Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at Tate Britain exploring the artistic and romantic relationship between these two 20th century artists. Alberto Giacometti and Isabel Rawsthorne met in 1933. He is the better known as a sculptor but she was a painter who had worked with Epstein and had a sell out show by the time she was 20. She worked in intelligence in the Second World War and sadly all her pre-war work was lost in the occupation of France and we only have the sketchbooks she carried with her from his time. Their work looked beautiful together here. Many of his figures in the show were of her and some done from memory in the war. They were complimented by her rather grey, monotone works with her almost sculptural use of paint. Closes 25 September 2022    

Beautiful retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern of sculpture and paintings by Giacometti. The works were beautifully displayed and given space to breathe and react to each other. From the first room which was filled with head studies from realistic ones to more abstract ones. I was entranced. Despite the different styles you can recognise where the heads are the same person. I was interested to see that he had worked in the decorative arts in the 1930s and I loved a cabinet of these as I now really want one of his lamp stands with a small female head on it.   The work was often shown alongside the magazines and exhibition catalogues in which it had featured giving a good sense of how an artistic career built up and the show was very good at blending his work and his life. I was interesting in the room on the war years when he was in exile in Switzerland when his work got very small. I had a sense of him making work he could just pick up and run with if the need ...

Unexpectedly good exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the work of Alberto Giacometti. I must admit I just thought of Giacometti as the sculptor of thin figures. I hadn’t realised that these figures were portraits and in the main portraits of a small group of people including his wife and his brother. As you looked at groups of them alongside paintings and photographs you could see the likeness but you could also see how they expressed the character of the sitters. I loved one of his brother Diego in which he was sitting like an Egyptian scribe. I loved the early pictures, mainly of his family, which were quite Post Impressionistic in style, especially a self-portrait with a yellow back ground which looked like a picture by Duncan Grant. It was interesting to see how he used two different styles, one at home with his family as his father was an artist which was slightly more traditional and a more cutting edge style when he was a student in Paris. Cl...