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Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism

By (author) Joanna Fiduccia

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A major reevaluation of a towering figure in twentieth-century art and the relationship of his sculpture to the crisis of nationalism in modern Europe Â In 1935, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901â€“1966) abruptly abandoned his surrealist experiments and devoted himself to sculpting portrait busts and minuscule figurines, many no larger than a fingernail. Joanna Fiduccia traces the origins and progression of Giacomettiâ€™s notorious artistic crisis, revealing its connection to a broader crisis of national identity in modern Europe. In this decade-long interval, the central features of his artworksâ€”their turbulent surfaces, unsettling generality, severely reduced scale, and compulsive repetitionâ€”gave form to the experience of social breakdown and war, even as they laid the groundwork for his iconic postwar sculpture. Pursuing a 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 artistâ€™s career as well as a vital episode in the history of modern sculpture. This fresh account, told through the philosophical, political, and aesthetic thought of Giacomettiâ€™s time, shows how ideologies of nationalism helped generate the problems of selfhood at the heart of modernism.