His Body of Sculpture Is the Draw

NEW YORK--The famously skinny, neurasthenic figures of Swiss-born Parisian sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) have always seemed informed by the art of drawing. Whether striding across flat planes of barely inflected bronze or standing stone-still atop massive feet, like ancient totems isolated in the void, the figures’ nervous linearity and fidgety surfaces suggest tactile drawings in space.

At the Museum of Modern Art, a large survey on the occasion of Giacometti’s centennial pays close attention to the importance of drawing in the artist’s development. Ninety sculptures have been assembled for the show--the first full retrospective since 1974--including abundant examples from his Surrealist phase in the late 1920s and 1930s; there’s also a terrific selection of the skinny figures, from what is now termed the classic period in Giacometti’s art, 1947 to 1951. But in sheer numbers the sculptures are just edged out by the 40 paintings and 60 drawings that are also on view.

Alas, these two-dimensional works almost swamp the show. Drawing was critical to the mature development of Giacometti’s sculpture, and his paintings likewise rely on a linear style, achieved through the use of oil pigments applied with very thin brushes over sparse washes of neutral color. But Giacometti was never a convincing painter. The test is simple: Without the triumph of his sculpture, his paintings, repetitive and dull, would hardly merit a second look.

Something of the tension between the two mediums is embodied in the show’s earliest painting. The self-portrait was painted when Giacometti was just 20, and it has never before been shown in New York. Its compacted, securely brushed color reflects the Post-Impressionist style of the artist’s father, Giovanni, and in fact young Alberto depicts himself at work inside his father’s studio.

What’s most intriguing about this stylistically conservative 1921 picture is its quietly intense composition. It shows Giacometti approaching painting in the manner of sculpture--that is, as a tactile, physical, three-dimensional object.

He puts himself in the extreme foreground, dressed in a suit and seated sideways at his easel, painting his own likeness. He looks out intently at the viewer, who assumes the position that a studio mirror took in the production of the self-portrait. This is the artist as professional tradesman, maker of things.

Seeming to Strain Against

Painting’s Limitations

Visually, Giacometti looks something like a sculptural relief projected forward from a flat panel. The background is a shallow mosaic of large shapes, mostly in mottled grays, browns and ochre inflected with a wide range of flickering colors. The figure is sharply shaded and outlined in black. His limbs are splayed, sort of like a swastika, which further flattens out his body.

The artist’s right foot is planted firmly on the bottom edge of the canvas. His left foot is pressed back, against the right edge at the lower corner. The top edge of the picture slices straight through his thick thatch of hair, while the left edge of the canvas abuts the edge of the canvas he shows himself painting. Giacometti is hemmed in on all sides by stretcher bars and canvas. He seems to strain against the boundaries of painting, pressing against its material limitations.

A few other, smaller paintings turn up here and there in the next nine galleries of the show, and drawings on paper remain important throughout the exhibition. But sculpture became the intense focus of Giacometti’s efforts for the next three decades. It’s not until well after World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s that painting evolved into a primary activity for the artist.

Curators Carolyn Lanchner, Anne Umland and Christian Klemm clearly want to reposition painting as an important activity within the sculptor’s oeuvre. Following their presentation of Giacometti’s riveting sculpture from his classic period, they offer two big rooms filled with 30 paintings--some sketchy landscape and still life pictures, but mostly portraits of single figures seated in the artist’s studio, often thinly drawn in black and white on washes of gray and brown.

It’s a dispiriting array, especially in the wake of Giacometti’s remarkably inventive postwar sculpture. Drawings transformed into bronze sculptures seem miraculous. Drawings made with oil on canvas look trumped up and overblown.

Drawing is the medium that registers the most direct assertion of artistic thought--straight from brain to page, as it were--without the editing, finish and revision common to other practices. Consider the very word “graphic”; it means something drawn, but it also means something marked by striking imaginative power. Giacometti possessed an extraordinary graphic sensibility.

A Surrealist Bronze

With Spellbinding Power

His single most important sculpture before the skinny, elongated figures for which he’s known is the most, well, graphic work of his youth. Descriptively titled “Woman With Her Throat Cut,” the 1932 Surrealist bronze retains its spellbinding power. The murky workings of the individual human mind were central to Surrealist art in the 1920s and 1930s, and Giacometti’s startling evocation of sex and violence in this otherwise modest object is among its most potent sculptural manifestations.

This amazing, anomalous bronze is part murdered odalisque, part monstrous insect. Splayed out low across the floor, without a pedestal and thus inhabiting the same space as the viewer, it plays against tradition and expectation. At most the sculpture is 8 inches tall. Figurative sculpture typically stands upright, and even when it portrays a reclining figure it tends to compel by straining against gravity’s pull. By contrast, this horizontal sculpture literally succumbs.

Sculpturally as well as in its narrative, the “Woman With Her Throat Cut” has yielded to an overpowering force. Dark thoughts feel visceral. They assume tactile power and material weight. The phenomenon wouldn’t happen again in Giacometti’s work for a dozen years.

Then, he began to develop his now-famous bronze sculptures of walking men and hieratic women. These “drawings in space,” cast from plaster applied with the fingers to spindly wire armatures, manifest visual tactility through their rough, churning, knotted surfaces. With blocky, oversized feet at the bottom and stark, often skull-like heads at the top, they emphasize the degree to which they are rooted in the earth, despite their ethereal elongation.

The MOMA exhibition might not persuade us of the significance of Giacometti’s painting, but it does succeed in undercutting the established interpretation of his classic sculptures as the embodiment of Existential ennui for a nuclear age. An idea promoted (with the artist’s cooperation) by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it ended up sidelining Giacometti’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of the revolutions of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art, his drawn and haunted figures seemed locked into the sensibility of an earlier age.

The Neo-Expressionist 1980s, which brought the hand-rendered human figure back to prominence in painting and sculpture, helped change the field of reception once more. The MOMA show, with its excellent catalog, is the decidedly mixed result.

“Alberto Giacometti,” Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York; (212) 708-9400, through Jan. 8. Closed Wednesdays.