Postwar Figuration in Europe and the Americas

In the theme Postwar Figuration in Europe and the Americas, we see artists working in both abstract and figurative idioms. Out of this fusion emerged a number of important art movements: in Europe, Art Brut, CoBrA, Tachisme and Art Informel; and in the United States, Abstract Expressionism, Hard-edge, and Colour Field painting.

Figuration means the representation of a recognisable figure, usually a person, animal, or earthly creature. Figurative artists often abstracted the figures so that they conveyed ideas or emotions, rather than specific people.

In Giacometti’s sculpture Nose, for example, we can see a distressed human face, but it has a ludicrously extended nose, and we can also see that the face has morphed into the shape of a machine gun. We can infer the agony and lies of war from the sculpture.

In his earlier works, Jackson Pollock also used figuration. To those familiar with Pollock’s drip paintings, Two is a surprising work. In the disintegration of the two figures, we can, however, see a direction that would lead him away from figurative emblems to entirely abstract means of expression.

A very different style to Pollock’s deliberately two-dimensional figures can be seen in Roberto Matta’s Years of Fear, 1941, in which a surreal landscape and the figures that populate it clash in a contest of space, dimension and time.

Wifredo Lam also uses the figure as a departure point. Inspired by Indigenous American and African ritual objects ("Primitive Art") and also influenced by Cubism, the figure in Lam's canvases frequently transcend a specific gender collapsing the duality of male and female.

 
 

Alberto Giacometti Nose 1947

Giacometti is represented in the exhibition with two sculptures. Standing Woman (‘Leoni’), 1947 cast in 1957 and Nose 1947 completed in the same year, but cast in 1965.

Standing Woman was made specifically for Peggy Guggenheim. This haunting sculpture related to Giacometti’s matchstick-size figures of 1942-46, and was made during an eleven year period when he did not exhibit new work.

In 1947 Giacometti commented that:

" Life size figures irritate me, afterall because a person passing on the street has no weight; in any case he’s much lighter than the person when he’s dead or has fainted. He keeps his balance with his legs. You don’t feel your weight. I wanted - without having thought about it - to reproduce this lightness, and that by making the body so thin."

Nose from the same time reflects Giacometti’s affiliation with the Surrealists, whose ranks he joined in 1929.

In 1935 Giacometti acrimoniously broke with the Surrealists when he decided to work from models rather than strictly from his imagination. In Nose 1947 the Surrealist tendency towards the fantastic is nonetheless still evident.

In this piece, Giacometti has suspended a head from a crossbar in a rectangular cage, thus implying that the pendant form could be prodded to swing, with the incredible nose extending further beyond the confines of its prison. There is a threat in the shape of the head: the configuration of the nose, skull and neck recalls the barrel, chassis and handle of a gun. Looked at in this way, the wide-open mouth suggests a scream of anguish, and the cord attaching it to its cage evokes the gallows.

 
 

Wifredo Lam Zambezia, Zambezia 1950

When Wifredo Lam arrived in Paris from Cuba in 1938 he carried a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso, with whom he had an immediate rapport. Soon he met many other leading artistic figures, among them the poet André Breton, who was the founder and dominant theorist of French Surrealism.

The Surrealists, who attempted to unleash the power of the unconscious through explorations of dream states and automatist writing, were fascinated by the mythologies of what they then called ‘primitive’ people. They believed that by delving into the unconscious mind, they could create a culture that was at once modern and primitive: in which there was an integrated understanding of myth and reality. Lam, as a Cuban of African, Chinese and European descent, seemed to the Surrealists to have privileged access to that integrated state of mind.

Zambezia, Zambezia, 1950, represents a synthesis of the concerns in Lam’s work of the 1940s and 1950s. This painting depicts an iconic woman, partly inspired by the femme-cheval (horse headed woman) of the Caribbean Santeria cult.

Lam’s canvases frequently use the device of transformed body parts to suggest magical metamorphosis, inspired by indigenous American and African ritual objects. Frozen in a state of eternal transformation - a state intensified by Lam’s use of Cubist-inspired fracturing - the figure possesses body parts belonging to both genders, thereby integrating male and female.

It is the influence of Synthetic Cubism which is clearest in the work of Wifredo Lam. Where the analysis of the object has been superseded by constructing or synthesizing through overlapping of larger, more discrete forms that seem as if they may have been cut and pasted to the canvas. Synthetic Cubism featured brighter colours, ornamental patterns, undulating lines and rounded as well as jagged shapes.

 
 

Middle Years

3.1 Giacometti’s Nose: A Personal Response

3.2 Research Lam and Giacometti

3.3 Abstracting the Figure: A Practical Activity

Senior Years – VCE Art & VCE Studio Arts

3.4 Lam and Giacometti and their Sources of Inspiration

3.5 Conservation, Materials and Techniques

3.6 Alberto Giacometti: A Commentary on Art