New York ends celebration of Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti is best-known for his sculptures of elongated humans Keystone Archive

The first New York retrospective of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti in almost thirty years has been hailed a huge success.

The exhibition, which opened at the city’s Museum of Modern Art exactly one month after the September 11 attacks, closed its doors on Tuesday.

Richard Turnbull, a lecturer at the museum, said the response to the exhibition had been “phenomenal”, stimulating a great deal of interest in both the artist and his work.

“So many people came to see the show, and certainly attendance on any one day – based on the number of people walking around the galleries – seemed to be quite phenomenal,” he said.

“As far as everyone can tell, the exhibition was received very, very positively. It gave people a chance to really see a retrospective of his career for the first time in New York since his death in 1966.”

The show, at which art lovers had the chance to discover, or re-discover the works of one of Switzerland’s best-known sculptors, marked the centenary of the artist’s birth and covered his entire career from 1919 to 1965.

One of the most significant paintings on display in the Big Apple was his Self-Portrait of 1921. It was Giacometti’s largest painting until 1947, and shows the techniques the painter had learned from his father, Giovanni Giacometti, a post-impressionist painter.

Elongated figures

Nearly 200 of the artist’s works were on show in Manhattan. His famous elongated human figures made the trip to New York, along with paintings, drawings and rarely seen plaster, wood and terracotta works.

Turnbull revealed that “Walking Man”, which he described as one of Giacometti’s signature pieces, had been a big hit with the crowds. However other works had proved equally popular, he said.

“It’s also true that a lot of people spent an enormous amount of time in front of some of the earlier works, for instance ‘Spoon Woman’ and also ‘Woman with Her Throat Cut’, which was one of the most savage pieces in the show,” said Turnbull.

Organised chronologically, the exhibition began with the artist’s first works in his home village of Stampa, and followed him to Paris, which became his second home until his death in 1966.

The MoMA has had a commitment to Giacometti’s art since 1936, when the museum’s director at the time, Alfred H. Barr, purchased one of his surrealist masterpieces, namely “The Palace at 4am”, which he made in 1932.

This acquisition made the MoMa the first US museum to own a work by the Swiss artist, which was included in the “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” exhibition in 1936.

swissinfo