Giacometti, The Egyptian: The Altes Museum organizes an exhibition showing the Swiss sculptor’s passion for ancient Egypt
Image by joelogon via Flickr
Now integrated into the sculpture halls of the Egyptian Museum’s permanent exhibition, works by Giacometti from the Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung in Zurich invite visitors to listen in to a dialogue between artists as they communicate with each other in a common language of forms which traverses several millennia. By being placed in this context, Giacometti’s work reveals how steadfastly rooted in the past it is, as well as allowing the art of the Ancient Egyptians to once again exude an extraordinary freshness and relevance.
Unlike other modern artists, Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived obsessed by Egyptian aesthetics. The Altes Museum in Berlin celebrates the Egiptomania of Alberto Giacometti through twelve sculptures and two sketches by the Swiss sculptor, which today share the same space with the bust of Nefertiti and other works from the museum’s extensive Egyptian collection.
Cult of the Artist: Giacometti, the Egyptian, creates risky analogies between the mute and serene pose of ancient statues from the distant past and the famous elongated sculptures forged in the twentieth century. This experiment is the fruit of labor of two Egyptian art enthusiasts, Wildung and Christian Klemm, members of the sculptor’s foundation in Zurich, who stressed the “Egyptian” in Giacometti, as seen in the “structure” of his works, “the intensity in the gaze” of his characters, and “the spatial distribution of his figures.”
Next to Nefertiti, a muse for Berliners who see in her the most beautiful woman in this city, the spectator finds a bust of Annette Arm, the flesh and blood muse who Giacometti met in Geneva and whom he married in 1949, back in Paris, the city that most inspired him and where he lived for many years. The statuette on a large pedestal, 1952, shows clear plastic symmetries with the figure of an Egyptian gravedigger dating from 1850 BC. The most monumental work of Giacometti in this show is that of the Marching Man, which is oddly contrasted with a wooden figure only ten centimeters in height from 1900 BC. Equally curious parallels exist between the Cube in bronze by the sculptor, with engravings, and the granite statue in the form of a cube of Senenmut, full of hieroglyphics.
The exhibition runs through February 15, 2009.
Extracted and translated from elpais.com
Rosetta Stone(s)?
According to Bassam El Shammaa, Egyptologist and tour guide, the famous Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, the focus of a controversy regarding rightful ownership, is not the only one of its kind. There are even better preserved and more ancient inscriptions of the same text written on the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery in 1799 was crucial in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by Thomas Young and Jean Francois Champollion.
The Rosetta Stone contains a proclamation by the pharaoh exempting the priests and temples from taxation. El Shammaa claims this decree was traditionally proclaimed every time a new pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty ascended to the throne of Egypt. The researcher mentions two similar stelae discovered in Kom El Hesn in the Western Delta and currently exhibited in the Greco-Roman section of the Egyptian Museum. They are known as the Canopy Stones because they were found at an archaeological site near Canopy, the extinct estuary of the Nile located 100 km from Rashid. These “Canopy Stones” display the same royal text as that of its famous counterpart.
Says Bassam El Shammaa:
“The Canopy Stones are even older as they date back to King Ptolemy III, whereas the Rosetta Stone marked the ascension of King Ptolemy V to the throne of Egypt.”
“When the Canopy Stones were discovered in Kom El Hesn, we found out that the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek texts were the same as the ones carved on the Rosetta Stone, but with the only difference that the Canopy Stones were intact.”
“Comparing the versions, we also detected a spelling mistake in the last line of the Greek text, a fact that could probably prove that the texts on the Rosetta Stone were inscribed by Egyptians.”
The Egyptologist questions why the Egyptian Museum authorities display a replica of the British Museum Rosetta Stone when they could showcase these two better preserved originals.
The inscriptions in the Rosetta and the Canopy stones command that “this decree be carved on stones and displayed at all the temples beside the sovereign’s eternal figure.” Bassam El Shammaa insists that a search be carried out to find similar stones that probably still remain buried in the Inner Sanctum chamber beneath the temples at Edfu, Dendara and Philae, among other Egyptian Ptolemaic temples.
