During his early years in Paris Giacometti initially felt isolated, and it was a painful realization in 1925 when his contact with the Montparnasse avant-garde made him conscious that his artistic experience was limited. In order to progress he had to abandon his years of academic training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but this personal setback was the decisive stimulus that brought him in step with his contemporaries, eventually propelling him towards artistic maturity. Giacometti's creative crisis can be characterized by a slow passage from traditional forms to the simplification and formal reduction of the avant-garde, which he described as follows, “…I would begin creating a detailed figure…In order to better define it I had to sacrifice something, reduce little by little…All that was left of the figure was a slab…It was always disappointing to see that what I really controlled, as far as the form was concerned, turned out to be so little” (C. Crescenzo, 1994, Alberto Giacometti: Early Works in Paris). Although Giacometti describes this in negative terms, it was a necessary process in order for him to find his own visual language. This struggle eventually resulted in sculptures where the void, not the mass, is used to integrate and delineate the figure and the emptying of the material acts in such a way that the figure is no longer drawn negatively, but emerges in the positive, becoming the structure of the composition itself, or as Giacometti said, “a kind of skeleton in space” (C. Crescenzo, 1994).

The Forest, 1950, Bronze, 57 x 61 x 49.5 cm Cast 2007, edition Fondation A. A. Giacometti Collection Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti ©ADAGP/FAAG, Paris 2007

Giacometti's figures became deliberately ambiguous in their composition and in a seminal work from this period, Man and Woman (1928-9), the dreamlike dimension beginning to surface in his work is charged with an openly aggressive content. The male figure is formed by two bars; the vertical one tilted towards the female represents the body and ends with a small head. The other, bending itself in an upright angle becomes a lance pointed towards the female figure, which is bending backwards in an attempt to avoid the aggression. As though two warriors engaged in battle, the heads of the two personages confront each other, the unflinching rigidity of the male head and the zigzag confusion of the female indicate agonizing expectation, their compact tension created through an interplay of projections and indentations which never present neutral zones. Using simple means and playing on little more than space itself, Giacometti succeeds in creating almost unbearable feelings of anguish, reaching into the subconscious for an image whose full meaning remains partly veiled, perhaps even from himself.

Giacometti's work has to be understood within the political climate of the time. The confusion that developed in the political situation was influenced by what was happening beyond French frontiers. Europe's prosperity in the 1920s had masked any diplomatic, economic and political tensions, yet the reality of the situation was that each nation continued to jostle with its neighbors to assert its own national interest. During the 1920s this rivalry posed no great threat, but after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 the desire for economic and social regeneration within each European country provided a dangerous challenge to peace. The globe was divided in an atmosphere of intense economic competition, sometimes between nations that actually shared common diplomatic and strategic interests like France, Britain and the US. By 1935 the term Popular Front came to the fore, of which Léon Blum became leader, and this movement aimed to oppose Fascist leagues and end economic crisis. Even so, France had been substantially weakened by political strife and by the late impact of the Depression, and this meant that investment stalled at the same time as Germany began to rearm.

Understandably, in the 1930s there was an unprecedented degree of political awareness amongst young intellectuals. In particular, the Aragon Affair of 1931-2 had become a focal point for the politicization of the arts. The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon had written Front-Rouge, which included lines such as, “Shoot Léon Blum…Shoot the trained bears of social democracy” (C. Mann, 1996, Paris Artistic Life in the Twenties and Thirties), an attitude which consequently led to his arrest. Giacometti joined the Surrealists during this climate of unrest and the sculptures he produced throughout these years are amongst the masterpieces of Surrealist sculpture, as seen in the iconic Woman with her Throat Cut (1932). Another pivotal work, The Palace at 4A.M. (1932-3), epitomizes the artist's sense of the loneliness of modern man, and as an experiment in open-space construction, is a crucial work in the artist's subsequent development.

After the war, Giacometti returned to Paris from Switzerland and developed a sculptural language that marks a major achievement in twentieth-century art. This latter period shows the artist working towards a new perception of reality governed by the figure in space. From 1946-57 Giacometti's work displays a heightened sensitivity to the role of perception and memory, expressed in the spatial divide between viewer and object. Sculptures created at this time show the artist moving away from the representation of a physical, bodily experience to explore a more optical sensation. Whilst this body of work is a departure from his earlier exploration of Surrealism, Giacometti retains the sense of an extraordinary encounter, as if seeing something familiar for the first time. Key sculptures such as Head of a Man on a Rod (1947); The Forest (1950); Four Figurines on a Stand (1950-65), and Standing Nude on a Cubic Base (1953), present a powerful distillation of Giacometti's ideas at this time.

Giacometti continuously reworked specific themes, often using models he knew intimately, such as his wife Annette, his mother and brother Diego. In paintings the figure frequently emerges from a force field of lines and Giacometti often used brushstrokes to gain an effect similar to the roughly pitted surfaces of his sculptures. By the late 1950s Giacometti's oeuvre was seen as part of a wider investigation into the spiritual essence of humanity, and in both his paintings and sculptures figures become physically and psychologically isolated from each other in space, as though separated by a limitless abyss. At this time the exchange of ideas between Giacometti and the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and other intellectuals frequenting Montparnasse was mutually stimulating. Giacometti was often referred to in Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs and was the subject of an important essay by the writer Jean Genet, whom he frequently painted between 1953-57.

Although Giacometti's new results have to be seen in the context of other Montparnasse artists such as Picasso and Lipchitz, who had theorized about sculpture constructed in equal measure both in space and volume, Giacometti's sense of alienation and fear of the consequences of existence were entirely personal. He became the creator of a new image of man after the Second World War, with his immediately recognizable, emaciated figures for which he became world famous. Giacometti received the Sculpture Prize at the 1961 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1962 Venice Biennale. In 1965 he was awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts by the French government. Although greatly revered, Giacometti avoided grandiose statements about his work. In 1962, when asked to comment on the relationship of his work to his epoch, Giacometti simply said, “In art there is no one aspect of life that should be expressed rather than another. There is only the problem of expression” (F. Morris, 1993, Paris Post War).

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