CERCLE 9

12 brief overview of giacometti The son of a Swiss post-impressionist, Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, 1901 - Chur, 1966) showed an interest in draw- ing from a very young age, and was a vocation that accompa- nied him throughout his life. After passing through the School of Arts and Crafts in Geneva, at the age of 18 he moved to Paris, where he resided practically until his death. There the artist began to work on two of his greatest concerns: symbolism, and simplification in representing the human figure until it almost disappeared. It is then, in the mid-1940s, when the Swissman outlined his iconic style and started a characteristic figurative period, with extremely stylised small human figures - rugged to touch and languid in aspect - influenced by the experiences of the Second World War. And it was precisely when the con- flict ended in 1945 until his death, that his entire production was obsessively centered around his unique perception of the figure and the human face, of his presence and his essence. ‘The perfect existentialist artist, (...) halfway between being and nothing’, as defined by Jean Paul Sartre. And for the artist it is that, it is the same material that shapes the sculpture that is responsible for its fragility and misfortune. The everlast- ing grey, a metaphor of life itself, according to his own words, could have accompanied his vision on so many walks through an evening Paris, dotted with figures that were more mental than physical. «I feel strong emotions facing Giacometti's work, something deep that you only feel in the face the true art, that thing capable of resisting immutable the passage of time» Carmen Giménez Martín (Casablanca, 1943) is a 20th-century art conservator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and one of the world's foremost authorities on the figure and work of Picasso. An honorary Academic of the Royal San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, she is considered one of the most impor- tant experts in modernist sculpture. She is part of the Board of the National Prado Museum and the Pilar and Joan Miró Foun- dation. She has curated this exhibition and understands the exhibition as a posthumous visitation, where the sculptures of the artist pass through the galleries of a museum that, paradoxically, was never to be visited by the Swiss artist. Within the framework of the Museo del Prado’s bicentennial celebrations, in collaboration with the Community of Madrid and the Fondation Beyeler and with the support of the Embassy of Switzerland and the Mirabaud Group, the gallery has recently closed the Giacometti exhibition, a careful selection of twenty works of one of the 20th century’s most disturbing, enigmatic and influential artists, who conceived art as a meet- ing point for the past and the present, and under- stood the timeless representation of the human figure, its loneliness and isolation. By Carmen Giménez Martin Understanding Giacometti