Alberto Giacometti & Yves Tanguy: Solitude and Silence

Skarstedt Paris presents Alberto Giacometti & Yves Tanguy: Solitude and Silence, the first exhibition devoted to a sustained dialogue between the two masters. It brings together sculptures and paintings by Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) with paintings and works on paper by Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). The two artists emerged from the same city, the same movement and the same catastrophic historical backdrop, and drew from them opposite yet complementary conclusions. The exhibition examines the diverging answers they gave to the defining questions of the post-war years. What remains after two world wars have brought civilisation to the brink of annihilation? What remains when humankind becomes its own predator? For Tanguy, the answer took the form of landscape; for Giacometti, the human figure. In both cases the subject is nature, and in both the choice is absolute: one keeps the world and gives up mankind, the other keeps mankind and gives up the world. Born a year apart at the start of the twentieth century, they belonged to the same Parisian generation, though they came to it by very different routes. Tanguy was self-taught – a former merchant seaman and the son of a sea captain – who decided to paint after glimpsing a de Chirico in a dealer’s window; Giacometti had been drawing, painting and modelling since childhood in a family of artists. In Paris they moved in the same circles. The house Tanguy shared on the rue du Château became one of the central meeting places of the Surrealist movement, and Giacometti was among its visitors. The two later became neighbours, joined André Breton’s Surrealist group within a few years of each other, and exhibited together at the sixth Salon des Surindépendants. Both eventually parted ways with Breton – Giacometti through expulsion in 1935, when he returned to working from the living model, Tanguy through a gradual estrangement after he left for the United States. Both were displaced by the war, Tanguy to a new world in Connecticut and Giacometti to his native Switzerland. And both were represented in New York by Pierre Matisse, a schoolfriend of Tanguy’s and a fellow student of Giacometti’s. From this common ground, their work follows different paths. In Tanguy’s painting the human figure withdraws and never returns to his ever-evolving landscapes. En le Temps Menaçant (1929) suspends a single dark, bone-like form in an empty ochre sky above a plain the colour of deep water, two faint incised diagonals the only measure of the distance between them. An untitled gouache of 1939 lays its objects along a low ground beneath a pale gradient of sky, tethered to one another by threads pulled taut across the sheet. The paintings made after his move to the United States – among them L’Orpailleuse (1945), LUMEN (1949) and Elle Viendra (1950) – gather such forms into dense congregations, chalk-white and bone-hard, punctuated by sudden reds and yellows and set against horizons that recede into the distance, if they exist at all. Two geographies meet in these works: the granite coast of Brittany, where Tanguy spent his childhood holidays, and the light and scale of the American continent. “I also have the feeling here of a greater sense of space,” he remarked in 1946. “That is, after all, why I came.” Man is nowhere to be found in these expanses. In his place stands nature – no longer a backdrop for human activity but something that carries on without it, a landscape that outlives him. After 1935 Giacometti took the opposite path, making the human figure the sole focus of his attention for three decades. Yet the figure is never severed from nature; it becomes nature’s irreducible container – a bust becomes a mountain, a head a stone, a standing silhouette a tree. In Diego assis (Homme à mi-corps) (1964–65), the seated body loses its lower half in a mass of worked bronze that reads less like legs than like roots, the figure emerging from its material as an outcrop emerges from a hillside. In Femme, épaule cassée, première version (1961), the title names the damage: one shoulder ends in a broken stump while the other side of the torso remains intact. The legs thin to two rods and vanish into a rough slab of bronze, so that the figure seems rooted in its base rather than placed upon it. Buste d’homme (New York II) (1965) cuts the arms away at the shoulder and lets the chest fall into a wide, spreading base; the surface is pitted and torn throughout, and the head rising from it has the worked, weathered look of stone. Neither body of work is a document of the war, and neither artist would have described it that way. Yet the change in both after 1939 is hard to separate from the years that produced it. The melancholy of Tanguy’s early paintings gives way, in his American work, to something closer to menace: forms harden and crowd together, accumulating like sediment or debris, lit from no source the viewer can locate. Giacometti travelled a different road to a comparable end. Emerging from the war years in Switzerland, he arrived at figures reduced almost to the point of disappearance, held in a space that presses in on them from every side – and found in that reduction not a diminishment of the human but its irreducible core. Where Tanguy seeks the world in the absence of mankind, Giacometti seeks humanity as the ultimate measure of the world. An instinct for enclosure runs through both bodies of work. Giacometti’s La cage (première version) (1949–50) and Tanguy’s La Cage des Temps (1951) were made within two years of each other on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Both use enclosure as a way of marking out time within space, treating the frame less as a limit than as the very condition under which anything can appear and happen at all. “Solitude is not psychological,” Giacometti said in 1963. “It exists in space.” The exhibition’s title names something both artists understood in spatial rather than psychological terms, and Tanguy’s silence works in the same register: not a mood imposed on the landscape but a property of it, the consequence of a constructed world. If Tanguy sought to resist the impermanence of existence through the survival of landscape, Giacometti found in the human figure the ultimate measure of reality. One makes the landscape a place of survival and renewal; the other makes the human figure the last territory of reality and hope. It is from this shared history, resolved in two irreducibly distinct visions, that the dialogue between their works is born.