Skarstedt Paris is pleased to present Alberto Giacometti & Yves Tanguy: Solitude and Silence, on view from 19 October to 19 December 2026. The exhibition is the first devoted to a sustained dialogue between the two masters, bringing together sculptures and paintings by Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) with paintings and works on paper by Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). They emerged from the same city, the same movement, and the same catastrophic historical background, and drew from them opposite but complimentary conclusions.
The exhibition examines the diverging answers these two artists brought to key post-war questions. What remains after two world wars have brought civilization to the edge of annihilation? What remains when humankind becomes its own predator? For Tanguy, the answer took the form of landscape. For Giacometti, it took the form of the human figure. In both cases the subject is nature, and in both cases the choice is total: one keeps the world and gives up mankind, the other keeps mankind and gives up the world.
Born a year apart at the beginning of the twentieth century, the two belonged to the same Parisian generation, though they arrived at it from different backgrounds. Tanguy was self-taught, a former merchant seaman, the son of deep-sea capitain, who decided to paint after glimpsing a de Chirico painting in a dealer's window; Giacometti had been drawing, painting, and modeling since childhood in a family of artists. In Paris they moved through the same rooms. The house Tanguy shared on the rue du Château became one of theSurrealist movement's central gathering places, and Giacometti was among those who frequented it; the two were later neighbors, joined the Surrealist group around André Breton within a few years of one another, and exhibited together at the sixth Salon des Surindépendants. Both would eventually lose Breton, Giacometti by expulsion in 1935 when he returned to the living model, Tanguy by slow estrangement after his departure for the United States. Both would be displaced by the war, Tanguy to a new world in Connecticut and Giacometti to his homeland in Switzerland. Both would be represented by Pierre Matisse in New York, a schoolfriend to Tanguy and a fellow student to Giacometti. From this shared ground the two bodies of work move down different paths.
In Tanguy's painting the human figure withdraws and does not return to his ever evolving landscapes. En le Temps Menaçant (1929) suspends a single dark, bonelike form in an empty ocher sky above a plain the color of deep water, with two faint incised diagonals the only measure of the distance between them. The gouache Untitled (1939) lays its objects along a low ground beneath a pale gradient of sky, tethered to one another by threads drawn taut across the sheet. The paintings made after his departure for the United States, among them L'Orpailleuse (1945), LUMEN (1949), and Elle Viendra (1950), gather such forms into dense congregations, chalk-white and bone-hard, punctuated by sudden reds and yellows and set against horizons that recede into the distance, if they exist at all. Two geographies meet in them: the granite coast of Brittany, where Tanguy spent the holidays of his childhood, and the light and scale of the American continent. "I also have the feeling here of a greater sense of space," he observed in 1946. "That is, after all, why I came." Man is nowhere to be found in these expanses. What stands in his place is nature, no longer a setting for human interaction but the thing that carries on without it, a landscape that survives him.
After 1935, Giacometti took the opposite path; he made the human figure the sole object of his attention for the three decades that followed. Yet that figure is never severed from nature, it becomes its irreductible container: a bust becomes a mountain, a head a stone, a standing silhouette a tree. In Diego assis (Homme à mi-corps) (1964–65) the seated body loses its lower half in a mass of worked bronze that reads less as much like legs as like roots, the figure emerging from its material as an outcrop emerges from a hillside. In Femme, épaule cassée, première version (1963), the title names the damage: one shoulder ends in a broken stump while the other side of the torso remains whole. The legs thin to two rods and disappear into a rough slab of bronze, so that the figure seems rooted in its base rather than set upon it. Buste d'homme (New York II) (1965) cuts the arms away at the shoulder and lets the chest fall into a wide, spreading base; the surface is pitted and torn throughout, and the head rising from it has the worked, weathered look of stone.
Neither body of work is a document of the war, and neither artist would have described it in those terms. But the change in both after 1939 is difficult to separate from the years that produced it. The critic Stuart Preston observed that the melancholy of Tanguy's early painting yields, in the American work, to something closer to menace. The forms harden and crowd together, accumulating like sediment or like debris, and the light that falls on them comes from no source the viewer can locate. Giacometti's path ran in a different way toward a comparable end. Emerging from the war years in Switzerland, he arrived at figures reduced almost to the point of vanishing, held in a space that presses upon them from every side, and found in that reduction not a diminishment of the human but its irreducible remainder. Whereas Tanguy seeks the world in the absence of mankind, Giacometti seeks humanity as the ultimate measure of the world.
That instinct for enclosure runs through both bodies of work. Giacometti's La cage (première version) (1949–50) and Tanguy's La Cage des Temps (1951) were made within two years of one another on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Both treat enclosure as a means of delimitating time embedded in space, taking the frame, less as a limit, than as the condition under which anything can appear and happen at all.
“Solitude is not psychological,” Giacometti told Jean Clay in 1963. “It exists in space.” The exhibition's title names something both artists understood in spatial rather than psychological terms, as Tanguy's silence operates in the same register. It is not a mood imposed upon the landscape but a property of it, the consequence of a world constructed.
If Yves Tanguy sought to fight the impermanence of existence in the survival of landscape, Giacometti discovered in the human figure the ultimate measure of reality. One makes of the landscape a place of survival and renewal; the other makes of the human figure the final territory of reality and hope. It is from this shared history, resolved through two irreducibly distinct visions, that the dialogue between their works is born.
