Alberto Giacometti

To mark the centenary of the birth of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), the Kunsthaus Zürich mounted a wide-ranging retrospective of 90 sculptures, 40 paintings and 60 drawings in the large exhibition hall. It was curated by Christian Klemm in collaboration with Tobia Bezzola. Klemm was the vice-director of the Kunsthaus, and also acted as conservator of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation, which is domiciled in the Kunsthaus and acts as its largest lender. Giacometti had last been widely honored at the Kunsthaus in 1962, four years before his death. In the 1980s and 1990s, retrospectives had been held in several major European and American cities, but not in his home country. The Zurich retrospective in 2001 focused primarily on the years 1925 to 1935, which were not the focus of the other exhibitions, as it had become customary to read Alberto Giacometti's life's work more or less from the late work created after the Second World War. From this Surrealist phase - Giacometti is regarded as the only Surrealist sculptor of the twenties and thirties - came, among other things, the object ‘Palais à quatre heures du matin’ (1932), which MoMA acquired in 1936 as the first purchase ever by a museum. The cage-like object had not been considered for loan until, on the initiative of the Kunsthaus, the New York museum decided to join forces to stage the major centenary exhibition. Recurring themes of the exhibition were the standing woman, the head, seeing, and the encounter between man and woman (often described as ‘sexist cruelty,’ as Ludmila Vachtova rightly noted) as well as a preoccupation with non-European art (the catalog still speaks of ‘tribal art’). The exhibition at the Kunsthaus was prolonged due to the public demand and reached blockbuster status with around 130,000 admissions. It was widely reviewed in the domestic and foreign press; the Basler Zeitung called the selection of works ‘breathtaking,’ the Neue Zürcher Zeitung ‘as surprising as it was insightful’. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung Willibald Sauerländer wrote about the show: ‘With quiet sensitivity, it makes a difficult, at times fragile, not infrequently fierce and frightening body of work speak’.