‘Giacometti’ Review: Beyond a Retrospective

New York

Figurative sculpture does not usually fare well in the bowed shallow bays of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was conceived to showcase abstract paintings. And seeing the large exhibition of nearly 200 sculptures, paintings and drawings of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) along its narrow, sloping spiral has its strengths and challenges.

Born in Switzerland, Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922, where he befriended Picasso, Balthus, Francis Bacon and Jean-Paul Sartre. Discovered by André Masson, Giacometti was embraced and, later, dismissed—for working figuratively—by Surrealism’s gatekeeper, André Breton.

Giacometti’s plaster, bronze and wood Surrealist sculptures from the late 1920s and early 1930s—strange biomorphic hybrid essences suggesting figures, cages, animals, weapons, phalluses and totems—take their cues from Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, tribal art and Cycladic idols. They feel much more at home here than his mature, gangling bronze and plaster figures, whose molten, tortured surfaces—stretched to the Existential breaking point—can seem at odds with the Guggenheim’s smooth, white void.

Two versions of the Surrealist “Spoon Woman,” in plaster (1927) and bronze (1926/27; cast 1954), feel created for the Guggenheim. They stand side by side, like sentries or game pieces, and their baby-bump bulges appear to rise and fall within their bowled torsos and among the Guggenheim’s long curves as naturally as ocean swells.

In the best Giacometti installations, viewers can mingle among his figurative sculptures, whose solitary, spindly presences—pinched, twisting, nervously agitated, their forceful eyes drilling into ours—both confront and empathize with us. The Guggenheim ramp favors a linear presentation, closer to shop windows in which the sculptures are displayed—looking out at us, and we at them.

It also offers long vistas in which Giacometti’s lithe bronze figures activate Wright’s architecture like drawings or musical notation. Up close, you cannot walk completely around Giacometti’s masterly life-size “Man Pointing” (1947; cast by 1949)—a gracefully slender, wiry figure suggesting sideshow barker and traffic cop, and whose finger aims at your chest like a speeding arrow. Seen across the rotunda, from a distance of 75 feet, however, “Man Pointing” has the looming presence of a harbinger, a phantom wavering on the horizon.

This enormous, welcome show is the first major New York Giacometti exhibition since the Museum of Modern Art’s 2001 retrospective. Organized by the Guggenheim’s Megan Fontanella and the Fondation Giacometti’s Catherine Grenier, it is arranged chronologically and spans Giacometti’s entire career. But it is not a retrospective per se, which allows it to veer into surprising and uncharted territory.

Classic sculptures abound, such as “Reclining Woman Who Dreams” (1929), the comically erotic “Suspended Ball” (1930-31), the violent “Head on a Rod” (1947), the oddball “The Nose” (1949; cast 1964) and “Figurine Between Two Houses” (1950). Also here are “The Forest” (1950); “The Chariot” (1950); a grouping of the “Women of Venice” (1956), in which their hands and feet feel like melting anvils; the hang-eared “Dog” (1951); and the bone- and relic-like plaster appendage “The Leg” (1958).

The long legs of the striding, life-size “Walking Man I” (1960; cast 1982) are as straight as iron rods. He moves like an ancient Egyptian figure, pressing into the abyss, and his limbs corkscrew downward, as if fighting against gravity. His face fades in and out of focus and form like a mirage.

“Seated Woman” (1950; cast 1956) is as frail as a string, as regal as a queen. Seen from the front, she is perched on her throne. Seen from the side, she evolves cinematically: She appears to be seated; then suggests a standing human skeleton, and then a long-legged spider, and then a thoroughbred horse, striding triumphantly.

Among other astonishments here are numerous gorgeous plasters—penciled, incised and painted. Giacometti’s signature paintings, drawings and sculptures are built out of endless addition and subtraction, infinite touches and impressions, as if he were always searching for how to articulate form, tension, space and the human predicament. His forms and internal frames materialize and dissolve, expand and contract. You sense the ever-present darting movements of Giacometti’s roving eye.

In Giacometti’s greatest portrait paintings—mazes that have the frontal intensity of ancient Egyptian statuary, and in which washy grays flit among smoke, liquid and stone—distant small heads yo-yo in space and race toward you like fastballs. At the Guggenheim, several sculpted portrait busts rise like mountain peaks, as if their tiny heads were forever out of reach. An arresting grouping of bronze torsos, some of them evoking Celtic crosses, transforms one broad pedestal into graveyard. And some brutally worked portrait paintings—resembling burnished or hammered metals—are so dense and cloudy that you must endlessly strain to grasp their visages in the darkness. Among them, “Head of a Man, Face On” (1956) has the bearing of a clenched fist and suggests an impact crater.

Overall, however, this exhibition has a meandering, padded feel. It might be more Giacometti than anyone can reasonably navigate. Pace yourself. The high points outreach any lows. Giacometti’s willful distortions transcend eccentricity and artifice, arriving in the realm of greater naturalism—as he moves beyond mere appearances to perceive and unearth something deeper, truer, more human.

—Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal. His book “The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art” will be published this fall by Basic Books.