Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was an artist often held captive by his enthusiasts. In Paris in the late 1920s, after creating totemic Cubist fantasies like The Couple (1926) and Spoon Woman (1926–1927), the Swiss-born artist was taken up by André Breton and the Surrealists. Some of Giacometti’s works from those years—Reclining Woman Who Dreams (1929), Suspended Ball (1930), No More Play (1932), Le Vide-Poche (1930), The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932)—instantly established themselves as Surrealist icons. Looking back on them today, however, what seems most striking about them is their plastic expressiveness. Surrealism proposed to unlock the unconscious by exploding the rational. But these works strike the viewer as eminently conscious and deliberative. They are not accidents. They are works of art.

Giacometti’s filiation with the Surrealists came to a noisy end when, following the lead of his art rather than Breton’s ideology, he returned to sculpting human heads from a live model. Breton publicly confronted Giacometti with his apostasy from Surrealist orthodoxy; for his part, Giacometti dismissed his commitment to surrealism as a mere “transitional exercise” and a form of “masturbation.”

Giacometti’s break with the Surrealists pushed him back into obscurity. He reemerged in the 1940s, this time as a hero of Existentialism, thanks largely to Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an essay called “The Search for the Absolute” when Giacometti exhibited his work at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in 1948. All at once Giacometti’s extraordinary elongated sculptures— the walking men, the women standing at hieratic attention: doubtless his best-known works—were hailed as symbols of Man’s Lonely Confrontation with the Abyss, etc.

Well, perhaps they are. But they are also unforgettable sculptures, moving in ways unconnected with expostulations about Being and Nothingness, the “upsurge of freedom,” and so on. It might be said that, when it comes to art, hell is other people’s theories. As Giacometti’s biographer James Lord put it, “Seeing, not believing, is what he cared about.”

The excellent sampling of Giacometti’s art —seventy-odd sculptures, thirty-odd paintings, and sixty drawings—at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts should help corroborate Giacometti’s independence from the theory-mongers. True, Jean-Louis Prat, Director of the Fondation Maeght (which owns sixty-five works by Giacometti) and Guest Curator of the exhibition, declares that “more than any other artist, [Giacometti] expresses the precariousness of our existence and of the times in which we live.” Giacometti did not exactly discourage this sort of talk. And there was much about his biography that provided fodder for gloomy existential rumination. But as one moves through this thoughtfully chosen and well-installed exhibition (the elegant galleries designed by Moshe Safdie are perfect for Giacometti), what really seem precarious are such portentous statements about Giacometti’s art expressing the precariousness of existence. This exhibition reveals the distinctively aesthetic logic of Giacometti’s art, its development out of Cubism and post-Impressionism, its striving to explore certain distinct modes of artistic expression.

Given the abstract nature of much of Giacometti’s art, it may seem curious that “likeness” was one of his artistic bywords. He often said that his main ambition was to “copy” what he saw, “to give the nearest possible sensation to that felt at the sight of the subject.” He was not being paradoxical. This exhibition shows how the elusive— indeed, the impossible—goal of “likeness” fueled an artistic career of astonishing pathos. Giacometti frequently complained that the more he worked on a picture or sculpture, the more difficult it was to finish it. Evidence of that difficulty is patent throughout Giacometti’s art. He set himself the impossible task of fixing in visible form the evanescent heart of the moment. What is extraordinary is how often his pictures and sculptures, heavy with the marks of their making, distill the hard light of naked reality.

“Alberto Giacometti” will not travel. A catalogue for the exhibition, with an essay by Jean-Louis Prat, has been published by The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (128 pages, CAN. $34.95).