ZURICH, Switzerland: He is called the Egyptian, but Alberto Giacometti never was in Egypt. A Zurich show just gives him that name to focus on the intense fascination ancient Egyptian art exerted over the Swiss sculptor.
The exhibition highlights for the first time the lasting impact anonymous Egyptian craftsmen who worked millennia ago had on the work of Giacometti, one of the most outstanding figures in 20th century art.
In the Kunsthaus museum, which houses the most comprehensive collection of the artist s works, some 20 Egyptian items are placed together with almost 100 Giacometti sculptures and countless drawings.
The result is an artistic dialogue that transcends thousands of years and opens a little-known perspective on the unique style of the artist who broke with surrealism early in his career. It allows visitors of the show, which runs until May 24, to discover astounding similarities between such ancient art and Giacometti s approach in sculpturing.
Giacometti was in his late teens when he first saw samples of Egyptian art in Florence s Archaeological Museum in 1920. It left him more impressed than anything else in the city of Michelangelo. After studying more Egyptian pieces in Rome s Vatican museum, he felt convinced that such art as unsurpassable.
For me, the most beautiful statue is neither Greek nor Roman and certainly not from the Renaissance – it is Egyptian, he wrote his parents from Rome in an enthusiastic letter. The Egyptian sculptures have an excellence, an evenness of line and shape, a perfect technique that has never been mastered since.
The oldest piece on display is the granite statue of a scribe writing on a papyrus scroll and sculpted 3,500 years ago. Giacometti s drawing of it is dated around 1935, 15 years after he made his first direct sketches of the Florence exhibits.
A seated mother statue done in plaster in 1927 is among Giacometti s earliest sculptures revealing such relation with the distant past. It is placed next to the seated figure of an Egyptian queen which like the scribe was created in about 2500 B.C.
Also on view is his 1950 Chariot, which comes close to replicating a well-preserved two-wheeled Egyptian battle-wagon that captured his attention on his first Florence visit 30 years earlier. But the ancient chariot, which is the museum s main attraction, had to remain in Florence.
To most of his fans, Giacometti is probably best known for his skeletal and elongated standing women and striding men, with their seeming alienation.
That major theme of his works is known to every Swiss because his Three men walking is depicted on the current 100-Swiss franc bank note along with a portrait of the artist.
At the exhibition, a bronze of one Walking Man, 5.5 feet (1.68 meters) high and done in 1970, more than overshadows its ancient wooden counterpart with a height about equal to the length of a pencil. Another Giacometti bronze, the 3.25 inch high Little Man on Pedestal is placed next to an ancient standing figure 14.5 inches high.
Such figures helped Giacometti gain international fame. He won the prestigious Sculpture Prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1961 and the Gold Prize for Sculpture at the 1962 Venice Biennale. Last year, a painted bronze 9 feet (2.74 meters) high and appropriately named Tall Woman II sold for $27.4 million at a Christie s auction in New York.
At Giacometti s New York debut none of the 12 sculptures presented found a buyer despite a price range between $150 and $250.
For Dietrich Wildung, director of the Egyptian museum in Berlin from which most of the ancient pieces are on loan, the exhibition shows that art is timeless. To him, key samples of the Berlin collection look so modern that they almost look like Giacometti pieces.
Egyptian art kept fascinating the artist throughout his life. But fame and fortune never made the chain-smoker change his frugal lifestyle; he worked in a shabby Montparnasse studio in Paris – with a water tap and a toilet in the courtyard. He was already in declining health and looked emaciated when he attended a broad retrospective of his work at New York s Museum of Modern Art.
A few weeks before his death, he finished the bust of a friend that again reflected an Egyptian motif. On Jan. 11, 1966, he died in a Swiss hospital.
According to biographer James Lord, Giacometti told a friend shortly before he died, It would be very annoying if I have to die just now because I have everything still before me which I must do.
