Cézanne & Giacometti

Louisiana is the first museum in the world to show an exhibition that confronts the works of the two artists Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966).

The exhibition consists of a generous selection of the works of both artists that brings out the retrospective view as well as showing specific points of contact between the works in the two artists’ formidable oeuvres.

Giacometti, like many artists of the twentieth century, was very interested in Cézanne. But there are also parallels in their artistic development. As young artists both were obsessed with the erotic and all the violent desire that sexuality can involve. In his early years Giacometti associated himself with Surrealism, while Cézanne cultivated an absolutely personal idiom in his early work.

Later both changed style completely and devoted themselves to years of searching in a succession of works that often look like variations on the same theme, thus reflecting that what they want to say perhaps cannot be said. In other words they meet at a point where doubt functions as a driving force for artistic creation.

60 works by Cézanne, 110 by Giacometti The exhibition comprises about 60 works by Cézanne – paintings and drawings – and 110 of works by Giacometti: paintings, drawings and sculpture.

The exhibition is based on loans from the biggest, most prominent museums in the world – for example the National Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunsthaus Zürich and Kunstmuseum Basel – as well as many other museums and private collectors in Europe and the USA.

The exhibition has been co-organized by Louisiana and Felix Baumann, former director of Kunsthaus Zürich and now the President of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Zürich.

Catalogue in english An international catalogue will be published for the exhibition with scholarly contributions that shed new light on both Cézanne and Giacometti, and especially on the relationship between them. Among the contributers

Cézanne & Giacometti
Paul Cézanne, Alberto Giacometti