A Once-in-a-Lifetime Gathering

I gasped as I exited the elevator into the PaceWildenstein Gallery, where I was overwhelmed by an installation of nine sublime, roughly 4-foot-tall Giacometti sculptures. The grouping of cast bronze figures, “The Women of Venice” (1956-58), is part of “The Women of Giacometti” exhibition, a museum-quality show of approximately 50 sculptures and paintings of women that spans the artist’s entire career.“The Women of Venice” was first conceived for the artist’s participation in the 1956 Venice Biennale. The last time they were all together was in 1958, when they were shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, and the ambitiously installed show at PaceWildenstein is reminiscent of some of the classic, gorgeous installations of Modern art one used to see at Pierre Matisse or Sidney Janis.Connections among the works abound. It is great to be able to com pare Giacometti’s two paintings “The Artist’s Mother,” from 1950 and 1951, respectively. In MoMA’s “The Artist’s Mother” (1950), she is seated – the calming, weighted anchor at the center of the chaotic room, and her head, as if a distant memory, looms far away – yet she also rushes down the Oriental carpet toward the viewer like the engine of a speeding train. In the second “Artist’s Mother” (1951, from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris), she, with baton in hand, is schoolmarm, maestro, and ship’s captain. Framed with gray and stationed or wedged behind large slabs, she is the single clear form in a storm.Then there is the pairing of “Plaster Head of a Woman (Flora Mayo)” (c.1926) and the bronze “Artist’s Mother” (1927). “Flora Mayo” is a fresco come to life; her face is flattened like a pancake, yet it reveals tenderness and haughtiness. It is a tombstone and a landscape and a beautiful woman, in which the carved features, especially the nose and forehead (which become a tree), transform roughness into beauty. Nearby, “The Artist’s Mother” reveals another kind of longing. Her hair is an inverted heart, and her cheek is a long curving path into the distance.The walls at PaceWildenstein have been painted a medium gray, an enveloping and subdued color that interacts with the various patinas of bronze. It sets a somber, intimate tone in the space around the pinched and turning, nervously agitated sculptures. It also gives an eerie, solitary atmosphere to the figures’ ever shrinking, ever expanding heads and to their deeply buried yet brightly burning eyes. It reinforces the sense in Giacometti’s work that gravity and verticality are tenuous states; as well as the sense that your own foot or hand (indeed your entire body) is a strange and distant appendage or tool.Much of the show at PaceWildenstein is beautifully lit. At times the gray reads as overcast sky, fortifying the figures’ simultaneous allusions to architecture, trees, totem, cloud, and ruins; to monument, apparition, melting ice, and mountain summit. It also brings out the variously colored and textured forms – from dark brown to turquoise green, from tree trunk thick to paper-thin – in the Venetian “Women,” which, like so many of the sculptures on view, are equally solid and elusive, as they float, swim, and undulate within the gallery’s fields of gray. (Much of the show at PaceWildenstein is beautifully lit.)Yet I have mixed feelings. I could not help but think that in some cases the installations, which often group paintings and sculptures together on raised platforms set in deep niches against three walls, verged on a staginess that favors groupings over individual works. It is a forced arrangement that sets the artworks not only at a physical distance from the viewer (many of the sculptures cannot be viewed in the round or even from the sides, and some of the paintings cannot be seen from closer than 8 feet away), but at an interactive and emotional distance as well.The installations at PaceWildenstein feel like canned existentialism. They “present” Giacometti’s art at the expense of allowing us to engage with it. I am at a loss to understand why so many galleries and museums often push figurative sculpture against the wall, as if the figure’s face was not only primary but all. One look at the barely accessible rear view of “Head of Ottilia” (c. 1926) – a golden plaster head whose wonderful face is fairly conventional but in which the back of the head is a carved and sculpted universe of foliage and architecture – and it becomes clear how important it is to see the entire work.As with ancient Egyptian figures, Giacometti’s sculptures have a strong frontality. But the sculptures do not begin and end there. They are sculpted in the round, and they demand to be experienced as such. Part of his sculptures’ power and tension lies is in their ability to force you, after all is said and done, to meet them head-on, where their gaze penetrates right through you, and their faces, fixed yet constantly in motion, emit an ethereal calm.At PaceWildenstein, “The Women of Venice” figures are all staggered together on stepped pedestals. Four of the sculptures face forward; three are angled to the right; and two veer to the left, as if they are all about to collide at Grand Central during rush hour. Certainly, a lot can be gained in the comparison between the figures’ frontal, three-quarter, and profile views; but much more can be gained in the round, where those experiences are allowed to be fluid, not fixed.Despite my reservations, “The Women of Giacometti,” is still a mustsee exhibition. Such a grouping will probably not be available again for 50 years. Giacometti does much more than give us portraits of individual women in these works; he gives us living portraits of universal relationships between people and to life.Paola Carola, who posed for Giacometti for six months during 1958 and 1959, wrote in the PaceWildenstein catalog: “I am often surprised by the presence of my bust and by what I see in it. … I often see the head and the face as those of a stranger; but not always; sometimes at sunset, standing on my balcony overlooking the sea and feeling that I am staring at the unknown, I recognize myself in the distant gaze of the eyes in the sculpture. … [Sitting motionless for Giacometti] like a statue on its pedestal … I had the curious impression that the modeling clay, continuously shaped and mutating, was alive and that I was the inanimate one.”Until December 17 (32 E. 57th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-421-3292).

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Gathering

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Gathering

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