Introduction

Throughout his career, in his search for the means to understand the human condition, Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) had a particular fascination with the art of ancient Egypt. As a young artist in Italy, he encountered Egyptian statues that made a lasting impression on his visual and conceptual exploration of the human figure. After moving to Paris, Giacometti regularly visited the Louvre’s Egyptian galleries and studied books on Egyptian art. Such ancient models informed his signature standing and striding figures, whose expressive fragility and stillness took on special meaning after World War II. The installation of fourteen sculptures from the collection of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, together with three from The Met collection, puts the work of one of the great artists of the twentieth century in dialogue with the ancient civilization that influenced not only the formal language of his art, but also his aesthetic orientation and vision.

Emperor Augustus of Rome commissioned the Temple of Dendur around 15 BCE. Gifted from Egypt to the United States in 1965, it is one of the best-known works of art at The Met. In ancient Egypt, the terrace before the temple functioned as a place where worshippers and deities could meet. It was a site of passage and encounter, experiences that resonate with Giacometti’s own concern with the charged relationship between sculpture and viewer. Setting his figures in this historic location highlights the temple’s architectural power as a point for ritual and gathering, as well as the human essence Giacometti sought to immortalize in bronze and plaster. Amid the stillness of this space, the figures—at once solitary and monumental—assume heightened emotional resonance, their fragility and endurance intensified against the stone facade of the temple.