The Kunsthalle Bremen is presenting a comprehensive retrospective exhibition titled "Alberto Giacometti: The Measure of the World," featuring more than one hundred works from the estate of the renowned Swiss sculptor and painter. The exhibition, which opened today, showcases Giacometti's famous sculptures alongside drawings and other works, offering visitors an intimate look at the artistic development of one of the 20th century's most influential sculptors.
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was known for his relentless approach to sculpting, constantly kneading and furrowing his materials with bare hands. He would roughen surfaces, smooth them, and rework them again as he wrestled to find forms that could artistically express his subjective perception of the world. Working with clay, plaster, and plasticine, Giacometti was often dissatisfied with his creations and frequently discarded his results. In 1947, he wrote to his mother describing his studio: "My studio looks like after a landslide, plaster everywhere and I almost have to clear my way with a shovel."
The exhibition draws heavily on Giacometti's deep connection to the mountainous landscape of the Graubünden canton in Switzerland, where he grew up and returned every summer. He frequently made comparisons to this alpine world, and it's no coincidence that the surfaces of his sculptures resemble jagged mountain formations, while his towering sculptures evoke slender mountain firs. The retrospective demonstrates how intimately the sculptor's relationship with his homeland's nature influenced and shaped his artistic output.
The Kunsthalle Bremen has collaborated with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, which manages the artist's estate, to bring approximately one hundred loans from their collection to Bremen. The exhibition is further complemented by paper works from the museum's own print collection, providing a comprehensive overview of Giacometti's artistic range.
According to Hugo Daniel from the Fondation Giacometti, who conceived the exhibition and curated it together with Giacometti expert Eva Fischer-Hausdorf, distance and size are crucial elements in the artist's work. "Giacometti constantly redefined for himself the measure of people, stones, and trees that surrounded him," Daniel explains. "Alberto Giacometti gave decisive impulses to sculpture after World War II."
Giacometti's artistic development was influenced by multiple sources. His father, post-impressionist landscape painter Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933), and his artistic friends Giovanni Segantini, Ferdinand Hodler, and Cuno Amiet, who was Alberto's godfather, were among Switzerland's most important artists. Additionally, Giacometti was influenced by German Romanticism through his extensive reading and the family library, which helped him build an art-historical and literary educational foundation early in life.
The artist adopted the Romantic notion of a sublime, immeasurable landscape, which he constantly observed in the alpine world of the Bergell and Engadin valleys. He simultaneously questioned the relationship between humans and nature, as well as humanity's role in the greater whole. "His benchmark was not just the 20th century, but the entire history of humanity," Daniel notes.
The thematically organized exhibition begins with early watercolors and drawings by the young artist, created between 1914 and 1923 around the family residences of Stampa and Maloja. "He went out into nature to draw with his father," Fischer-Hausdorf explains. Giacometti captured the special lighting atmosphere of the alpine region in his pictures, painting glowing peaks in evening sunshine or catching light reflections on mountain lakes. His works show the partly picturesque, partly monumental shape of mountains, which he perceived as personalities, establishing initial connections between his human representations and the mountain world.
In 1922, Giacometti moved to Paris to study sculpture. There he created a group of flat sculptures, including the "Crouching Figure," which has its knees enclosed by its arms. As the artist recounted in his text "Yesterday, Drifting Sand," he often played as a child near a large stone, hiding crouched and sheltered in its cracks and caves. Through the much more abstract relief "Looking Head," which only suggests facial features, Giacometti attracted the attention of the Surrealists in Paris, joining their movement in 1930.
However, only a few years later, Giacometti broke with the Surrealist group. The sculptor abandoned the fantasy-influenced, reality-distant form and henceforth strived to depict the human head true to nature. His brother Diego, model Rita Gueyfier, and later his wife Annette sat for him daily as he explored how the seen could be transferred into portrait work, despite its effect being so strongly dependent on the viewer's perspective and position. His surfaces are rough and uneven like rock walls of granite and gneiss when viewed up close, but from a distance, slender body forms crystallize from the material.
Because Giacometti perceived human form in relation to its environment, his sculptures began to shrink and take on miniature format during the war years. "I reduced the size of the sculpture to reflect the actual distance from which I observe the figure," wrote the sculptor, who spent the war years withdrawn in Switzerland. This also illustrates the smallness of humans before the sublime, immeasurably large environment.
After 1945, back in Paris, Giacometti turned to further experiments and developed those towering, very thin female figures through which he became famous. Only in this extremely stretched form, the sculptor found to his own amazement, did the figures now appear lifelike to him – in analogy to the tall coniferous trees of the alpine region. In humanizing the landscape, Giacometti drew again on Romantic concepts: "In Caspar David Friedrich's works, a solitary tree can acquire a sentient, almost human presence," the curator explains.
The exhibition shows, for example, the figure composition "The Clearing," consisting of nine differently sized, extremely gaunt figures. Giacometti explicitly referred with this work to a specific alpine clearing that had made a great impression on him – "a somewhat wild meadow with trees and bushes at the forest edge." In the sculpture "Three Walking Men," each individual appears isolated yet belonging to the group – like individual trees that together form a forest.
Giacometti drew a parallel between nature and the urban landscape, where each passerby becomes part of the crowd with whom they do not interact. The Swiss artist's drawings and lithographs show impressions from the metropolis of Paris. Through sketching, he appropriated the surrounding reality, now also measuring buildings with his drawing pencil.
The exhibition "Alberto Giacometti: The Measure of the World" runs until February 15 at the Kunsthalle Bremen, offering visitors a comprehensive look at how one of the 20th century's most important sculptors transformed his deep connection to the Swiss alpine landscape into a revolutionary artistic vision that redefined modern sculpture.
