Alberto Giacometti’s “Figures of Crisis”

Do the sculptures by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), created during a ten-year period of creative crisis beginning in 1935 — and initially understood to be regressive, peculiar, and inscrutable — have a deeper relationship to that era’s crisis of nationalism?

In her first book, “Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism,” Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor of History of Art at Yale University, looks at the artist during a period when he abruptly abandoned his abstract surrealist experiments and devoted himself to sculpting deeply textured portrait busts and minuscule figurines, many no larger than a fingernail.

“These sculptures have remained a blind spot at the dead center of this otherwise well-exposed oeuvre,” said Fiduccia at the book launch on April 8 at Yale’s Loria Center.

“Figures of Crisis” traces the origins and progression of Giacometti’s artistic crisis, linking the sculptures to the rise of nationalism and to a broader crisis of national identity in modern Europe during the interwar period.

Her monograph centers on Giacometti’s career during this decade-long period (1935–1945) and prior to his creation of his iconic filiform figures. 

Fiduccia’s book is a re-evaluation of a major figure in 20th Century art as she examines this period and the central features of Giacometti’s artworks: turbulent surfaces, unsettling generality, severely reduced scale, and compulsive repetition. Fiduccia proposes that the artwork gave form “to the experience of social breakdown and war, even as they laid the groundwork for his iconic postwar sculpture.”

Pursuing the concept of crisis as both an irreducible encounter with uncertainty and the clarification of a conflict, Fiduccia reimagines this fragmentary and inconspicuous body of work as the pivotal phase in the artist’s career — as well as a vital episode in the history of modern sculpture and experimental art practices.

Fiduccia said, “I wanted to write a book about living with the symptom that is nationalism, and that understands modernism through its attempts to appraise, to manage, and to survive that symptom.”

Fiduccia said she also wanted to examine “an artist struggling to make original work, great work, in a moment of immense cultural decline — a decline caused not by the disintegration, but by the intensification, of the central social form and a great revolutionary project of modernity: the nation.”

At the book’s launch event, Fiduccia reflected on what contemporary scholars and artists may glean from this period of Giacometti’s work. “Are we able to understand Giacometti yet? With the understanding that comes with hindsight, only after the end of an epoch? That is to say, is the modernism that lives with the symptom of nationalism really over?

“My answer is probably not, on both accounts,” she concluded, “but also that the intractability of Giacometti’s sculpture at the crux of his career offers something else, something like the mirror image of effective history.”

Following the lecture, Fiduccia was in conversation with Noreen Khawaja, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Yale and Art H. Merjian, Professor of Italian at New York University.

In addition to her scholarship on modern art, Fiduccia is the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, East of Borneo, Spike, Even, and Parkett, as well as numerous catalogues and essay collections. Her current book project is a study of the evolving relationship between political sovereignty and automatism beginning in the late nineteenth century.