Word: giacometti
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...advent of iron is the subject of an extremely beautiful show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, curated by Carmen Gimenez, with excellent catalog essays by Dore Ashton and Francisco Calvo Serraller. "Picasso and the Age of Iron" involves three European artists -- Alberto Giacometti, Gonzalez and Picasso -- and two American ones, David Smith and Alexander Calder. Its time span is from 1928, when Picasso made an open frame of iron rods with a pinhead and two tiny startled hands and called it Figure, to Smith's maturity in the early 1960s. But its core...
...Giacometti, by contrast, did not work in iron at all; every object by him in this show is cast bronze. He is included, presumably, because of his relations to Picasso through the Surrealist figure, because of his influence on Smith and because of the linearity of his style -- an obsessive thinning out of sculptural mass that is nevertheless modeled in a wholly traditional way on an armature, and never welded. It's true that Giacometti tended increasingly to think of sculpture as a means of connecting points in space, rather than of setting volume imposingly before...
Smith remains the true primary heir of Picasso and Gonzalez -- and, to some extent, of Giacometti, whose space constructions like The Palace at 4 A.M. inspired the young American artist in the '30s to make a series of small iron precincts and even a miniature iron house, complete with iron paintings on the walls. Curator Gimenez's choice of his work is an exemplary condensation. Beginning with those initial Surrealist images, it picks up on the early sculptures that clearly indicate the bent of his talent, such as Amusement Park, 1938, a small work that both remembers Picasso's iron...
...space, thus seeming to predict Futurism. And indeed, just as Daumier's drawings contain his prehensile relation to the past, so they look forward to the more modern artists: the massive strong men and pathetic acrobats of Picasso's Rose Period are already in Daumier's carnival scenes. Giacometti was deeply influenced not only by Daumier's drawing but by his series of tiny, malignant caricature-sculptures in clay known as Les Celebrites du Juste Milieu...
Instead they reach back to the earlier and more authentic anxieties of Alberto Giacometti. Some depict vomiting heads, which, as Rothenberg puts it in her catalog interview with Auping, were "divorce images," conveying "a sense of something threatening, like a stick in the throat . . . the whole choked-up mess of separating from someone you care for and a child being involved." Her combined face-hand images, like Red Head, 1980-81, are particularly strong, perhaps because they so vividly combine a sign for openness and approach (the human countenance) with one for rejection or warding off (the open palm thrusting...