The Women of Giacometti, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

The Women of Giacometti
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
January 14 - April 2006

The Nasher Sculpture Center presents The Women of Giacometti, the first Alberto Giacometti exhibition presented in Dallas since 1979. The Women of Giacometti features 48 works, including 34 sculptures and 14 paintings, which explore the artist’s long-standing fascination with the female subject, from his mother, sister, and wife to various models. The works range from very early naturalistic portraits, to Surrealist-inspired and Cubist-influenced works from the 1920s and 1930s, to Alberto Giacometti’s well-known tall and slender figures including all nine cast bronze Women of Venice (Femmes de Venise) from 1956, on view together for the first time in the United States since the landmark 1958 Giacometti exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.

Alberto Giacometti (b. 1901 Switzerland – d. 1966 Switzerland) worked as a youth in the studio of his father, the painter Giovanni Giacometti, and studied briefly at art school in Geneva before moving to Paris in 1922 to pursue his career. By age 12 he had completed the first portrait drawings of his mother, Annetta, who would continue throughout her life to play a key role in his art, and at 14 produced his first sculpture, a bust of his brother Diego.  His sister Ottilia also appeared in numerous early works.

Even as Alberto Giacometti began to absorb the strong influences of Cubism and Surrealism in Paris, he continued to work in a figurative vein, as seen in the exhibition in a plaster Head of Ottilia from c. 1926 and the plaster and bronze heads of Flora Mayo, an American art student with whom Giacometti had a tumultuous affair. Such outstanding monuments of Alberto Giacometti’s Surrealist period as Spoon Woman, Reclining Woman Who Dreams, and Woman with her Throat Cut, with their primitivized and fetishistic approach to female anatomy, date from the late 20s and early 30s.  Stylistic change soon followed, and the two heads of Rita from 1935-38 and three portraits of Isabel from 1937-39 show Giacometti’s return to the investigation of human physiognomy. Rita Gueyfier was a hired model, and Isabel Nicholas Delmer was an English model, sometime art student, and familiar figure in the Parisian art world with whom Giacometti lived briefly. 

When Alberto Giacometti returned to Switzerland in 1942 to escape the German Occupation, he made the acquaintance of Annette Arm, who joined him in Paris after the war. They were married in 1949.  For 20 years, Annette played a crucial role in his life as companion and muse and is depicted regularly in his post-war signature explorations of fragile, elongated, elusive figuration.

Caroline Poiraudeau came into Alberto Giacometti’s life in 1959. Her wild and defiant character held a strange fascination for him, and she soon became both lover and model for a lengthy series of highly expressive paintings and busts. The portrait Caroline in Tears shows the frontal and symmetrical Egyptian pose, loose brushwork combined with sharp linear rendering of head and features, and intense personal examination that characterize many of his later paintings.  Often in these late works, individuality gives way to a generalized, iconic vision of woman as mysterious life force.

The work of Alberto Giacometti has long been of interest to Raymond and Patsy Nasher, and the Nasher collection now encompasses 13 sculptures, two paintings, and one drawing. Several of these are in the exhibition plus masterpieces spanning the artist’s career, such as Spoon Woman (1926, cast 1954), Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), Tall Figure (1947), and The Glade (1950).

“It is an honor to present so many outstanding works by this great master of modern art at the Nasher Sculpture Center,” said Raymond Nasher. “The show directly complements and expands upon the many other Giacomettis in our collection.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Véronique Wiesinger, Director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris, and Paola Caròla, a friend and model of Giacometti whose portrait bust is in the exhibition.

“Our show contains a number of works that have rarely or never been publicly exhibited before,” said Director Steven Nash. “These objects and the two catalogue essays help advance our knowledge of Giacometti, whose biography has sometimes proven as elusive as the meanings behind his evocative figures.”

The Nasher Sculpture Center’s display of The Women of Giacometti is presented by Chase. The exhibition was made possible with the help of several generous loans from the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, private collectors, and institutions including: the Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Zurich; The Beyeler Foundation, Basel; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Before the Nasher Sculpture Center, the exhibition was presented at the PaceWildenstein gallery in New York from October 28 to December 17, 2005.

NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER
2001 Flora Street, Dallas, TX 75201
www.nashersculpturecenter.org