Articles by: Renato Miracco

Not in this lifetime will you find a better setting for the 200+ works of Alberto Giacometti than those on display today.   

That’s the first impression you get upon entering the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which Frank Lloyd Wright designed, despite his commission, with a view to building “the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music.”

That was the gist of all the comments made at both the dinner and opening press event by the museum’s director Richard Armstrong; Francesca Lavazza, a trustee and sponsor of the show; Catherine Grenier, director of the Giacometti Foundation in Paris; and Megan Fontanella, co-curator of the show.     

Stanley Tucci (actor and director of the 2017 Giacometti picture Final Portrait) captured the impact well when he spoke about the negative and positive space that the artist’s sculptures manage to delineate, evoke, communicate. (By the way, it was a weird coincidence and a weird meeting, since Stanley and I narrated the upcoming documentary about Tintoretto produced by the National Gallery in Washington.) 

But why are we speaking in English about a Swiss artist for an Italian magazine? Should we think of Alberto Giacometti as Italian?

Well, in one sense, yes. In part because Giacometti himself frequently said that he felt more Lombardian than Swiss, seeing as he was born in that Italian canton. Giacometti was actually born in Borgonovo di Stampa, in Canton of Grisons (Switzerland) on October 10, 1901, to the post-Impressionist Swiss painter Giovanni Giacometti and Annetta Stampa, a descendant of Protest Italian refugees from Switzerland.  

He was also intensely attached to his native land and almost violently devoted to his family, as his sculptor and friend Mario Negri pointed out in his documentary for Swiss television in 1986. 

Giacometti began drawing, painting and sculpting at a very young age. Impressed by his talent, his parents sought to encourage him. There is a famous clay portrait of his mother from his high school years at the Giacometti Foundation in Stampa, in the Val Bregaglia, Grisons, Switzerland. Founded in 2013 and distinct from the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, who is the co-sponsor of the current show.

In 1921, the then twenty-year-old moved to Rome to study, among other things, the great artists of the past. 

During his studies, he took a particular shine to the work of Tintoretto and Giotto, who inspired him to create art that eschewed intellectualism and drew from primitive origins.  

At the same time, he also took an interest in anthropology and African art, an interest that resurfaced in many of his creative stages. 

Archaeology was another subject of interest, in particular Etruscan art, which he first came across at the Museum of Archaeology in Florence. It would influence many works, such as “The Chariot” of 1950. The same was true of Egyptian sculpture, which can be seen in many statues and busts from 1940 on.  

Upon returning to France, he came under the spell of Cubism. His work from this period makes constant reference to Brancusi and Archipenko. Look carefully at the first part of the show and you’ll discover where he converges with and diverges from the two artists. 

It’s really an open (art history) book.    

In 1927, Giacometti became part of the Surrealist group (despite participating in shows with them till 1938, by 1935 he’d already broken from the group). His first surrealist sculptures were displayed at the Salon des Tuileries  

During these years, he formed an important bond with the movement’s founder, Andre Breton, and contributed to his magazine, Surrealism in the Service of Revolution. But the revolution proved very intimate, painful, freeing: 

“Yes, I make pictures and sculptures, and I have always done so, from the time I first started drawing or painting, in order to denounce reality, in order to defend myself, in order to become stronger in those things with which I can the better defend myself and launch my attacks; in order to stave off hunger, cold and death; in order to be as free as possible, free to strive, with the means that today appear to me as the most suited to this task, to see and to understand my environment better, to understand it better so that I have the greatest measure of freedom; in order to squander my powers, expend all my energy as far as a I can into that which I create, to have adventures, to discover new worlds, to wage my battle—for pleasure? out of joy?— a battle for the sake of the pleasure of winning and losing.”

His is a career of constant extremes, I’m moved to say, constantly torn between competing forces, as we can see throughout his career as both a painter (the current show has a wealth of drawings and canvases) and sculptor.  

During his surrealist period, the imagination and (oftentimes) the unconscious are the guiding principles that form the base of Giacometti’s sculptures, which are very important to the surrealist idea of “objects with a symbolic function.” 

That gave rise to “Boule pendu” (Suspended ball, 1930). A ball hanging on a thread rests on top of a halfmoon inside an iron cage. The sculpture, a standout as you wind your way through the spiral museum, introduces the problem of spatial limitations, which would become a constant in Giacometti’s esthetics.  

In the sculptures from the early 1930s, a period well represented in the show, there are a few recurring elements fundamental to interpreting the work: allusions to body parts and sex organs that form a dialectical relationship with linear and geometrical shapes by being placed inside of them (“Cage,” 1931). His use of cages highlights the idea that sculpture is a transparent, visible and plastic construction of “illusory” space in painting. His friendship with Pablo Picasso during these years was fundamental.       

When they first met, in Surrealist circles, the two artists already knew and admired each other’s work. Alberto Giacometti had seen the paintings of Picasso, just as the latter had Giacometti’s sculptures. In fact, the Spanish artist had attended the sculptor’s first Parisian show.  

It was a point of pride for Giacometti that he attracted Picasso’s attention. He was twenty years his junior and Picasso was already considered the great modern artist of the era.  

Reading Giacometti’s letters to his family, you realize the depth of his friendship with Picasso, whose hound would become the model for the sculpture that closes the show at the Guggenheim.  

But the Surrealist period and his work in that vein would soon fizzle out, and Giacometti returned to figurative studies, to the “Fleeting resemblance,” as the title of Jean Soldini’s 1998 book has it. Chronologically speaking, this shift in thought is occasioned by the death of his father in 1933.  

From 1935 to 1940 he concentrated almost obsessively on studying heads, beginning with the gaze, the seat of our thought. He began to draw entire figures in an attempt to capture the identity of single human being with just a glance. 

His preferred subjects, few and constantly revisited, were familiar: his mother, his brother Diego, his cousin Silvio, the objects he surrounded himself with, the landscapes  he’d seen and lived in. 

It is here that I find extraordinary parallels to Giorgio Morandi. Both artists explore their intimate relationship with objects (or, in this case, people). It is the space between them, the way they emerge and contrast that “creates art,” whether it be two or three dimensional.  The figures are fixed, immobile, strictly forward facing, isolated in space. Almost as if their presence created both an emptiness and fullness, so that what emerges is a “metaphysical space.” The figures are made of “lines of force” covered with amorphous materials that carve out the surroundings. This pursuit became a real obsession. 

“From 1935 on, I never did anything the way I wanted. What emerged was always something different from what I wanted. Always.”   

Almost never, with the exception of the eyes (“Mains tenant la Vide” or Holding the Void, “Objet invisible” or Invisible Object). Their outline is drawn, but the viewer is left to imagine the pupil. Everything is placed in an inaccessible dimension in which the circumscribed space is the essential component. It’s the artistic transposition of Sartre’s existential theories; no coincidence that he wrote an essay for one of Giacometti’s shows and became a partner in crime. 

The artist/sculptor spent World War II in Geneva, for he couldn’t return to Paris, and that is where he met Annette Arm, his future wife.

In 1946, after the war, he returned to Paris and was reunited with his brother Diego. He immediately launched into a frenetic phase of activity, during which his sculptures became elongated, their limbs extending into a space that contains and completes them. 

From 1950 on the figures were more often alone, though groups of figures inhabit the same space. It’s the space between them that establishes their relationship. Not the gaze but the approach to “similitude” that is the key to read and interpret their relationship. 

In Giacometti’s elongated figures, we recognize the figures described by Proust at the end of In Search of Lost Time: «comme si les hommes étaient juchés comme sur de vivantes échasses qui grandissant sans cesse finissaient par leur rendre la marche difficile et périlleuse, et d’où tout d’un coup ils tombaient».

We are all hovering on the edge of lost time. 

We’ve mentioned Breton, Picasso, the Surrealists, Sartre. But another figure—apparently far removed from that world—remained dear to Giacometti’s understanding of existential theory: Jean Genet, who wrote a beautiful essay about his friend.  

Picasso thought it was the most beautiful essay on art that he’d ever read. It’s easy to understand why he was so enthusiastic; L’atelier di Alberto Giacometti, which came out in the magazine Derriere le miroir for the first time in June 1957, is an incisive, intense and illuminating piece. 

“As I see it,” writes Genet, “Giacometti’s work makes our universe even more unbearable. It seems, in fact, as though the artist knew how to lift the veil from our eyes to reveal what remains of man when all misleading appearances have fallen away.” 

Genet felt Giacometti’s sculptures were the key to beginning the process of recognition and stripping away, a process every creature must complete: you need to shrug off the visible world and venture beyond what can be measured, beyond the appearance of reality. 

It was a “testament” for both beings, an essential, unusual yet real bond between the arts that the two men represent.

It turns out this process is interminable for the artist who stubbornly pursues a goal that, mysteriously, eludes him. ”I have the feeling,” he says, “or the hope, that I am making progress each day. That is what makes me work, compelled to understand the core of life.” 

Then came the glory years. In 1955, the Arts Council Gallery in London and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York put on major retrospectives of his work. 

In 1961 he received the Carnegie Prize and the year after the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, where a space was reserved for his work alone. 

There were other important shows at the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That same year the French government awarded him with the Grand Prix National des Arts. But perhaps the greatest honor was when the artist and some of his works were printed on the Swiss 100-franc note (!!).   

He died of heart disease in Chur, Switzerland on January 11, 1966. 

You could talk for hours about Giacometti and unravel his intense and contentious relationship with America and various institutions, or talk about the acquisitions that, slowly, made him one of the most sought-after artists of the 1900s. But more importantly I encourage you to go see this show. Then maybe we can reconvene to talk about him. Sound good? 

While you’re at it, check out the three bronzes on sale in the Galleria Venus on 980 Madison Avenue. You won’t regret it! 

When we talk about Italy, whether as a child in an elementary school or a as a tourist, there are always these three words: Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel and Vatican Museums. Even those of  a certain age like me remember with particular anguish, which later on became absolute joy, the modern restoration that began in 1979 of the lunettes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and that continued until the restoration of the entire work. On December 11, 1989, the  process was documented by the Japanese photographer Takashi Okamura as it  brought back the ancient splendor and colors a work that had lost its original power.

Do you remember all the controversies at the time? And the people who identified Michelangelo with a faded painting rather than a vivid incarnation? We can definitely say that Michelangelo has always made people talking a lot about himself.

Painter, sculptor, architect, and poet,  Michelangelo, one of the most famous artists of the Italian Renaissance, was born in Tuscany on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, a little village close to Arezzo. Michelangelo’s father, Lodovico, was  serving as a magistrate there  when he recorded the birth of his second of five sons to his wife, Francesca Neri.  As  critic Holland Cotter correctly noted  in his article in the New York Times, the exhibit “Michelangelo Divine Draftsman and Designer” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a monument to a monument. As Cotter said, ‘’It is a one-stop event with a nonextendable three-month run, which is the maximum exposure to light, even at dusk-level, that the drawings can safely stand‘’.

To explore  more fully the idea of the exhibition, we asked questions of Carmen C. Bambach, a good friend of mine, curator of the exhibition,  as well as curator at the Museum's Department of Drawing and Prints. We wanted to know more about the work, the commitment and the torment behind this and every other major exhibition. 

Is the exhibition about Michelangelo a sign of devotion to an artist you've always loved? Is it your life’s commitment?

“Michelangelo Divine Draftsman and Designer is the result of a life-long commitment to study this great artist and is in many ways a professional dream come true.  I was born and raised in Chile until I was a young teenager, when my family emigrated to the United States, where my inclination during my early life was to become an artist. At that young age, I was very focused on drawing copies after photographs of Michelangelo’s frescoes and sculptures  to train my eye and hand. Michelangelo  was my love throughout my college years and graduate studies in art history at Yale University, but the concentrated efforts, research, and serious planning for the exhibition at the Met have occurred during the last eight years. Our focus  in the show is primarily on  the originality of the artist. At a time when much of our visual experience -- as students, scholars, or the general public -- is inundated by digital images, it is a rare privilege to see so many original works by Michelangelo gathered together in an event designed for  close looking, contemplation, and even reverie. The Met’s exhibition explores the concept of Michelangelo the Divin’ disegnatore, the divine draftsman and designer, with a selection of more than 200 extremely rare works, selected from almost 50 museums and private collections in Europe and the United States."

What did you find out about Michelangelo that you did not know before? Do you see him in a different way now?

"In preparing the Met’s exhibition and making the selection of the over 200 works, it became especially important to focus the attention on Michelangelo’s disegno, its meanings and implications in the widest possible sense. Michelangelo’s energy and imagination – his “fantasia” -- were uncontainable up until his death at 88 years of age, and the exhibition attempts to illustrate his enormous versatility as an artist in the selection of works. The exhibition showcases the 133 drawings by Michelangelo, which is a very large representation of his work. There are also three of his sculptures and a wood architectural model from the Fabbrica di San Pietro in order to illustrate  the continuities in his artistic process and the monumentality of scale in his conception of the human figure and architecture. The exhibition also includes drawings, paintings, and sculptures by other artists that  represent Michelangelo in the art world of his time."

The audience visiting Michelangelo is sometimes a distracted audience. What should those people absolutely not miss about this exhibition? 

 "The design of the exhibition includes many monumental works  which create vistas as points of attraction  for the public, as enticements to keep going from one room of the exhibition to another. The vistas are of Michelangelo’s marble sculptures and of his largest compositions all seen in dramatic lighting. Of course, the visitor should not miss the room at the midpoint in the exhibition that contains an  enormous reproduction of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the scaffolding, and Michelangelo’s original studies for the Sistine. The reproduction of the Sistine Ceiling can be seen floating above almost at the entrance of the exhibition so that the visitor begins the show with that as a destination."

Back to the Sistine restoration, I want to underline that the preliminary experimentation began in 1979. The restoration team included Gianluigi Colalucci, Maurizio Rossi, Piergiorgio Bonetti, and Bruno Baratti, who took as guidelines the rules for the restoration of works of art established in 1978 by Carlo Pietrangeli, director of the Vatican Laboratory for the Restoration of Paintings. The first stage of the work took place  between June 1980 and October 1984 and the vault was completed in 1989. The final stage was the restoration of the wall frescoes, approved in 1994 and open to the public on  December 11, 1999.

Holland Cotter also wrote  that “this exhibition has made you revisit the original Renaissance concept of design,  disegno,  as a theoretical category, an aesthetic and ethical end in itself?” True?

"Yes, in commenting in detail about Michelangelo’s 'disegno' Holland got to the very pulse of the Met’s exhibition in his thoughtful review. Michelangelo’s conception of “disegno” (in the sense of design and drawing) provided the very foundation of his art, and he understood it in a profoundly metaphysical sense. In Michelangelo’s creative process the work of the mind, the eye, and the hand of the artist are interconnected in a continuum in which the intellectual and the manual production of art exist as one, and are inseparable dimensions of  creativity. Disegno unified Michelangelo’s activity as sculptor, painter, and architect. It was very important to demonstrate to the viewer this ineffable, continuous connection of mind, eye, and hand in the sequences of drawings we presented. Many of the sequences of drawings reveal that for Michelangelo drawing was a very rich and functional language of expression, as well as an act of love. His gift drawings to his friends are the jewels of Michelangelo’s disegno, and those given to for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, for instance, are all reunited in the  exhibition. Michelangelo’s art also emphasizes the monumental, the permanent (even wishfully, the eternal), and the very execution of the work “by his hand” -- “di sua mano,” as so many documents and letters by his contemporaries confirm. The authenticity of Michelangelo’s hand in drawing and design is a leading theme in the  exhibition."

Michelangelo’s lover Tommaso dei Cavalieri(1509–1587), was an  exceptionally handsome nobleman  whose appearance seemed to have fit the artist's notions of ideal masculine beauty. Cavalieri was 23 years old when Michelangelo met him in 1532, at the age of 57 and he was the object of the greatest expression of Michelangelo's love. He dedicated approximately 30 of his total 300 poems to Cavalieri, which made them the artist's largest sequence of poems. The homoerotic nature was recognized in his own time, so that a decorous veil was drawn across them by his grandnephew, Michelangelo the Younger, who published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed. John Addington Symonds, the British poet, critic,  and gay activist, undid this change by translating the original sonnets into English and by writing a two-volume biography, published in 1893. Michelangelo also had a strong relationship with Vittoria Colonna,  who influenced Michelangelo's life the most. He met her in Rome, where he spent the last 30 years of his life. Their friendship came late, when he was 61, lasted until Colonna’s death in 1547. It seems to have seriously changed by  encouraging his move in a contemplative direction and bringing a new, soft grace to his work.

What does Michelangelo’s art teach a contemporary artist?

"Michelangelo’s philosophy of  disegno seems to me to provide very important avenues for new ways of thinking about our contemporary art world. The example of Michelangelo can help us refocus our attention on the work by the artist’s hand, di sua mano, which can and should be seen as intrinsic to the creation of art. In our contemporary art world, it seems to me a very productive exercise to rethink how we approach the relationships of the conceptual and the technical execution of art. Today, artists, collectors, and the art public have often felt a certain anxiety about admiring or even valuing  the technical virtuosity of a work of art. Instead, the importance and value go mostly into conceptual aspects and  ideas behind the work. Many contemporary artists have especially diminished the value of the execution of a work of art so that a basic sketch can be given to studio assistants from which to paint or to create  a series of images. A sculptor in Carrara, for example,  can create an entire monumental sculpture in marble based on  a small conceptual sketch by an artist. Similarly, we have often tended to emphasize the ephemeral in art and give little thought to the permanent."

In this field I remember that Jackson Pollock,  one of the leading painters  of the twentieth century, one who undermined the rules of western figurative art and dissolving the last bastions of Renaissance perspective was influenced by Michelangelo. The  young Pollock, still undecided whether he wanted to become a painter or a sculptor, studied and reflected upon Michelangelo’s work: there are drawings by Pollock that reproduce  the ‘naked’ in the Sistine Chapel, the Cumaean Sibyl, and The Prophet Jonah, certain figures in the Flood, Adam in his famous position,  and studies of positions and drapery in the Judgement. A small exhibition of Michelangelo’s influence  was held  in Florence in 2014.

An ambitious project with a prestigious institution can create some competition in the art world. What was the reaction of international lenders and, in particular, of Italian colleagues? 

"The Met’s show has been eight years in the making, including the research and the many loan negotiations. From the very beginning, our colleagues in the museums of Europe and the United States rallied to support this project with loans, and once we had secured a core group of works, more institutions began to collaborate . Both European and American museums and private collectors have been beyond extraordinary in their generosity with loans, and they often performed miracles to get these loans approved  in time for the  Met’s exhibition. Very importantly, Italy has lent a total of 57 works,, most of them by Michelangelo’s hand. This large group of impressive loans has made a magnificent contribution to the show. Of the nearly 50 lenders of works of art to the Met's show, I would like to single out especially the Royal Collection of Windsor Castle (Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II); the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford; the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence; the Casa Buonarroti in Florence; the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples; the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London."

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Carmen C. Bambach, Curator of Italian and Spanish drawings (BA, MA, and PhD, Yale University; fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences), is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art. She is the author of Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Una eredità difficile: i disegni ed i manoscritti di Leonardo tra mito e documento (Florence, 2009), more than 70 scholarly articles, and 10 exhibition catalogues, including Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (2017), The Drawings of Bronzino (2010), An Italian Journey(2010), Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman (2003), Correggio and Parmigianino (2000), and The Drawings of Filippino Lippi and His Circle (1997)

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Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until 12 February 2018)
Accompanied by a catalogue by the organizing curator of the exhibition, Carmen C. Bambach—an authoritative volume that examines the Renaissance master as "the divine draftsman and designer" whose work, according to Giorgio Vasari, embodied the unity of the arts.

Many thanks to Carmen Banbach, Mauro Mussulin and the The Metropolitan Museum