Modern art is space.
By showing the 230 works loaned by the Giacometti Foundation over the 2,500 m2 of the Grimaldi Forum, this exhibition takes it masterfully into account.
And deserves its title of "Real marvelous", this magical gift of a Swiss artist who learned French through poets and surrealists.
Thanks to the immaculate scenography by William Chatelain, this retrospective, conceived with freedom by Émilie Bouvard, takes its time like a long mountain walk, plays on hindsight after each work and the reminiscences of a people of statues frozen for eternity. .
And in the end, composes a surprisingly light ensemble where the shapes speak to each other.
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With each new Giacometti exhibition, the original strength of the master of modern art surprises and poses the enigma of this sphinx.
The Yuz Museum in Shanghai in 2016 introduced Giacometti to popular China and dazzled by his ambition.
The Tate Modern in 2017 had lined up the masterpieces as a series of evidence.
This summer, at the Grimaldi Forum, a poetic wind rises, which plays with the white of the plasters like the shroud of ghosts and the black of the oils inspired by “portraits of the Fayoum” like the very material of darkness.
Obsession to translate reality
The Invisible Object
, 1934-1935, so baptized by André Breton, is the flagship image. The image of emptiness and mourning with his face of a praying mantis, his wide gaze on a wheel, perhaps inspired by a gas mask from the First World War, and his feet joined as a convict under a plank. This black and white concerto tells the story of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) in a different way. Gives material to a singular spirit, forged as much by his childhood with the artists who taught him to look and be moved - his father Giovanni, his father's friends, Ferdinand Hodler and Cuno Amiet - as by the mists of his mountains .
“I think I move forward every day. Ah! I believe that, even if it's barely visible. And more and more, I think that I am not moving forward every day, but that I move forward exactly every hour ”
, said this hard worker to Pierre Schneider in 1961. From the family heritage evoked in a few paintings and drawings striking (
The Artist's Father reading the newspaper
, graphite pencil on paper, 1918) to the cruel Parisian avant-gardes, there is an obsession with translating reality, told in a succession of superb, intriguing and puzzling works (
Mère and daughter
, 1933, pretty little couple inspired by a news item: a mother taking her daughter to a brothel).
Temptation of abstraction
Installed in Paris from 1922 to follow the teaching of the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, Giacometti confronts cubism, still relevant, experiments it, multiplies the angles of view, simplifies the forms by being inspired by archaic Greek sculpture. , Cyclades, Africa (the
Woman
spoon, 1927, recalls the anthropomorphic Dan spoons of West Africa) and Mesopotamia, strews his sculptures with signs, symbols, scarifications. His
Walking Woman I
, presented in 1923 at the Pierre Colle gallery under the surrealist title
Mannequin
, recalls the Egyptian statuary that Giacometti saw at the Louvre.
Despite the temptation of abstraction (
Head that watches
.
Flat women
,
Head skull
), Giacometti, soon excluded from surrealism by Pope Breton in a real punitive ceremony in 1935, explores the landscape of the human figure. He examines it as closely as possible, between death and the living. His direct confrontation with the agony of two friends leads him to his famous
Head on a Rod
(1947), where he used his dreams and hallucinations as a good surrealist (and his taste for carnival). The black paintings of the early 1950s, inspired by the Fayum Roman period, are portraits from beyond the grave, evanescent, where the sculptor mingles with the painter, multiplies the layers and engraves them with the handle of the brush.
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Nature invites itself into the work, little in the form of landscapes, directly in the busts where man, rock, tree, essential forms, merge. The scenography, which confronts giant photos of the Stampa mountains and a circle of massive busts, is incredibly telling. Suddenly, Alberto Giacometti's voice is heard above Diego's carnival heads. Immersive experience of the famous workshop in a room with black and shiny tiles and a virtual floor designed in the
Dogville style
of Lars von Trier. We see Alberto ask Stravinsky to pose, sharpen his pencils with a pocket knife, say of Picasso that
"he is a monster and knows it well"
and smoke his unfiltered cigarettes to the end like a tramp.
“Alberto Giacometti.
The real marvelous ”, at the Grimaldi Forum, in Monaco, until August 29.
Catalog, Skira Publishing, € 36.
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