Alberto Giacometti in his studio, 1951. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 2024. Photograph by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation.
By Paulina Prosnitz
In many ways, Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti’s lives ran on parallel tracks. They were both born in 1901—Dubuffet in France, Giacometti in Switzerland. Both exhibited regularly at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, in New York. And in the late–1950s, both were asked to create an installation for the Chase Manhattan Plaza: after Giacometti declined, Dubuffet made the landmark sculpture Group of Four Trees.Their paths diverged when it came to artistic style. Giacometti’s humanoid sculptures were elongated and frighteningly thin. He was preoccupied not with representing the human form but with the “shadow that is cast.” Dubuffet, who painted in a style often likened to a child’s drawing, launched the Art Brut movement, which favored art created by untrained outsiders as opposed to formal work from within the academy. A new show at Nahmad Contemporary pairs the two midcentury artists, offering a fascinating visual dialogue.