PARIS.- The exhibition Giacometti/Morandi. Still moments at the Institut Giacometti presents the unique meeting of the œuvres of two major post-war artists. Although they were contemporaries, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) never met, but many essential characteristics bring them close together. This exhibition is the first opportunity to examine these connections: their particular practice in relation to their studio, the attachment to a familiar environment and models, and a singular research rooted in careful attention to real life.


Dive into the world of Alberto Giacometti and Giorgio Morandi with Moments immobiles.


Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) were contemporaries. Both made of their studio, a room-studio in Via Fondazza in Bologna for Morandi, a studio in rue Hyppolite-Maindron in the Montparnasse neighbourhood for Giacometti, the matrix of an œuvre dominated by the continuity of a unique and same research whose development conveys the meaning of their respective lives.

They shared the recurrence of the same models: for Morandi, the objects collected to be painted, the central figures of Annette and Diego among a narrow circle of personalities that went on enlarging for Giacometti.

They deliberately travelled little. Morandi’s life was split between Bologna, his native town and Grizzana, a village in the Apennines where he mainly spent the summer. Settled in Paris since 1932, Giacometti went almost every year to Stampa and Maloja, his childhood homes in the Val Bregaglia.

Major artists of the 20th century, they were original voices who, having experienced the avant-garde, revitalised classic forms: still life and landscape for Morandi, the human figure for Giacometti, both artists keen to express in the post-war years, a universal vision of the human condition.

At a time when the debates around figuration versus abstraction raged, when artists were summoned to choose one camp over the other, both men developed an art connected to real life, though not realist but which, from the transcription of the visible world, focussed on the essence.

This exhibition gathers together the collections of the Fondation Giacometti and loans from Museo Morandi, Bologna and European private collections. It will take the visitors on a journey through their careers from 1913 to 1965, in four chapters: The tudio; The Familiar, Throught the avant-gardes; Looking into real life.

The Studio

While in the first decades of the 20th century Dadaism, futurism and surrealism promoted new artistic forms in which theatre, music, dance and visual arts combined, it was in their work in the studio that Morandi and Giacometti operated the synthesis of art and life. Those unique spaces offered the artists a frame of reference and a catalyst to their art. An ordinary room in the petit bourgeois apartment where Morandi lived with his mother and sisters, the studio of Via Fondazza in Bologna offered a setting to the objects and apparatus, simple boards covered in paper, that played such a part in his practice over several dozen years. Alberto Giacometti’s studio, reconstructed at Institut Giacometti from many photographs taken in his lifetime, as basic as Morandi’s, is a testimony to the work and references of the artist.

As soon as the visitor enters the exhibition, they are welcomed with a photograph of Morandi’s studio taken in 1980 by Paolo Ferrari, which hangs opposite Giacometti’s studio. Contrary to Giacometti who let us glimpse the studio space in his painted portraits, or evoked it in drawings focused on sculptures of various periods piled on its floor, Morandi never depicted his studio and let it be photographed very few times. But for the two men, the studio was a space both permanent and always in motion, in which rules were worked out to enable the artists to set up their encounter with a reality carefully arranged. The background sheets on which Morandi drew the outlines of the objects, real testimonial to the compositions in progress, and the viewfinder cut from a piece of cardboard, which he used to frame his landscapes, clearly reveal that, as much as the mark traced on the floor by Giacometti to show the spot of the model’s chair. Whether daylight or a simple lightbulb, the changing light regulated the work sessions: painting in the afternoon and drawing in the evening for Morandi, session with a model in the daytime and work from memory in the night time for Giacometti.

The studio walls were spaces for running trials. In 1972, Annette, Giacometti’s widow, had the sketches and graffiti removed from the walls of the original studio, repositioned now in the Institut. On Via Fondazza, paintings in progress are hanging on the walls, waiting to be appraised.

The familiar

Giacometti and Morandi didn’t travel much.

Except for one trip to Switzerland, to Winterthur in 1956, Morandi never accompanied his many international exhibitions. His life unfolded mainly between Bologna, his native town, and Grizzana, a little village in the Apennines where he had spent his holiday with his family since 1913, and where he had a house with a studio built in 1959-1960. Giacometti settled in Paris in 1922. Very close to his family, he regularly returned to the family homes in Stampa and Maloja, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where he worked in his father’s old studios. He did not like travelling either, choosing instead to remain focused in his studio. Grizzana and its surroundings, like Stampa and Maloja, are recurrent subjects in the landscapes made by the two artists.

Born into a family of artists, Giacometti benefitted from his painter father’s passion for impressionism and futurism, as well as from his extensive culture in art history. It was in books and magazines that Morandi acquired a broad culture of French art, in particular Seurat, Monet, Cézanne and Chardin, but also Picasso and Le Douanier Rousseau. Informed of the latest trends in art, Morandi, at 24, took on the cubist and futurist vocabulary whose presence can be seen in his first still lifes dating between 1914 and 1916 (Still life, 1914, Mnam, Centre Pompidou). A vocabulary Giacometti discovered when he arrived in Paris at the beginning of the 1920s and which marked his first personal experimentations. As far as references are concerned, three names dominate the pantheon shared by Morandi and Giacometti: Giotto, Rembrandt, Cézanne. Paul Cézanne’s demanding practice encouraged generations of artists to experiment as they tried to leave behind the colourful ‘snapshot’ of impressionism. Giacometti’s fondness was conveyed in the copies he made of Cézanne’s works on detached sheets of paper or in books like André Lhote’s Paul Cézanne. From the detailed and constructed depiction sensitive to the effects of light found in Giacometti’s art, in particular in Portrait of Ottilia (circa 1920), the artist’s sister and Montagne, Lunghin (circa 1930), and in Morandi’s Self-portrait (c. 1930) to their drawings and paintings of late maturity, both artists showed a continuous deference to Cézanne as the artist who, in his studio, ceaselessly examined the issue of how to express real life in painting.

The Italian Primitives were another reference. During a journey to Italy with his father in 1920, Giacometti saw Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena of Padua. Morandi also developed an interest in Giotto and Masaccio whom he discovered on a trip to Florence in 1910, and from whom he learned the dynamism of simple forms.

Passing through the avant-gardes

Between 1918 and 1920, Giorgio Morandi made a dozen ‘metaphysical’ paintings. His art came closer to the art of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico. This short period established in his oeuvre the presence of daily life objects, at times quaint: door stopper in turned wood, casing, box in wood (Still life (with a box), 1918), milliner mannequin, ball. Smoothly painted in delicate tones, bathed in a diffuse light in a space of reduced depth, those objects seem offered to the gaze like a silent scene. Based on simple shapes, those paintings announced the still lifes with objects simply lined up from the 1920s and 1930s (Still life, 1931, private collection).

The realism, the washed-out tones, read as proofs of his ‘Italian-ness’ within the art movement Novecento, with which Morandi exhibited in the political context of fascism, were interpreted as a transcription of the “spirit of the time”, referred in France by Jean Cocteau as a “call to order” in 1926. They anticipate Morandi’s personal quest in the following thirty years to maintain the cohesion of a universe whose actors (bottles, vases, small bells…) were brought closer, then placed at distance, or eventually superimposed in an endless play of shapes. A universe both very calm and threatening.

First influenced by Zadkine and Laurens, Giacometti joined the surrealist movement from 1931 to 1935.

From Cubist figure 1 (1926) to Walking woman (1932), the exhibition follows Giacometti’s evolution from the geometrical analysis of volumes and the steles bearing a few signs that brought him close to abstraction (Head looking,1928 - 1929) followed by the “immobile and mute objects” with violent and sexual connotations, to finally the reappearance of the full-length figure. With an added arm and a head made of the neck of a violin, this female figure appears like a mannequin and not entirely human yet, in the surrealist exhibition at the Pierre Colle gallery in 1933. Like Morandi’s metaphysical paintings, those works are imbued with silence. They indicate the disappearance of all narrative, of any autobiographical mythology, and prepare the ground for immersion in the sole attention to real life.

Looking into real life

Alberto Giacometti opposed “automatic” creation, under inner dictation of sculptures from the surrealist period entirely conceived before their making, at that moment in 1935 when he decided to confront the issues of representation he had dealt with during his apprenticeship and undertake to build his vision facing real life. That new working method facing a model was slow and the object of repeated reworking. The emblematic works of Giacometti’s figurative style made from the post-war era to his death in 1966 show that constant reworking in the representation of the same models, was never successful enough in his own eyes. In the paintings he developed in the same period, the work was at times, erased and started all over again each day, to the degree that he said to Jean Clay in 1963 that his aim was no longer the finished work.

This interest for the work in progress found an echo in his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre: facing his models, usually the same few, Giacometti described practising a real exercise in visual epistemology. For Morandi art was an experiment too. Anonymous, without label or mark, painted inside and sometimes outside, covered in a thin layer of dust, his objects appear like a “prepared” reality whose precise determination on positioning already belongs to the work. In his paintings made with big strokes, with a signature often too big, far from the smooth finish of the metaphysical works, the artist didn’t strive for perfect depiction but worked tirelessly at new combinations in painting, in a practice that was almost serial, especially from the 1950s (Still Life, 1956, Museo Morandi, Bologna and private collection).

Alberto Giacometti mentioned how much the experience of distance stimulated his vision. In a mythologised narrative often repeated, he had his entire system of representation - tiny figures first, then very slender - go back to a precise moment: the vision from far of his friend Isabel Rawsthorne on Boulevard Saint-Michel. We can similarly imagine Morandi’s daily experience of looking through the window at the courtyard of Via Fondazza, soon partially blocked with the building of a wall whose ochre plan took that familiar landscape towards abstraction. Or in Grizzana, his gaze projecting itself in the distance through an opening cut in a piece of cardboard. For both artists, that awareness of the distance was conveyed by the work itself, because of the necessity to combine together several elements and to work out their limits.

In 1956, Morandi left aside etching, a technique he learned to master as a self-taught artist from the study of Rembrandt’s prints, and turned to watercolour. His watercolours, like his drawings from the 1950s with quivering contours, play on the vacuum and the plenum in an effect of inverted density between the object and its environment. The discontinuity of the lines and the colours also surfaces in the landscapes from the 1950s made by Giacometti in Stampa, as in his pencil drawings punctuated with large erasures.

Questioned in 1955 by Peppino Mangravite on abstraction, Morandi said: “For me, there’s nothing abstract; there is nothing more surreal or more abstract than reality”, acknowledging an art of research in which the same act of observing simple elements - a bottle, a box, a bowl - is constantly re-examined, as was, for Giacometti, the vision of a woman, a man, or a head.