Kárpáti Zoltán - Liptay Éva - Varga Ágota szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 101. (Budapest, 2004)

ANNUAL REPORT 2004 - A 2004. ÉV - TEMPORARY EXEIIBITIONS - IDŐSZAKI KIÁLLÍTÁSOK - ILONA FEKETE: Alberto Giacometti's Life-Work Exhibition

was predisposed to irrationality. His Surrealist period was represented by a pen drawing (1932) for the famous spatial model, Palace at four a.m., and numerous studio drawings, as well as two sculptures, Flower in Danger (1932) and the sombre Woman with Her Throat Cut ( 1932). Reduced to the utmost, Cube ( 1933-34) already signals the end of the artist's avant-garde period. In the following years and throughout World War II, Giacometti, unsatisfied with his artwork, again began to work from models. One of his most successful works during these investigations was his Small Bust on a Double Pedestal (194CMH): the enormous mass of the pedestal renders the bust of merely a few centimetres at once distant and monumental. Among the first sculptures of Giacometti's style that was born at this time and that made him well known on a wide scale were two bronze body-fragments. At this time, lank human figures of amorphous surface, undoing the spatiality of his sculptures, appeared in his art. The artist made a distinction between the static woman, standing rigid as a column, and the advancing, dynamic male figure. These motifs were to also return later in the course of his oeuvre, recurring perpetually. The figures move in solitary boundlessness, as the Man Striding in the Rain (1948) or Collapsing Man (1950). Similarly to the latter sculpture, his Dog (1951, fig. 59) also suggests an existential approach to life, whose noteworthy representatives, among them Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, had a close relationship with Giacometti. From the 1950s, the artist worked exclusively from models, immortalising his family, friends and acquaintances. Standing out from the numerous bronzes made of his brother on exhibition is the Large Diego-Head (1954). At the same time, in the hopes of taking part in the Venice Biennale, he began again to model full-figure sculptures. In comparison with his earlier string-thin, apparition-like figures, his Venetian Women are voluminous and robust. In Budapest, three from this series were on view. From the mid-1950s, the artist makes painting studies from models, and his exploration of possibilities flows into a new creative crisis, whose process is followed by his drawing and painting series of Japanese professor of philosophy, Isaku Yanahira. Breaking through his crisis, Giacometti achieves his later, suggestive portraits, in which he endeavoured to seize the models directly. His later chefs-d'oeuvre: paintings and busts of his wife, Anette, a prostitute by the name of Caroline, and photographer Elie Lotar, as well as a few sensitive, ethereal drawings of interiors concluded the exhibition. In the three-hundred page, richly illustrated catalogue in Hungarian and English, alongside the full-page, colour reproductions of the exhibited works, and numerous photographs taken of the artist, there is a detailed study written by Christian Klemm, head curator of the Giacometti Foundation. The catalogue moreover fills a long-felt need: since the small monograph published in 1972 by the Művészet Kiskönyvtára (Small Art Library) series, there has been no other volume published on Giacometti in Hungarian. ILONA FEKETE