Figures of Crisis

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

Figures of Crisis examines the neglected decade of artwork that separates the surrealist experiments of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) from his iconic postwar sculptures. It reveals the connection between a famous artistic crisis in modern art and the crisis of national identity in modern Europe. In 1935, Giacometti abruptly abandoned his early abstract objects and devoted himself to sculpting portrait busts and minuscule figurines, many no larger than a fingernail. Joanna Fiduccia reimagines this fragmentary and inconspicuous body of work as the pivotal phase in his career, which registered the erosion of interwar democratic values and the searching questions this period posed for the future of modern sculpture.

Challenging previous explanations of Giacometti's return to figuration, Fiduccia argues that his figures gave form to the experience of social breakdown during the rise of fascism through their turbulent surfaces, unsettling generality, dramatic reduction of scale, and compulsive repetition. This fresh account, told through the philosophical, political, and aesthetic thought of Giacometti's time, shows how ideologies of nationalism generated the problems of selfhood at the heart of modernism.