{"id":506154,"date":"2026-06-18T13:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T13:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/506154\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T13:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T13:46:10","slug":"giacomettis-goddesses-have-entered-the-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/506154\/","title":{"rendered":"Giacometti\u2019s Goddesses Have Entered the Temple"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ancient Egyptians knew the Temple of Dendur as the residence of the goddess Isis, who would interact with worshipers there through her cult statue. Today we know the temple as an event space, in the most generous sense. It has hosted performances of music and poetry, a protest<\/a> that contributed to the renaming of the wing that houses it, and numerous fund-raisers \u2014 most famously the Met Gala<\/a> \u2014 that have transformed it into a giant sandstone stage set, its bas-reliefs of deities and pharaohs lit up by theatrical gels.<\/p>\n

With \u201cGiacometti in the Temple of Dendur,\u201d<\/a> a new installation siting hauntingly elongated female figures by the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti in and around the temple, the Met aims to restore some gravitas to its most famous set piece (gi<\/a>ven to the United States by Egypt in the 1960s, when the construction of the Aswan High Dam flooded the site). This striking and otherworldly show uses secular modern sculpture to help us visit the Temple of Dendur once again as a sacred space.<\/p>\n

The Met has certainly chosen the perfect artist for the job, in that Giacometti\u2019s works seem to turn their surroundings into quasi-spiritual environments. As his critic and champion Jean Genet observed, \u201cOne must have a strong stomach to have one of your statues in one\u2019s house \u2026. One of your statues in a room, and the room is a temple.\u201d<\/p>\n

A collaboration between the Met and the Fondation Giacometti<\/a> in Paris, \u201cGiacometti in the Temple of Dendur\u201d includes 17 sculptures \u2014 most of them from the foundation\u2019s collection, making a rare journey abroad before the new Giacometti museum opens there in 2028. It assembles a critical mass of Giacometti\u2019s \u201cWomen of Venice\u201d<\/a> figures from 1956, attenuated apparitions in plaster and bronze that were originally created for the French Pavilion at that year\u2019s Venice Biennale.<\/p>\n

Although weighted toward these postwar works, the show gives prime placement to the 1932 goddess-figure \u201cWalking Woman (I)\u201d \u2014 a headless, stylized female with a cavity in her chest, shown with one leg slightly in front of the other in a pose familiar from ancient Egyptian and Greek figures (like the smaller statue of the priestess Tagerem<\/a> that sat inside the temple before this exhibition). Giacometti\u2019s bronze rests just inside the entrance, as if it is about to step out \u2014 a nod to the ritual of carrying sculptures out from the sanctuary to the terrace, so that the deities could greet worshipers.<\/p>\n

On the Met\u2019s version of that terrace, above a reflecting pool, the \u201cWomen of Venice\u201d convene in small groups. They may be humans, or deities, or deified humans (like the brothers Pedesi and Pihor, who were buried in a crypt behind the temple in its original home).<\/p>\n

Genet, among other critics, saw Egypt in these sculptures, comparing them in his 1957 essay \u201cThe Studio of Alberto Giacometti\u201d to a statue of Osiris at the Louvre. He also observed their spatial and temporal ambiguities: \u201c They are familiar, they walk in the street. And yet they are in the depths of time, at the origin of everything, they keep coming near and moving back, in a sovereign immobility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Installed at the Met, the sculptures have the profound effects Genet described. When you enter the gallery and catch sight of them from across the reflecting pool, they are intimidating but spectral \u2014 wiry-limbed enough to feel more like drawings than sculptures. But they also exude power, with large feet firmly anchored to their bases and a postural tension that continues all the way up through the Pharaonic crowns of their heads. This, more than anything, links them to the ancient sculptures Giacometti sketched on regular visits to the Louvre and in the margins of his books on Egyptian art.<\/p>\n

He never actually visited Egypt, content to explore it through Western collections of ancient art and contemporaneous Egyptology texts such as Hedwig Fechheimer<\/a>\u2019s \u201cEgyptian Sculpture\u201d (popular with artists and poets in Giacometti\u2019s Parisian circles, and notable for its emphasis on the spiritual presence of Egyptian statues). He was also a frequent visitor to the Sphinx, a brothel with Egyptian-themed d\u00e9cor, where the women \u201cattract and amaze me,\u201d he wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Visitors will have to glean those facts from other sources, because the curators have chosen not to offer much background on Giacometti or his Egyptian inspirations. One place to start is the Fondation Giacometti\u2019s 2021 exhibition \u201cGiacometti and Ancient Egypt,\u201d<\/a> which included Giacometti\u2019s drawings of Egyptian statues and some of the objects that inspired them. (A plaster version of \u201cWalking Woman (I),\u201d for instance, was paired with the Louvre\u2019s statue of the Goddess Nephthys<\/a> in mid-stride.) Catalog essays from that show quoting Giacometti\u2019s on Egyptian sculpture are especially illuminating, suggesting that he was drawn to these works on both technical and humanistic levels.<\/p>\n

\u201cEgyptian sculptures have a greatness, a rhythm of lines and forms, a perfect technique that was never used again after,\u201d he wrote to his parents from Rome after encountering examples in the Vatican museum there. \u201cAll is made and measured to the smallest details, there is not a single shadow a little too strong or too weak, not a single line or form that is out of place, no hollow in which to slide a finger. And the heads seem alive, it looks like they are staring at you and talking.\u201d<\/p>\n

More of this material would have been welcome in this show, where wall text is scant (as is the fashion these days<\/a>) and unaccompanied by any catalog or audio guide. That\u2019s unfortunate, because the museum is positioning \u201cGiacometti in the Temple of Dendur\u201d as a preview of curatorial thinking for its forthcoming Tang Wing of Modern and Contemporary Art<\/a>. You hope that the ancient and modern will coalesce, in that new wing, in displays that are as substantial as they are stylish. We will be looking for visual connections across centuries and millenniums, but also recognizing where context and scholarship are needed.<\/p>\n

There are some auspicious signs, in two recent exhibitions at the Met looking at ancient Egypt through the eyes of modern and contemporary artists: Lauren Halsey<\/a>\u2019s triumphant reimagining of the Temple of Dendur by way of South Central Los Angeles, up on the museum\u2019s roof garden in 2023, and \u201cFlight Into Egypt, 1876-Now,\u201d<\/a> an ambitious 2024 group show featuring multiple generations of Black artists.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiacometti in the Temple of Dendur\u201d was organized by Stephanie D\u2019Alessandro, a curator of Modern art at the Met and its senior research coordinator of Modern and Contemporary art, with Aude Semat, the museum\u2019s associate curator of Egyptian art and Emilie Bouvard, the Fondation Giacometti curator.<\/p>\n

The presence of Giacometti\u2019s sculptures in the temple points to the monument\u2019s Roman-Egyptian origins, although the show doesn\u2019t highlight this connection. The Temple of Dendur was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who appears throughout the reliefs<\/a> dressed as a pharaoh and making offerings to Egyptian deities (so as to reassure his subjects that their religious traditions would continue under his reign). In its layered identity, it\u2019s an appropriate setting for an artist who came to know Egypt primarily via the antiquity collections of Italy and France.<\/p>\n

Decades of cocktails and canap\u00e9s around the temple have made it harder to see the complexities of its history, or to feel its ceremonial importance. Its interiors, once open up through the entrance hall, have been roped off for several years now (a response to the post-Covid uptick in Met visitors). Think of this spare but stunning presentation of Giacometti as an invitation to come as close as you can get.<\/p>\n

Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur<\/p>\n

Through Sept. 8, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ancient Egyptians knew the Temple of Dendur as the residence of the goddess Isis, who would interact with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[216329,2273,307,304,305,306,308,93,216328,61,60,190266,10159,3023],"class_list":["post-506154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-alberto","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-giacometti","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-manhattan-nyc","tag-metropolitan-museum-of-art","tag-sculpture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}