The Sculptor Who Attacked Reality Poem by Paul Hartal

The Swiss sculptor, painter and poet Alberto Giacometti
was born in 1901 in the village of Borgonovo,
on the Italian border.

Giacometti was influenced by Cubism,
but his oeuvre was essentially Existentialist.
J.P. Sartre characterized him as an artist striving
for absolute freedom and immersed in existential fear.

From his part, Giacometti proclaimed
that he is an artist who makes sculptures
and paints in order to atttack reality,
in order to defend himself, in order to resist death
and to be free.

The style that Giacometti developed in sculpture
is characterized by exceedingly gaunt human figures,
extremely elongated proportions, emaciated bodies,
like apparitions. The dematerialized mass,
the disembodiment of the human shape,
the unearthly skeletal, ghostly figures exhale
an air of loneliness, despair and anxiety.

The artist's dreadful vision of human existence
reflects Giacometti's times, they echo
in the language of art the horrors of World War 2,
the thin, spiky, fragile, emaciated bodies
of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.