Louis Vuitton Beijing ESPACE Cultural and Arts Space "Alberto Giacometti" collection selection exhibition
Inscription: From April 7 to September 26, 2021, louis vuitton Beijing ESPACE culture and art space held a selection of the "Alberto Giacometti" collection, exhibiting eight masterpieces of Giacometti sculptures from the Fondation Louis Vuitton: "Heads on poles" (1947), "Three Walking Men" (1948), "The Toe Man" (1950), "Venice Woman III" (1956), "Tall Woman II" (1960) and "The Tall Woman" (1960) and "The Man who Walked on the Toe" (1950) and "The Man on his toes" Man's Head (Rodal I), Man's Head (Laudal II), Man's Head (Laudal III) (1964-65).
Text/Yan Liu
In Paris in the late 1930s, on more than one occasion on the banks of the Seine, a young man pushing a trolley and pouring its full of sculptures into the river was Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss who had become famous in the surrealist art world. His weirdness doesn't stop there, he makes works during the day and destroys them at night. This habit lasted a lifetime, and a work was repeatedly revised by him, constantly overturned and rebuilt, and often several years later when it was finally completed.
Giacometti, The Table of Surrealism, 1933
Giacometti was always frustrated in his work, and he was deeply puzzled by this— before work, he seemed to see a clear-looking statue of a man or woman in front of him, but once he started to work, he felt lost. So he was always dissatisfied, and he could only insist on working, day and night, just to pursue the "correct" size and proportion of things in his eyes.
Giacometti's Portrait in the Frame, oil on paper, 1947
So what does the artist's final product look like? At present, in louis vuitton's Beijing ESPACE cultural and art space, there are eight sculptures on display: two upright women are more than two meters tall, a toe man is about the same age as ordinary people; in a glass display case, three walking men meet, which is not much larger than the head of a nearby pole; the other glass display case contains a head of the same man and two seated statues. The face of the human sculpture tends to blur, the body is stripped of fat and flesh, all unusually thin; the head portrait has deep eye sockets and deep eyes. The slender figure has a large and stable base at its feet, and the sculptor's hand is constantly rubbing marks from the face to the body. The huge exhibition hall and the dim light allow you to calmly walk between these "men" and "women", and the heart quickly calms down, as if hearing the breath of "them".
Man's Head (Laudal I), Man's Head (Laudal II), Man's Head (Laudal III), 1964-1965
I remember when I first saw Jia's work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the lights were too bright and the works were too close, but the permanent exhibition could only do so. Unexpectedly, the first grand viewing of Giacometti was in the upscale shopping mall of the Beijing CBD. When Jia's inspiration came to him, he painted everywhere on the walls and doors of his studio in the Montparnasse neighborhood, but after his death, his wife Annette had no money to buy the studio, so she had to scrape off the works on the wall. Fortunately, today the Giacometti Foundation in Paris has restored the artist's studio and is popular every year in exhibitions around the world.
2016 "Giacometti Retrospective" restored Giacometti's studio
But the audience for this free exhibition in Beijing does not seem to be much, far less popular than the luxury store next door, and some fresh Internet celebrities are keen to punch in and take photos outside the LV exhibition wall, and do not look at the works. Or, if they go into the showroom and giggle, they're in the wrong place.
The Tall Woman II, 1960
The moment in the face of Giacometti's work is undoubtedly dignified, and the heavy doors and confined spaces of the exhibition hall have already provided support for this. The magic of these sculptures is that when you are far away from it, you feel strongly attracted, and when you come closer, it rejects you, so you are constantly wandering in this dilemma. The first thing that appealed to you was The Tall Woman II, who was so tall that you wanted to go back and look at another shorter Woman of Venice III.
The Venetian Woman III, 1956
The Venetian Woman III (1956)
Why do women stand upright and men walk? How does that toe posture strike a balance? Why is the sculpting method of the horizontal head so different from the sculpting method of the seated statue?
Left: Three Walking Men, 1948, Right: Head on a Pole, 1947
Three Walking Men , 1948 ( partial )
The Toe Man, 1950
These works are the mature works of Jia's late years, the result of his more isolated and huddled in the studio after World War II. It should be known that Giacometti does not create or paint out of thin air, but creates in front of real people, and it is a chore to model him. His studio is only more than 20 square meters, full of works and painting materials, and the model can only sit close to him and withstand his long gaze. His brother and wife, and later the French writer Jean Genet and the Japanese philosopher Izoku Yanahara, were willing to be "tortured" by this, and even Sartre joined in. In the face of great artists, the models not only incarnated into immortal works of art, René and Sartre also became Jia's most powerful artistic interpreters.
Ikuuchi Hara modeled as Giacometti in 1955
Giacometti was obsessed with watching, and as a child he liked to stay in a cave in his hometown staring at the rocks, and when he arrived in Paris at the age of 22, his eyes were full of food, as if everything was as fresh as he first saw. He was a member of the Parisian artist café family, and he always found some interesting pedestrians "as strong as rocks, and more free than elves", and he was fascinated by sketches. At night he often roamed the streets of Paris, only wanting to paint all kinds of things he saw on the street, and the writer Beckett was a good companion for his night tours.
Samuel Beckett with Giacometti in the studio in 1961
What exactly did Giacometti see? His methods of observation were unusual early on, such as when he was seventeen years old, his still life paintings made pears smaller and smaller, and after his father changed them, he shrank them again, making his father angry. Nearly forty, he watched as a woman walking across the street grew smaller and smaller, leading to his smallest sculptures that could fit into matchboxes.
Giacometti's Little Annette Breast Painted Plaster 1946. From 1941 to 1945, Giacometti returned to Geneva, where he met Annette Amu, one of his favorite models, and married in 1949.
For Giacometti, it was one thing to try to depict hopelessly in the face of a model, and it was another to gaze at everything in front of him on another occasion, and this long and unremitting observation finally gave birth to a new visual experience that was extremely intense and unique. In 1946, he told René that one day he saw a towel hanging from the back of a chair that was "so lonely that he could almost pull out the chair and stay in place." This towel has its own place, its weight, until it is silent. From that moment on I felt the need to tell the story of what I saw through my sculptures and paintings."
Giacometti, Portrait of Jean Genet, 1957
The experience seems to have a surreal thriller, but it's more like the experience of Logandine from Sartre's novel Disgusting: he sees acquaintances become strangers, and he can't see his own face... It contains a new awakening of Giacometti's consciousness, which forces the artist to deny the established sculptural and painting language, "peel off the fat of space", and move toward the nothingness of existence, and Sartre naturally becomes his confidant, calling it "the pursuit of the absolute".
Giacometti's Jean-Paul Sartre pencil sketch 1946
It is also because of Sartre and Giacometti's fame that it entered China in the 1980s with existentialism. As he became the record holder of the highest auction price for sculpture in the world, the Yuz Museum of Art in Shanghai hosted Giacometti's first major exhibition in China (Alberto Giacometti's Retrospective) from March to July 2016, with as many as 250 works present.
2016 Giacometti Retrospective Exhibition site at © the Yuz Museum in Shanghai
Although I was absent from that event, I calmly walked to meet with these masterpieces several times in the middle of this summer. In autumn, the exhibits are withdrawn, as the poet Rilke said, "Whoever is lonely at this time will always be lonely", but Jia's loneliness is not such a tragic situation, and his "universal portrait" reminds people that the "common soul" of mankind never stops going back and forth between the ancient and the future.
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966)
About the artist
Giacometti was born on 10 October 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland. Because his father was a painter, he was exposed to Post-Impressionism and Symbolism at a young age. He graduated in 1919 and left school to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Geneva. In 1922 he moved to France to study body art at the Grand-Hut Art Institute in Paris, also studied sculpture with the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, and often visited the Louvre. His work brought him closer to post-Cubism—notably The Couple (1926) and Spoon Woman (1927). He later joined the Surrealist ensemble – suspended Ball (1930) sculpture, which was grouped with Joan Miró and Jean Arp at the Pierre Gallery in Paris, also marked an important turning point for him. In 1935, he broke away from the avant-garde art circle and began to devote himself entirely to the creation of live models as a reference. During World War II, he returned to Switzerland in 1941 and met his future wife, Annette Arm, who became one of his favorite models. In the post-war period, he began to create tall and thin figures. By the 1950s, Giacometti's reputation had greatly improved. In 1956, he represented France at the Venice Biennale and presented Women of Venice, and later in 1962 he won the first prize in the sculpture category of the Venice Biennale. Before leaving Paris for the last time in 1965, Giacometti created three statues of photographer Eli Lotar, of which Laudal became his last model.
Giacometti died on January 11, 1966 at Coville State Hospital.
(The author is a 2021 contracted critic of the Beijing Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature, this article was originally published in the Beijing Daily 2021/10/20 Xinzhi Weekly Appreciation Edition)