Giacometti: Pure Presence review – the most profound, universal art of the past 75 years

National Portrait Gallery
The artist captures his family and his lovers in all their heroic human honesty in a formidable five-star show

In the last years of his life Alberto Giacometti got friendly with a young woman called Yvonne Poiraudeau – a wild character who hung out with prostitutes and gangsters in the Paris of existentialism and New Wave cinema. Giacometti calls her Caroline in his portraits of her.

Paintings of Caroline hang together in the formidable final room of this exhibition, her features worked over in tough spiderwebs of intent drawing and suspended in brown and grey washes. This woman – who Giacometti once tried to get released from prison on a theft charge – takes on the dignity of Queen Nefertiti. She is lost in time, ancient and monarchical. These paintings seem to have been found, not made. Caroline takes her place among Egyptian statues and bog-preserved bodies as a sublime image of the enduring and irreplaceable mystery of what a human being is.

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