The term “cultural hero” has occasionally been bestowed on an artist whose moral prestige reached beyond the narrow circles of his profession to inspire society as a whole. Over the past century, a number of painters have earned the status of cultural heroes, but only one sculptor stands among them, Alberto Giacometti, the subject of a new retrospective at the Guggenheim. Although David Smith and Richard Serra loom large among their followers in the art world, beyond that restricted orbit their influence and prestige are immediately diminished. But it may be doubted whether any sculptor since Rodin, who died in 1917, has won the admiration of as large a swath of society as Giacometti, who is in so many ways his polar opposite. There was a time in the sixties and seventies when it seemed as if the cover of every paperback was adorned with one of Giacometti’s nervous stick figures confronting the futility of his existence. Giacometti was sculpture’s answer to Sartre and Camus and maybe even to Che Guevara. In general, cultural heroes need to look the part, and here too Giacometti did not disappoint: Dressed in threadbare browns and grays, with his wrinkled face and hooded eyes and unkempt hair, he seemed like a character in a play by Samuel Beckett—another cultural hero of the day—but even more like one of his own stick figures improbably animated into life.
Today, however, even if Giacometti’s prestige remains about as high as it ever was—his Pointing Man became in 2015 the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction, and a Giacometti biopic starring Geoffrey Rush was released earlier this year—he is no longer the cultural hero he once was. In part this is because we no longer have cultural heroes as we did in the postwar era; perhaps we no longer need them. But even if we do need them, it is unlikely that Giacometti would qualify. Today our collective imagination is paltry and scattered, whereas that of the postwar era was focused on the dismal aftermath of the Second World War and the vivid possibility of a Third. Giacometti’s stick figures literally embodied that specific moment in human history in a way that would have made little sense before 1945 and that makes somewhat less urgent sense today. We may live in an age as ironic as Giacometti’s, but we have lost that tragic sense of life that so crucially defined his art and the general culture of the postwar years.
Giacometti was born in the Graubünden canton of Switzerland in 1901 and he died there in 1966. Most of the time between those two dates, however, was spent in Paris, in a dreary, drafty studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron. The idiom that we most associate with him, the one that secured his status as a cultural hero, evolved only in the last two decades of his life. As the Guggenheim exhibition makes clear, his career can be readily divided into two parts: from about 1927 to 1935 and from about 1946 to his death two decades later. The reader will notice a gap of about 11 years: On the evidence of the Guggenheim exhibition, Giacometti does not seem to have done much of anything during that lost decade. And while there are certain formal and thematic links between the two periods of his career, it is only in the latter period that he emerges as the heroic figure whom the world continues to admire. (It must also be stated that in the second part of his career, as the Guggenheim show reveals, Giacometti proved to be a superb painter and draftsman, although he mostly limited these febrile congeries of lines to depicting his younger brother Diego and his wife Annette.)
If Giacometti had died in the late 1930s, he would still be seen as one of the most gifted modernist sculptors, but his gift would have consisted in the canny and skillful use of the dominant style of the day, rather than in the creation of an entirely new way of depicting the human condition. In this first half of his career, he is a surrealist, and whether in metal, stone, or clay, he is working in an inherited idiom that seems fully adequate to his purposes at the time. He is inspired, like most Parisian artists of the day, by Sigmund Freud and André Breton. His titles are expressive of this fact: Woman with Her Throat Cut, Disagreeable Object, Woman Who Dreams. There is an element of subversive irony to these works that is hard to square with the pulsing seriousness of his postwar sculptures. At the same time, the young Giacometti is more purely formalist: His Spoon Woman of 1927 and Cube of 1934 reveal an almost Brancusian love of fluid form for its own sake, with few or no references to anything beyond form itself.
By the time Giacometti emerges from his decade of self-imposed silence, however, he is a changed man. He has rid himself of his earlier irony and formalism—indeed, he has become anti-ironic and anti-formalist. In purely formal terms, his stick figures are quite insignificant, even meaningless: It would be foolish and beside the point to admire them, say, as so many verticals rising from a horizontal base. Only when we import into the equation the knowledge that these are human forms do they acquire meaning and resonant beauty. There are, it is true, certain formal and thematic correspondences between the two phases of Giacometti’s career. His Walking Woman I of 1932—impossibly thin and tall, not to mention bereft of head and arms—presages the radically schematic forms of the postwar years. Meanwhile, a very different work of the same year, The Palace at 4 a.m.—simple wooden figures and architectural forms on a flat plane—equally anticipates the terrain over which the later stick figure will move.
But who is this creature—usually a man, but often a woman—who dominates the later art of Giacometti? The embodiment of humanity itself, battered and bowed, but quietly unconquerable in the face of all the bullying ideologies that in living memory have sought to beat him into submission. Each of those ideologies assails that frail humanity by presuming to offer something greater and more heroic. But the necessary heroism of Giacomettian man consists in his silent but indestructible refusal to assent to any of those dismal doctrines. He reminds us that man is only man, that he will never be more than that, that he can never be more than that, and that he will never need to be more than that.
