A key work in the exhibition "Surrealist Giacometti. Objects like Sculptures", preserved, like its bronze version, in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris, Alberto Giacometti's Table sheds light on the transformations of Surrealism in the early 1930s, as well as on the complex relationship its creator maintained with the movement.

Is it a sculpture presented at the “Surrealist Exhibition. Sculptures, Objects, Paintings, Drawings” at the Pierre Colle Gallery in June 1933, or is it a piece of furniture that remained for nearly twenty years in a corridor of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles’s house in Hyères?

Drawing on the poetic legacy of Lautréamont and the “uncanny” as defined by Freud, Alberto Giacometti’s Table crystallizes the tensions inherent to the Surrealist object, poised between artwork and functional object, handiness and disruption, the everyday and the marvelous.

A lecture by Marie Sarré, curator in the Modern Collections Department, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris

A graduate of the École du Louvre, Aix-Marseille University and the Sorbonne, Marie Sarré joined the Centre Pompidou in 2010. As a curatorial assistant in the modern collections department, she has notably curated the exhibitions Surrealism in 1929 (Pisa; Budapest; St Petersburg, Florida, 2018–2019), Yves Saint-Laurent at the Centre Pompidou (Centre Pompidou, 2021), ‘A Painting of the Essential’: Surrealism and Calligraphy (Westbund Museum, Shanghai, 2023) and Surrealism (Centre Pompidou, 2024).

Image : Alberto Giacometti, The Table, 1933 © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn © Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris 2026. Exhibition view "Surrealist Giacometti. Objects like Sculptures", 5 June -1st November 2026 at Institut Giacometti, Paris. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris 2026.