Rodin looked like a work extracted from some rough marble by Rodin. Giacometti was dry as one of the figures he modeled himself with cat shaking. They never met (the Frenchman died in 1917 and the Swiss was born in 1901), but an alternating current was established between them.
When Giacometti arrived in Paris, Rodin had been dead for five years. He was a young enthusiast of the master's work, a sculptor apprentice fascinated by the abrupt art of that subject. These first-minute passions usually leave a trail that remains throughout life no matter how much you stab it.
Giacometti turned away from that fervor when he began to look for his place in the sculpture. Your own place. His aesthetic initials. His pavilion of silence. He chose other routes: Zadkine, Lipchitz and Laurens ... He crossed over to the high voltage area of surrealism. He exercised modernity there with his hands turned towards the symbolic. And once the expedition that made it as he wanted was completed, he turned his eyes to Rodin's work, wiser and better conditioned to dive in that impetuous sea that split the art of a time yet to be done in two.
Giacometti's round-trip trips to Rodin's work set the exhibition that on February 6 (and until May 10) hosts the Mapfre Foundation of Madrid in its rooms at Paseo de Recoletos, with almost 200 pieces, and of which Catherine Chevillot (director of the Rodin Museum), Catherine Grenier (director of the Giacometti Foundation) and Hugo Daniel (of the Giacometti Institute) are curators. It is not a fight, but a strange communion that already occupied the spaces of the Gianadda Foundation (Switzerland) at the end of 2019, but here you will have new pieces and different layout.
Giacometti was bringing shapes and materials from figuration to abstraction until he came to the tense metaphysics of his irons, to the quiet place of an essential sculpture that moves by his wide solitude, by the astonishment of such a quiet movement. In Giacometti there is concentrated confusion and damage that a devastated Europe accumulated after World War II . And it is in that time of disappointments when he returns to Rodin, to the expressiveness of passions that he had discarded as matter, but he did not deny. The human figure was the axis of the two artists, subjected to emotional discharges of very different caliber, although complicit in the impossibility of drawing or modeling only what they see, and yet it is what they try to do.
Rodin is abundant, Giacometti seems to run away from any volume, from any voluptuous gesture. Rodin is driven with blind force, Giacometti embraces austerity as part of his spirit . They love the ancient statuary alike and consider all fires the fire. They could have worked a thousand years, without repeating themselves, without going back, never ending anything, always going further. The photographs of the Swiss artist in the sculpture of The Bourgeois of Calais , by Rodin, installed in the park of Eugène Rudier de Vésinet (France), is another document of respect, of the interest that this work arouses in a Giacometti that begins to develop the first sculptural groups.
Over time, he made drawings and diagrams in the French catalogs, which he never got rid of. The man who marches is a piece of Rodin that Giacometti adopted obsessively. One sought power, movement, appetite, sensuality. The other, a moral gesture, a questioning of all that until then were immutable values.
The way of dealing with matter was also different, but the way in which they were exposed to the exploration of the human could go in parallel paths. One from the excess, the other from the concentration. Rodin's talent, who did his work in a noisy mansion on the outskirts of Paris, annulled what any of his disciples could have. The most revealing of those young women, Camille Claudel, devoured her until she became a tormented being who ended up hammering her own pieces and occupying an uninhabited body of life in the asylum of Montdevergues, in 1943. Some of the best sculptures of the French master have Camille's pulse.
Giacometti, on the other hand, worked alone in a small shed, with a pale flock of plasters, some books arranged on any page, a shower that did not heat up, the turkey of a cigar off on the lips and submerged in a silence of stone.
The exhibition gathers molds, models, finished pieces, notes, drawings, photographs. The portrait is another of its communicating vessels . For example, those of the Japanese Hanako, a subject to which Rodin dedicated 58 sculptures. Or those of Giacometti's brother, Diego, or of the Rita Gueyfier model, who posed almost daily in his studio, where the Swiss locked himself up at a stubborn idea: "Capture the true." The integration of the pedestal to the sculpture was another of the points in common, the incorporation of the plinth as part of the work. The elevation.
Two men of opposite temperament, of different convulsions, but hopelessly linked by that intimate battle beyond despair, beyond glory, closer to the will to encrypt the world in a gesture that lasts longer than life.
Rodin works his pieces with a gesture of spite, of rage . Giacometti with an eagerness to reach the last gram of existence, stripping the figure of everything accessory until making it the thread of anyone. The encounter of two pieces such as Eustache de Saint-Pierre (1916), of the French, and of Figure debout (1958), of the Swiss, allow us to clearly see that between the energetic and the spiritual there is the same search, a compatible expressiveness, a convulsive beauty of the same sign.
The accident, the random, the fragmentary is even part of the same exploration in the two artists. It is not about beautifying what you see, but about giving new life to what is suspected. May each new work be an event. That you can appreciate the seam, the reverse, the imperfection, the trace of the yolk, the incision of the nail, the existence.
Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti are beyond dialogue and beyond complicity . Two beings endowed with the same thirst that does not defeat water. Each in their own way exploring a new depth. And a vertigo.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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