Giacometti at the Prado
Alberto Giacometti never visited Madrid, so he never walked through the Prado. But now 20 of his late great works are given pride of place in the Prado’s magisterial Edificio Villanueva, alongside masterpieces by Velasquez, Titian, Rubens, and the other giants of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Giacometti’s tall, thin figures do not appear at all out of place in the formal halls of the Prado. Yet the contrast between them and the art that surrounds them is striking. Anyone who lived in early modern Europe had ample cause for anxiety – life was famously nasty, short, and brutish. But Velasquez and the other great painters of the era were not social realists: their portraits of the aristocrats who supported them show a world of plenty, luxury, and serenity, and even their violent scenes from mythology portray suffering is a curiously sanitized world, free of real hardship except for those unfortunate few who had offended the gods.
Giacometti, however, was an artist of anxiety. His celebrated late figures are not robust and healthy, but emaciated and scarred. Not only their forms but their very surfaces tell of uncertainty and insecurity, as Giacometti’s hands constantly worked and reworked the clay from which his sculptures were cast, leaving them mottled and pitted.
Although it is not likely that many visitors who pass by the Giacometti sculptures on their way to Las Meninas will ponder it, the contrast between these works underscores the single greatest transformation in the history of western art, from a regime in which artists tailored their works to the aims of individual patrons, to one in which artists choose their techniques and motifs according to their own concerns, and only then present the products to an anonymous competitive market. Philip IV needed to project an image of power and security to his subjects, and Velasquez masterfully translated this need into visual images. But Giacometti made images for himself, and for collectors who happened to share his existentialist perception of the isolation and social fragmentation of modern society.
Ironically, the Prado is the greatest showcase for the artist who may have been the first to anticipate the artistic regime that Giacometti lived in, for it is not difficult to imagine that the aged Goya who disgorged the horrors of the nightmarish Black Paintings onto the walls of his house in Madrid would have understood the fears and anxieties that produced Giacometti’s late masterpieces.