Standing Figure

Description

March 28, 2009
Giacometti often proclaimed his interest in exploring in sculpture his ideas about vision and perception, and particularly in rendering in three dimensions the phenomenon of vanishing point perspective so easily captured in painting. Notwithstanding his own description of his formal concerns, by the late 1940s, Giacometti was widely regarded as the artist who best represented Existential angst in the aftermath of the two World Wars. Some scholarship suggests that the skeletal thinness of his figures during this period was a manifestation of working through trauma from the ever-increasing flow of evidence from the Nazi concentration camps; the artist is also said to have begun to sculpt in this style soon after he visited the exhibition “Art and Resistance” (1946), where he would have seen grisly images of emaciated prisoners and piles of naked corpses, some drawn and painted by his friend and neighbor Boris Taslitsky, who had been interned at Buchenwald. While we cannot know if Giacometti is directly referencing these powerful images, his work was produced in a historical moment deeply affected by them, and they heavily influenced the prevailing interpretation of his sculpture.