ART REVIEW : ‘Sforza Court,’ Giacometti Exhibitions in Bay Area

The title has a nice ring, “The Sforza Court--Milan in the Renaissance 1450-1535.” Sounds rather grand--like a history play staged by Franco Zeffirelli--but it also sounds scholarly and dignified--like an exhibition in a university library.

What it is, in fact, is a survey of some 125 small objects visiting UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum through March 12.

It represents an attempt on the part of the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin to recapture the flavor of an upstart dynasty that ruled Milan and Lombardy for three generations. The whole thing started with Francesco Sforza, a mercenary general who did the takeover, and ended with the death of his grandson Francesco in 1535. Meanwhile, the dukes dispersed art patronage like some wildcat corporation trying to make itself look respectable.

Milan was notably short on native art talent, but the tyrants were so anxious to have a brilliant court they imported out-of-towners to liven things up. Donato Bramante was brought in to do something about the architecture, but unfortunately the only evidence here is a print. Leonardo da Vinci painted “The Virgin of the Rocks” and “The Last Supper” while he was in town, but naturally they are not in the exhibition--only a couple of tiny graphics.

From the degree of promotional fuss made by the gallery, one was led to expect this was going to be at very least a jewel-box version of such a big historical blockbuster as “The Treasure Houses of Britain.”

After all, the Sforza court was dazzling by all accounts until it crumbled away in war and bad fortune. The exhibition is, in fact, a rather embarrassing little compendium of the sort of borderline artifacts one might find in the secondary rooms of a provincial European museum. A guard dozes quietly on his wooden chair in the corner. The visitor tries to keep respectfully focused on the historical importance of all this while wondering vaguely if there is a zoo in town.

Funny how they never got anything quite right. That relief “Annunciation” looks like poor old Benedetto Briosco had to work with a piece of scrap marble. Kept running out before he could finish a figure. Well, Giovanni Pietro Birago’s book of hours is nice, but it’s in one of those historical troughs where the coloring is medieval and the drawing is Renaissance.

What a difference when you come across Leonardo’s postage-stamp-size caricature of an old woman’s head. It’s smart, probing for the character behind the ugly face. Every good drawing in the show seems to pay homage to the great man, the sweetness of a portrait by Boltraffio or a virgin by Bernardo Luini. Leonardo seems to have affected Milan like a Picasso doing a weekend seminar at Walnut Creek Community College. For a hundred years afterward the faculty keeps cranking out little homages to the memory of the genius who came to call.

The gallery people at UC Berkeley labored bravely to make the Sforza show look handsome and uptown, creating two little warrens of galleries to give an intimate feeling within the sprawling space of the museum, but design can only do so much. An ornate grotesque helmet standing alone against yellow and gray columns wanted to be a dramatic accent but it just looks lost.

Maybe the Sforza show has the virtue of reigniting intellectual curiosity about the Renaissance, but it does leave one hungry for an art experience. If you hurry across the Bay to The City you can still catch one until Sunday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The matter is a retrospective of some 90 sculptures and paintings by Alberto Giacometti organized by the Hirshhorn Museum. In a way the exhibition represents something of a revivalist test for the artist whose reputation has been rather on hold since his death in 1966.

In the ‘50s, he came to world-master prominence with tall, spectral figures of striding men and standing women which resemble Egyptian deities transformed into ordinary people and incinerated to cinders. At the time, they were taken as an essential expression of post World War II Existential weariness, the visual equivalent of the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and the plays of Samuel Beckett.

They also formed part of an international style of anguished figurative art that spread from Giacometti and Dubuffet in Paris to Francis Bacon in London and Rico LeBrun in California.

With the advent of ‘60s cool in Minimalist and Pop art, the Existentialists were neutralized. With the advent of Neo-Expressionism in the ‘80s, they have been called back for review. In Giacometti’s case, the process was furthered by an excellent 1985 biography by James Lord.

Taken together, retrospective and biography tend to shape a growing generalized picture of a generation of immensely talented School of Paris artists who were also troubled and obsessive personalities.

Giacometti’s biography presents the Swiss-born sculptor as a haunted neurotic, dogged by death, terrified of impotence, immensely bright and charming in company--but a virtual hermit who worked all night chain-smoking and had breakfast at 3 in the afternoon. He treated his models like galley slaves, insisting they pose motionless for hours.

After great initial success in the Surrealist years, he went into a 10-year slump where every plaster figure he started was reduced to a pile of dust. Always fascinated by prostitutes, he took up with a hooker and part-time thief named Caroline late in his life, carrying on an affair that reads like a European version of Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans.”

There’s a cultivation of decadence and ennui in Giacometti’s art that is so European as to be only fitfully accessible to an American, a kind of Angst we may feel as individuals but which remains foreign to our collective character.

A few of Giacometti’s Surrealist period works are as corny as “Surrealist Table” or as embarrassingly derivative of African art as “Spoon Woman,” but on the whole the epoch was an enormously varied and inventive period, ranging from a head of his mother that is like something out of the Middle Ages to elegant structures like “Flower in Danger.” Thematically the work is riddled with sexual anxiety. “Woman With Her Throat Cut” reeks with the fear and fascination of erotic violence.

Giacometti was never merely kinky like, say, Hans Belmer, because he kept his eye on a specific sculptural consideration--the interaction between form and space. We can, however, deduce sexual fetishism lurking within the early work.

The mature stick figures lose formal invention but they replace it with humanism and the artist’s preoccupation with the-solid-versus-the-void. It becomes a neurotic sensation that the viewer can actually--and most uncomfortably--sense. It is the feeling that one’s body is being dissolved by the surrounding space. It is a great tangible metaphor of the terrible modern awareness of one’s identity shucking away like sunburned skin.