his studio.

Constant draftsman

Drawing is another major continuity in the show. The exhibition is filled with works on paper, including Giacometti’s numerous, obsessive studies of human heads and bodies, often sketched with a ballpoint pen on anything that came to hand, including exhibition fliers and newspapers.

Giacometti also filled the plaster walls of his studio, with graffiti-like sketches. A fragment is displayed in the exhibition, like a relic from some ancient Pompeiian villa.

Scale is another significant factor in Giacometti’s art. It comes as something of a shock to see how small and intimate much of it is, especially after decades in which artists have seemed to equate size with ambition.

Working in a cramped, affordable space, Giacometti made numerous objects resembling amulets or trinkets buried in ancient tombs that are small enough to be carried in a pocket.

His drawings, with their searching, hazily indicated outlines, have the delicacy of lace.

Dominated by pale gray walls, the show may strike some viewers as visually dry, in part because of Giacometti’s inherent austerity, and because his work needs to be seen up close, instead of from across a room.

Shock and drama

But the show possesses an undeniable drama. Walls painted in somber tones of plum or oxide green resonate with the patinas of Giacometti’s bronzes.

And, there are moments of shock. A sequence of portrait heads sculpted from the mid-1920s through the 1940s explores styles that evoke the Cubism of artists such as Raymond Duchamp-Villon, or the romantic and expressionistic qualities of Antoine Bourdelle, one of Giacometti’s instructors. But the series concludes with a strikingly elongated 1946 head of Marie-Laure de Noailles, a visual jolt that encapsulates the artist’s leap to his late, mature style.

Also shocking is the museum’s installation of “The Nose,’’ one of Giacometti’s most famous works. You suddenly encounter it in a corner upon entering the show’s big, final gallery. As you turn to see it, it’s like locking eyes with someone who’s been staring at you without your knowledge.

The sculpture depicts a decapitated head with an obscenely long nose, suspended in a cage while shrieking in pain or cackling with wicked laughter — it’s hard to tell which.

After working in smaller scales and formats through much of his career, Giacometti entertained a commission in to create site-specific sculptures for the plaza of the Chase Manhattan Bank office designed for lower Manhattan by architect Gordon Bunshaft.

Two monumental sculptures developed for the plaza — a striding man and a totemic woman — conclude the exhibition with a bang. They were never installed; Giacometti, according to the exhibition’s catalog, wasn’t sure they’d work.

He was reaching for the big, brash scale typical of New York, which was then rising as the capital of the art world, but Giacometti didn’t make the leap. Troubled by doubts and anxieties, he was uncertain to the end. These days, as always, it’s easy to relate.

REVIEW

What’s up: “Giacometti: Toward the Ultimate Figure.’'

Venue: Cleveland Museum of Art.

Where: 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland.

When: Through Sunday, June 12.

Admission: Tickets start at $15 for adult nonmembers. Museum general admission is free. Call 216-421-7350 or go to cma.org.