MARSEILLE.- For the first time in Marseille, the work of sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti is being celebrated in a monographic exhibition organized by the Cantini Museum in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation. Bringing together iconic works—plaster and bronze sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints—the exhibition explores the theme of the void, a central concern in Giacometti’s practice, around which the various periods of his career are structured.

An artist of the “Void,” whose work was described by Jean-Paul Sartre as “a way of experiencing space,” Giacometti created imaginary spaces from which forms, figures, and often isolated characters emerge—inseparable from their environments. In his sculptures as well as in his drawn and painted works, the void becomes a tool for artistic expression.

The exhibition opens with a section devoted to the synthetic, solid, and dense forms of sculptures created by Giacometti in the late 1920s, such as The Couple (1926) and Spoon Woman (1927), which reveal the artist’s interest in Cubism and non- Western art.

The next section, dedicated to the Surrealist period, presents major works including the painting The Palace at 4 a.m.(1932), the sculptures Flower in Danger (1932), and The Invisible Object (1934– 1935), also known as Hands Holding the Void. These creations, often born from dreams or fantastical visions, are part of a visual exploration that moves away from the visible world.

The third section, covering the postwar years until Giacometti’s death in 1966, marks a return to the representation of the human figure, driven by a desire to capture his perception of reality as faithfully as possible. Playing with scale and distance, Giacometti explores the relationship between the figure and its space in works such as Tiny Figurine (1937–39), Woman with Chariot (1943–45), The Nose (1949), and Tall Woman I (1960).

The exhibition concludes with a joint presentation of Giacometti’s drawings and prints, accompanied by archival documents, as well as ancient and non- Western objects from the collections of the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology and the Museum of African, Oceanic, and Amerindian Arts in Marseille.

Conceived as an imaginary museum, this final section highlights the major influence these sources had on Giacometti’s investigations into void and space.

The Exhibition Journey – Room by Room

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) had what Jean-Paul Sartre called an «obsession with the void» (Les Peintures de Giacometti). Throughout his life, he relentlessly sought to “experience space,” striving to capture a shifting, elusive reality. Among the works from the collections of the Museums of Marseille, Portrait of Diego (Black Head), painted in 1957, bears witness to Giacometti’s tireless exploration of the human figure. The face of his brother emerges from repeated lines, set in a dense, dark halo.

Until now, no exhibition had been solely dedicated to Giacometti in Marseille, apart from a few works shown in a group exhibition in 1960. This summer, the Cantini Museum and the Giacometti Foundation join forces to offer a poetic journey through the work of the Swiss sculptor and painter. Bringing together key pieces, this exhibition highlights the significance of emptiness in Giacometti’s creations. From his early sculptures to his surrealist works and the elongated figures of his final years, the exhibition reveals his consistent focus on the space surrounding figures, on scale, and on the distances between people and objects. Extending beyond the chronological narrative, imagined dialogues with Marseille’s heritage collections evoke some of Giacometti’s major sources of inspiration: the arts of Antiquity and those from other continents. These juxtapositions invite fresh, open, and sensitive interpretations of the assembled works, composing what might be called Giacometti’s imaginary museum.

At the end of the 1920s, Alberto Giacometti moved away from studying from life, a practice he had pursued during his training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He began to explore new approaches to capturing the human figure. Influenced by the sculpture of the High Antiquity period, the arts of Africa and Oceania, and the formal innovations of the Cubists, Giacometti began to deconstruct and simplify volumes, evoking bodies through the interplay of surfaces and a few suggestive signs.

Devoid of detail, Giacometti’s refined and smooth forms are characteristic of his sculptures with the appearance of steles, which he described as “plaques.” These are animated by shallow hollows that emerge across their surfaces. Incisions cut into the material, sometimes slightly hollowed out. Their slender profiles contrast with the fullness of their volumes when seen from the front. The alternation of angular masses and circular forms creates what poet Jacques Dupin described as a “rhythmic accentuation of the void.” These formal experiments bring Giacometti to the threshold of abstraction.

Alberto Giacometti was introduced to the Surrealist circles following a first exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher. In 1929, he formed friendships with artists associated with the journal Documents, and the following year, he joined the circle of André Breton, becoming an active member of the movement. The imaginative sculptures he created during this period reflect a common desire, one he expressed in a prose poem: “I fumble to grasp in the void the invisible white thread of the marvellous, which vibrates and from which facts and dreams escape with the sound of a stream flowing over small, precious, living stones.”1 At this time, Giacometti focused his artistic research on the evocation of emotional states and dreamlike visions.

Recalling the series of “plaques,” Object (1931–1932) still retains a full and compact form. Other sculptures unfold into more open compositions in which the void plays a structuring role, such as Reclining Woman Who Dreams (1929) or the fragile Flower in Danger (1932). During these years, Giacometti developed a cage- like framework that allows the sculpture to be contained within space and increases its density, as evidenced by Suspended Ball (1930–1931). This approach reaches its culmination in the vacant space held between the hands of the figure in The Invisible Object (1934–1935), also called Hands Holding the Void.

From 1935 onwards, Alberto Giacometti returned to a form of realism. He once again worked from live models, focusing exclusively on creating heads. During the Second World War, the artist revisited the representation of the whole body. He became interested in the relationships of scale involved in perceiving a figure at a distance. The integrated base of the sculpted figure helps suggest the surrounding space, particularly for very small works such as Very Small Figure (1937–1939).

In the immediate post-war period, Giacometti developed structures that define the space around his figures. Placed inside a cage, a box, or on a platform, they acquire a new presence, composing small enigmatic theaters. During the 1950s and 1960s, the solitary female figures with slender silhouettes and arms alongside their bodies took on multiple variations, each representing an attempt to capture the reality of a body perceived in space.

“All the art of the past, from all eras, from all civilizations, arises before me; everything is simultaneous as if space took the place of time,” Giacometti wrote in 1965.

The copying of ancient statuary and arts from other continents continuously accompanied his research. Giacometti captures through drawing the structure and appearance of works from the past and elsewhere, capable of vividly conveying reality and life. He draws inspiration from creations of ancient Egypt, Africa, and Oceania, which he regards with equal sensitivity, without establishing any hierarchy.

Adjacent to his drawings, the pieces from the collections of the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology and the Museum of African, Oceanian, and Amerindian Arts in Marseille reflect a world of forms and representations that the artist studied in museums and private collections, and mainly through magazines such as Cahiers d’art and Documents, as well as books—particularly André Malraux’s Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (1952). Far from providing an exhaustive account of the sources of his creation, the simultaneous presentation of these pieces traces an imaginary map and opens new dialogues with Giacometti’s work.