Giacometti.

Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection | Berlin, Germany

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Last fall and winter the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin mounted ten exhibitions on the theme "Immortal! The Cult of the Artist" (through February 15), celebrating such artists as Joseph Beuys, Caspar David Friedrich, Alberto Giacometti, Martin Kippenberger, Paul Klee, Jeff Koons, Hans von Marees, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Andy Warhol, and, indirectly, the Pharaonic sculptor Thutmose. The departing gift of retiring Staatliche general director Peter-Klaus Schuster, "Immortal!", spread across five of the 17 state venues, has occasional moments of interest. At the Hamburger Bahnhof, the expansive "Beuys: The Revolution is Us" gives back to the works' audio components their vital role. "Das Klee Universum," at the Neue Nationalgalerie, treats viewers to the 1920 Angelus Novus (1920) once owned by Walter Benjamin, not the facsimile (rarely does Jerusalem's Israel Museum allow the valuable piece to travel). Also to be found in Mies van der Rohe's famous glass temple is "Jeff Koons: Celebration," filling the grand space with luminous kitsch colossi, while von Marees's country scenes get a perceptive hanging at the Alte Nationalgalerie. But taken as a whole, the various museum interventions seem oblivious to the fact that resurrecting the cult of the artist is in this day and age as antique as Tut's tomb, rather like the inexplicable exclusion of women artists.

Of all these exhibits, "Giacometti, der Agypter" at the Egyptian Museum is surely the most challenging in both concept and presentation, displaying a wealth of subtle surprises. Who knew of the Swiss artist's life-long study of Egyptian art, or that it provided the basis for his mature style? "They have a grandeur, an evenness of line and form a perfect technique," the 20-year-old Giacometti writes from the Vatican in 1921, where he fell under the spell "of the beauty of the Egyptian sculptures." In Rome, he obtained a copy of Hedwig Fechheimer's pioneering study, Ancient Egyptian Sculpture (1920), on which he scribbled "how alive these statues and faces are." His brother Diego recalls a visit to the Louvre where Alberto said, "Did you notice the scribe blinking at you?" Fechheimer's book ended up becoming the source from which he would draw repeatedly, most of all the elongated statues of Akhenaten and the Berlin Green Head (400-300 BC). Giacometti never finally saw the head in Berlin, but he was able to study Fechheimer's photographs of it in great detail. Situated near the genuine article in the museum we find a 1935-36 ink drawing of the Gruner Kopf, in which Giacometti has agitatedly drawn circles around the eyes to emphasize their vacant gaze.

In sum, 13 sculptures and drawings from Zurich's Alberto Giacometti Stiftung found their way into Berlin's permanent Egyptian collection, where they set in motion a dialogue spanning thousands of years. The tall, spindly Homme qui marche (1947) stands next to a tiny wooden "standing-walking" man (ca. 1900 BC), demonstrating a striking divergence in scale, deportment and bodily mass. Habitually standing figures, either small or colossal, advance the left foot, which is firmly planted on the ground to convey what Thomas Mann termed (in Joseph and His Brothers) "arrested walking." Homme, by contrast, extends the right leg and lifts it slightly, but like its Egyptian counterpart holds fisted hands close to the body. Thutmose's serene head of Queen Nefertiti (presented here behind bullet-proof glass) is paired with the 1962 Annette VIII, a painted plaster bust of the artist's wide-eyed wife looking as if about to speak.

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The boldest juxtaposition on display places a diminutive bronze bust, Lotar I (1965), next to the stunning, similarly sized Facial Fragment of Akhenaten from around 1350 BC (lent by the Staatliches Museum Agyptischer Kunst in Munich), whose sensuous lips and pronounced chin stems from a three-meter-tall sandstone statue. This 18th dynasty pharaoh reigned for 17 years, founded the new City of Akhetaten (now the archeological dig El-Amarna), and inaugurated with his co-regent Nefertiti a monotheistic religion devoted to Aten or light, the worship of which (along with a regal malformation perhaps) led to an extreme aesthetic of elongated facial and body affectations. According to his nephew Silvio, Giacometti was greatly drawn to this Amarna style, setting the artist on the path for which he is mainly known today.

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What's notable about "Giacometti, der Agypter" is that these two vastly different bodies of art history, cultural bearing, and inspiration are conjoined in the face of spatiotemporal uncertainty. Does the modern sculptor bow to the Ancient Egyptians or somehow stand apart? There is no way of knowing from this mostly tacit comparison, except to agree with the dwarf's comment in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that, "All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle."