The Missing Decade: Rethinking Giacometti’s Interwar Crisis
Art history loves a clean narrative arc. For Alberto Giacometti, the conventional biography follows a predictable binary: the early, experimental years as a Surrealist “object-maker,” followed by the post-war existentialist period that produced the towering, skeletal figures synonymous with mid-century malaise. Between these two poles sits a decade—1935 to 1945—frequently dismissed as a transitional interlude. As Joanna Fiduccia argues in Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, this is a profound historiographical error. By reducing his mid-career work to a mere bridge toward his “mature style,” we ignore the very mechanics of how an artist navigates historical collapse.
The standard reading of Giacometti—cemented by exhibitions like the 2001 MoMA retrospective—frames the shift away from Surrealism as a rejection of enigma in favor of a return to the “real” human head. Yet, this narrative ignores the deliberate, obsessive, and often radical experimentation that defined his work during the ascent of European fascism. The artist’s break with the Surrealist movement, sparked by André Breton’s frustration with his return to figuration, was not a conservative retreat. It was an interrogation of how representation could function when the world itself was splintering.
Scale as a Political Weapon
Fiduccia’s analysis centers on the peculiar scale of Giacometti’s work during the late 1930s. While peers were preoccupied with the monumental and the heroic—a visual language often co-opted by state-driven nationalism—Giacometti moved in the opposite direction. He produced portrait busts and figurines, some barely the size of a pin, mounted on massive, imposing bases. This was not merely an aesthetic choice; it was an act of refusal. By rendering the human figure diminutive against the backdrop of an expanding, aggressive state apparatus, he turned the act of "seizing life" into a site of profound instability.
This approach manifests most clearly in his 1939 designs for the Swiss National Exhibition. Tasked with representing a nation attempting to maintain its identity while squeezed between fascist borders, Giacometti proposed a bust of self-effacing proportions. The project was never realized, but its failure is telling. It highlights a tension that modernists like Donald Judd and Richard Serra would later recognize: Giacometti was not interested in creating a fixed monument, but in using the physical body to activate the surrounding empty space. He treated the environment as a phenomenological participant, a move that separates his work from the “monuments manqués” label applied by critics like Benjamin Buchloh.
Beyond the Existentialist Cliché
The reliance on “existentialist angst” as a catch-all explanation for Giacometti’s elongated figures acts as a filter that obscures the historical specificity of his development. By contextualizing his work within the volatile politics of the French interwar period and his own Swiss origins, Figures of Crisis dismantles the idea that the later, famous thin figures were an inevitable conclusion. Instead, they appear as one possible outcome of a long, arduous process of building and dismantling. His working method was characterized by a rapid oscillation—constructing a form only to destroy it—which mirrored the volatility of the geopolitical climate.
The Contemporary Echo
We are currently seeing a significant institutional pivot toward reassessing this artist. The Barbican Center’s current pairings of Giacometti with contemporary figures like Huma Bhabha and Mona Hatoum, along with the upcoming 2028 opening of the Musée & École Giacometti in Paris, suggest that the art world is finally moving past the simplified canon. The archival wealth of the future Paris site—housing over 10,000 items—will likely provide the empirical weight needed to finalize this shift.
The relevance of this revisionism extends beyond the walls of the museum. Fiduccia’s study serves as a warning against the temptation to treat artistic responses to crisis as purely symbolic. When nationalism and exclusionary politics return with the force we see today, the "crisis" of the 1930s no longer looks like a historical footnote; it looks like a precursor. If Giacometti’s work teaches us anything, it is that the survival of the individual form—its stubborn, shrunken, and fragile persistence—is not just an aesthetic achievement. It is a fundamental assertion of existence against the encroaching pressures of a totalizing environment. The challenge for future scholars and observers is to maintain this focus, identifying how the "crisis" of today will be retrospectively distorted by the narratives we choose to build around it.
