It’s tempting to view great art through the prism of contemporary events, and that’s especially true in the case of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s big spring exhibition on the work of Alberto Giacometti.

A Swiss modernist who spent much of his career in 20th-century Paris, Giacometti is known chiefly for sculptures of gaunt, shell-shocked human figures that wander distractedly across city squares, alienated from themselves and each other amid the psychic wreckage of World War II and the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War.