Alberto Giacometti, The Walking Man I

The cynicism pervading Europe in the 1940s found a voice in Existentialism, a philosophy asserting the absurdity of human existence and the impossibility of achieving certitude. The writings of French author Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) most clearly captured the existentialist spirit. According to Sartre, if God does not exist, then individuals must constantly struggle in isolation with the anguish of making decisions in a world without absolutes or traditional values. This spirit of pessimism and despair emerged frequently in European art of the immediate postwar period.

The sculptures of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) perhaps best express the existentialist spirit. Although Giacometti never claimed that he pursued existentialist ideas in his art, his works brilliantly capture the spirit of that philosophy. Indeed, Sartre, Giacometti’s friend, saw the artist’s figurative sculptures as the personification of existentialist humanity – alienated, solitary, and lost in the world’s immensity. Giacometti’s sculptures of the 1940s are thin, nearly featureless figures with rough, agitated surfaces. Rather than conveying the solidity and mass of conventional bronze sculpture, these thin and elongated figures seem swallowed up by the space surrounding them, imparting a sense of isolation and fragility. Giacometti’s evocative sculptures spoke to the pervasive despair that emerged in the aftermath of world war.^[1]