ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WHAT MEETS THE EYE AT SMK MUSEUM
February 10, 2024 – May 20, 2024
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WHAT
MEETS THE EYE AT SMK MUSEUM
February 10, 2024 – May
20, 2024
From February 2024, SMK
(Statens Museum for Kunst) presents an extensive exhibition featuring the
famous Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. Featuring major works within the fields
of sculpture and drawing, the exhibition homes in on Giacometti’s fascination
with what you actually see when you look at the world.
Tall, slender figures
with rough, organic surfaces: the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
is internationally known for his iconic representations of long-limbed human
figures. They are highlights in the collections of some of the world’s leading
museums, such as the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New
York and the Fondation Giacometti and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In Denmark they can be found at Louisiana and in the square in front of
the old town hall in Holstebro, among other places.
Giacometti’s fame rests
very much on his sculptures. This held true in his own day and remains so today,
when he is considered one of the most important artists of the twentieth
century. But the scope of his art is far wider than that.
On 10 February 2024, SMK
will open the exhibition Alberto Giacometti – What
Meets the Eye, which unfolds the story
of Giacometti across his various art forms: sculpture, painting, printmaking
and drawing. The extensive exhibition takes its point of departure in the SMK
collection, which is home to several important examples of Giacometti’s works
on paper.
Created in collaboration
with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, the exhibition offers an extraordinary
opportunity to experience some of Giacometti’s popular masterpieces like The Nose (1947),
The Cage (1950-51)
and The Walking Man (1960) side by side with a number
of lesser-known works that have only rarely been on public display. In total,
the exhibition contains around 90 works, and it takes its starting point in the
1920s and 1930s – a period that left a decisive mark on Giacometti’s art and
would continue to affect his style and idiom until his death in 1966.
OBSESSED WITH THE VISIBLE
WORLD
Giacometti moved to Paris
at the age of 21, and from 1930 he became part of the Surrealist circle around
the French poet and writer André Breton (1896–1966). For several years,
Giacometti was inspired by the idiom used by the Surrealists to represent the
subconscious and humanity’s inner life. But in 1934 his artistic practice took
a significant turn. He began to work from the life again, working from models
and turning to physical reality.
The exhibition Alberto
Giacometti – What Meets the Eye unfolds Giacometti’s years-long obsession with visual
perception and his dedicated struggle to capture the world as he saw and
perceived it. Heads and full-length figures were his most used subjects, and by
working with scale, direction, space and distance, he strove to translate his
visual sensory impressions into truthful and authentic works of art.
Giacometti was
uncompromising in his quest. He often repainted his works and sometimes he made
countless drafts of the same portrait. He himself described his endless project
in these terms: ‘It’s as though reality were always behind a curtain that you
pull away … There’s always another … and another. But I have the impression, or
perhaps it’s an illusion, that I’m making some progress every day. That’s what
makes me take action, as though you had well and truly to succeed in
understanding the core of life.’
https://www.smk.dk/en/article/new-exhibition-alberto-giacometti-takes-over-smk/
MEDIUM FIGURE III, 1948-1950
Plaster
Dimensions: 126.5 x 18.5 x 34 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THE FOREST, 1950
Bronze
Dimensions: 57 x 61 x 49.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
PROFILE OF FEMININE NUDE AND BUSTS ON THE REVIEW LES TEMPS
MODERNES N0 8, MAY 1946
Graphite on Printed Paper
Dimensions: 230 x 145 x 15 mm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THE GLADE, 1950
Bronze
Dimensions: 58.7 x 55.3 x 52.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, CA. 1946
Plaster
Dimensions: 14.8 x 8.5 x 9.4 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THE NOSE, 1947
Plaster, Painted Metal and Corde de Coton
Dimensions: 82.5 x 37 x 71 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD OF A MAN, 1948-1950
Painted Plaster
Dimensions: 25.8 x 8.5 x 9.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
FIGURINE IN A BOX BETWEEN TWO BOXES THAT ARE HOUSES, 1950
Bronze, Oil Painting and Glass
Dimensions: 30 x 54 x 9.5 cm.
Kunst Museum Winterthur, On Permanent Loan From the Alberto Giacometti Stiftung,
1976 © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Adagp,
Paris, 2024
WALKING MAN, FEMININE NUDE, HEAD OF MAN AND FEMININE BUST ON THE REVIEW
LES TEMPS MODERNES, N0 103, JUNE 1954
Blue Ink on Printed Paper
Dimensions: 230 x 145 x 15 mm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
GRAZING HEAD, 1928-1929
Plaster
Dimensions: 40 x 36.4 x 6.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WHAT
MEETS THE EYE INTRODUCTION
THOMAS LEDERBALLE
PEDERSEN & ÉMILIE BOUVARD
RESHAPING THE MODERN EYE
In 1935, Alberto
Giacometti flouted the general practice of the circle of Surrealist
poets and artists of which he was part when he began working with life models
anew. He later reported that when the circle’s informal leader, André Breton,
realized what he was doing, Breton’s reaction was to exclaim: ‘ Well, everyone
knows what a head looks like! ‘1
Giacometti did not agree.
For him, the act of representing a human head or a full-length human figure was
associated with almost insurmountable problems. From the mid- 1930s, these
difficulties became his main artistic concern. He turned away from Surrealism’s
cult of the inner life and the unconscious and began instead to work whit what
he saw around him. Up until this point, since arriving in France in 1922, his
own artistic development had otherwise followed the trajectory of the Parisian
avant-garde. He became a student of Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929), who
practiced a style of figure drawing distinguished by a geometrizing and
analytical approach to form where straight lines connected points and gave the
form a prismatic character (21). As Catherine Grenier has noted, Bourdelle’s
principles of form and emphasis on careful observation of the model proved
formative for Giacometti.2 This tendency towards a geometric reduction of form
can first be observed in sculptures which Giacometti executed in the second
half of the 1920s, under the influence of the Cubist movement’s radical work
with complex compositions consisting of pared-back geometric volumes, such as
Figure (known as Cubist I) (22) and Man (Apollo) (23). In both sculptures,
Giacometti has transformed the figure motif into a juxtaposition of simple
volumes: intimations of legs, arms, torso and a face can be glimpsed in the
accumulation of blocks in the Cubist figure, while Apollo’s bow - or arrows -
are reduced to stylized signs.
T he flat, almost
two-dimensional Apollo is also related to the small group of so-called ‘plates’
that the sculptor produced towards the end of the 1920s, and which prompted his
entry into the Surrealist circle (25, cf. 26). In 1929 his Gazing Head (24) was
featured in an article in the Surrealist journal Documents, the year before he
became part of the circle around André Breton.3
In years that followed,
his association with this group became decisive for the character of his work,
leading to the production of object – like sculptures such as
Walking Limping Figure (Family Group) (29), but also more figurative works like
the Cubist – influenced Head Skull (30) or Walking Woman I (31). In the latter
work, deformation is combined with aesthetically refined figurative
representation, evoking a figure that seems to belong in a dream.4
The Surrealists’
aesthetic principles gave exclusive priority to those layers of the mind where
the unconscious and uncontrollable impulses belong, favouring visual art that
expressed this inner life rather than the phenomena of the outside world. In
his article introduced with the phrase ‘I can only speak indirectly about my
sculptures…’ in the journal Minotaure from 1993, Giacometti would explain,
entirely in the spirit of this line of thinking, that for some years he had
only made sculptures that had arisen in his head. These might reflect his
memories or inner visions, but could also be forms which were disturbing or
which he himself did not recognize.5
THE TURN TOWARDS REALITY
From 1934-35, the outside
world as perceived by the senses was at the centre of Giacometti’s work. When
he recalled this change of direction in 1948, he described how he had hired a
model to practice figure – making. When this quickly proved more difficult than
anticipated, he soon concentrated on making heads alone.6 At first these were
mainly the heads of two specific people: his brother Diego (32), and his
regular model Rita Gueyfier (33). Both, then, were people he knew well.
Giacometti executed busts of the same people repeatedly over the years,
especially Diego, witrh whom he shared his studio, which was also the place
where they lived, in Paris, rue Hippolte – Maindron.
During the Second World
War, however, the full – length figure made a significant return in his work
while he was in exile in Switzerland. From then on, he would work with two
parallel approaches in his representation of figures: one being general types,
the other being portraits (3, 34, 35). Busts and full – length figures remained
the two main subjects in his art until his death in 1966.
In 1962, he summed up his
artistic project with these words: ‘To copy exactly, as in 1914,
appearance’.7 The year 1914 was when he first began working with sculpture. His
use of the term ‘copy’ here should not be taken to mean quite the same as when
he referred to his copying of art from earlier eras. An undertaking which, over
the years, had resulted in countless drawings, mainly after reproductions, and
included a distinct focus on art from ancient Egypt (36, 37, 38, 73). In fact,
he emphasized that copying in an artistic sense revolved around the challenges
of reproducing his own life world, even though imitation and copying were
released activities: ‘For some years I have known that the act of copying is
the best way for me to become aware of what I see, just as it happens in my own
work; I only know fully what I see in the outer world, a head, a cup, or a
landscape, when I copy it. The two activities are complementary (…)’.8
Giacometti had taken up
painting back in the 1930s as part of his artistic reorientation, but not until
after the war did he embark on extensive portrait painting. Here he rendered
his figures in a strict frontal pose in order to pursue his
fundamental artistic concern, namely the true representation of the
figure, in this case the human face.9 Several of Giacometti’s models have told
of the artist’s uncompromising pursuit of a specific appearance, prompting
incessant repainting and countless drafts of the same portrait in the hope of
capturing the very essence and character of the sitter (40, 41).
SCALE
Among the challenges
faced by the sculptor in his representation of figures was the question of
authentic size. That is, the size that makes a figure or the head of a portrayed
person recognizable. Which size best reproduces the nature of what you see?10
Even when he practiced drawing apples as a child, the subject grew smaller and
smaller as he drew 11, and when he took up drawing and sculpture again in the
years after Surrealism the problem arose anew. After working from models for a
while, he began working from memory, and here he ran into difficulties: ‘ But
wanting to create from memory what I had seen, to my terror the sculptures
became smaller and smaller, they were only good likenesses when they were small
(…)12
Up until the war, the
tendency to work on a small scale was pronounced in his full –
length figures and also infused his work with heads, which gradually saw a
similar inclination towards the miniature. The time around his wartime exile in
Switzerland saw the creation of several such scaled – down figures, which were
provided with distinctive plinths hinting at the space around the figure and at
the figure’s proportions (42, 43).13 After his return to Paris, he continued
this approach. It can be observed in a series of very small plaster heads, some
of which have been painted, thereby adding a feature meant to make the face
even more recognizable (44, 45, 46, 47, 48). Overall, the question of the
‘right’ size was a pervasive issue in his post – war art, where it also
affected the distance between the artist and those portrayed in the paintings:
the sitters were carefully positioned by him in the studio, placed at a
distance intended to strengthen the effect of truth.14
SPACE AND DIRECTION
The interplay between
figure and space was central to the artist’s many miniature figures. When in
1948 he summed up his artistic endeavours in a letter to the
gallerist Pierre Matisse, he pointed out that figure and space had been
particular leitmotifs for him.15 A note from around 1949 states: ‘Space does
not exist, it has to be created (…).16 Apparently this was precisely tha
intention of The Cage, 1950 – 1951 (49), where the artist, according to his own
statement, sought to create ‘a delimited space’ and ‘abolish the plinth’.17
Here a stage rather than a traditional plinth defines the spatial interaction
of the figures. The principle can also be observed in The Nose (50), as well as
in works such as Figurine in a Box Between two Boxes which are Houses (51).
In his letter to Matisse,
Giacometti, in addition to figure and space, pointed out a third element as
fundamental to his art: movement. Around this time he created a larger figure
of a walking man. A decade later, he would create a variation on this theme in
a figure of the same gender and size: Walking Man II (54). With its dynamic,
progressive pose, this figure type creates space, and it has been compared to a
corresponding figure type in ancient Egyptian art, which the artist knew
intimately (a). 18 In figurine in a Box Between two Boxes which are Houses
(51), the artist used the pose again. Here the figure appears as a hieroglyph
to be read from the angle suggested by the elongated shape and enclosed space
of the work : it can be seen as a relief with a predetermined angle from which
to view to plastic form, just like his plate sculptures from the 1920s (24,
25). Here, the creation of space and movement come into their own. As
Giacometti himself briefly noted around 1946 about his problems with
reproducing movement: ‘It’s totally impossible to draw movement from nature.
(…) It’s the same thing in the sculpture; only in relief, perhaps, does the
possibility of movement exist’.19
APPEARANCE AND
PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD
Giacometti’s turn towards
external reality from 1934 thus entailed a number of problems for his work,
regardless of the nature of the subjects or artistic media he used. However,
his artistic goal remained the same: ‘For me, sculpture is not a beautiful
object, but a means of trying to arrive at a slightly better understanding of
what attracts and amazes me about ant head; painting is a means of trying to
understand what attracts and amazes me about any person, any tree or object on
a table’. 20 The philosopher Isaku Yanaihara, who was portrayed by the artist,
summed up this methodological starting point in the 1950s, based on what the
artist had told him: ‘His task was to draw my face as it is seen by others.
Drawing what you see is simple at first glance, but had he truly tried to do
that? And, first and foremost, what is one looking at? (…) This is precisely
the aspect that demands infinite analysis, even though reality is a whole that
admits of no parts, a thing that cannot be grasped by means of analysis’. 21
In recent years, a number
of Giacometti scholars have very compellingly argued that the artist’s
undertaking is comparable to that of phenomenology, a branch of philosophy
where one seeks, through systematic observation, to expose essential properties
of experienced reality. In 1940s and 1950s Paris, phenomenology had prominent
proponents in the form of intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, philosophers whose work Giacometti knew to varying degrees. With
his investigation of the relationship between the sensing consciousness in
itself and what is being perceived by that same consciousness, Giacometti’s
artistic endeavour had a close kinship with the theoretical starting point of
phenomenology.22 The artist concentrated on what appeared before him – when,
that is, it came together to form a clear appearance at all: ‘One sees it seem
to disappear … appear … disappear … appear … which it to say that it is quite
simply always in a state between being and nothingness. And that is what you
want to copy’.23 The artist focused on what presented itself to him to such an
extent that it approached the deformed, as seen in Tall Thin Head from 1954
(55). Or, as he explained it:
Breton’s dismissal of the
artist’s interest in the human head in 1935 was not relevant to him. His plan
was to penetrate reality.
1 Beauvoir
1960, 501. Quoted from Bucalo – Mussely 2022, 23
2 Grenier
2017, 38 – 40
3 Regarding
the process surrounding the artist’s association with the Surrealists and the
terminus post quem for Giacometti’s Surrealism, see Umland 2001, 16.
4 Grenier
2017, 133
5 Giacometti
1992c, 46
6 Giacometti
1992d, 43
7 Parinaud
1992, 269
8 Giacometti,
1992c, 98
9 Klemm
2001, 168
10 Cf.
Klemm 2001, 121
11 Sylvester
1992, 288
12 Giacometti
1992d, 44
13 On
this question in general, see Grenier 2017, 167, as well as 154f. regarding the
debate surrounding his bust at the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition.
14 Yanaihara,
2015, 87
15 Giacometti
1992d, 40
16 Giacometti
1992f, 198
17 Giacometti
1992g, 51
18 Grenier
2017, 176
19 Hieroglyph,
ef. Étienne 2021, 39
20 Giacometti
1992h, 83
21 Yanaihara
2015, 48
22 Bezzola
2001, 32
23 Parinaud
1992, 274
Essay of ‘’ Alberto Giacometti: What Meets the Eye Introduction by Thomas Lederballe Pedersen & Émilie Bouvard ‘’ quoted from exhibition book. You may have exhibition book to read whole essays.
BUST OF A MAN, CA. 1962
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
STUDY DRAWINGS AFTER THE HEAD OF THE GODDESS MUT, 1920 – 1939
Pen and Black Ink on Paper
Dimensions: 268 x 210 mm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
ANNETTE STANDING, CA. 1954
Bronze
Dimensions: 47.5 x 10.5 x 20 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD OF WOMAN ( RITA ), BEFORE 1936
Bronze
Dimensions: 23.9 x 13.9 x 18.4 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
WALKING MAN II, 1960
Bronze
Dimensions: 190 x 112.5 x 28 cm.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Humlebaek Donation Ny Carlsberfondet
© Succession Alberto Giacometti / Adagp,
Paris, 2024
VERY SMALL FIGURINE, 1937-1939
Plaster
Dimensions: 4.5 x 3 x 4.8 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THREE WALKING MEN, 1948
Bronze
Dimensions: 76 x 32.7 x 34.1 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
MAN ( APOLLO ), 1929
Bronze
Dimensions: 39.4 x 30.9 x 8.2 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
%201965.jpg)
BUST OF SEATED MAN ( LOTAR III ) 1965
Bronze
Dimensions: 65.7 x 28.5 x 36 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
DESCRIPTION
This
man’s bust, one of the most spectacular created by Alberto Giacometti, was
never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, and was therefore never given a
title. It was one of the last pieces on which Giacometti worked, and was found
standing, in clay, in his Parisian studio when death took him by surprise in
Italy in January 1966. The first casts in bronze were made for the
retrospective that took place in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1969. The
piece was then entitled “Buste d’Elie Lotar”, but for practical reasons (three
different busts were exhibited under the same title) it was then generally
called “Lotar III”. Elie Lotar was a photographer of Romanian origin who had
associated, before the war, with the surrealist milieu. Alcoholic and without a
penny, he was part of an expanding group of parasites and crooks whom
Giacometti used to welcome when he became famous from the middle of the
Fifties. In Giacometti’s scale of values Lotar’s decline conferred on him by
reversal, an equivalent greatness,. Indeed the three busts of Lotar that
Giacometti made from 1964 have a particular monumental aspect. As often
happened with Giacometti, the shape of Lotar’s bold head merges with that of
Giacometti’s brother Diego, contributing to making this seated bust not the
portrait of a man in particular but a work of art of universal scope.
HEAD ( Cover Project For The Monograph by Jacques Dupin ,
Alberto
Giacometti, Éditions Maeght, 1962 ), 1962
Graphite on Vellum Paper
Dimensions: 261 x 210 mm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
BLACK ANNETTE, 1962
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 55 x 45.8 cm
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
TALL THIN HEAD, 1954
Painted Plaster
Dimensions: 65.6 x 39.1 x 24.9 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
STATENS MUSEUM FOR KUNST
A RESPONSIBILITY
SMK is the largest art
museum in Denmark and is also officially the so-called ‘main museum’ for visual
art in the country. This gives SMK a special responsibility for helping to
nurture and develop museum activities as such in all of Denmark – and for
cultivating and strengthening co-operation with museums in Denmark and abroad.
Denmark has a total of
three main museums:
-
National
Gallery of Denmark is the main museum for art.
-
The National
Museum of Denmark is the main museum for cultural history.
-
The National
History Museum of Denmark is the main museum for natural history.
A COLLECTION
SMK owns the nation’s
largest art collection, comprising approximately 260,000 works of art. The
collection was originally founded as the royal collection, meaning that it was
the private property of the Danish kings, but with the introduction of
democracy in Denmark in the mid-1800s, the kings’ art collection was given to
the people. That gift eventually became SMK. Works of art from the large
collection can be viewed at exhibitions and presentations at SMK. But because
the collection is so vast, only a small part of it will be on display when you
visit SMK on any given day. Many works from the collection will be accessible at
other museums in Denmark or abroad, being displayed as part of their
exhibitions, but the bulk of the collection will be stowed away in the museum’s
storage facilities. SMK is currently working towards realising its ambition to
have its entire art collection digitised, making it freely available online.
The art collection at SMK
comprises three distinctive collections:
-
The Royal
Collection of Paintings and Sculpture holds paintings and sculptures dating
from around 1300 to the present day.
-
The Royal
Collection of Graphic Art is the nation’s largest collection of prints,
drawings and other art on paper – and one of the finest collections of its kind
in the world.
-
The Royal
Cast Collection is a collection of more than 2,000 plaster statues housed in
the West India Warehouse by the Copenhagen harbour.
https://www.smk.dk/en/section/about-smk/
.png)
.png)
FALLING MAN, 1950
Bronze
Dimensions: 60 x 22 x 36 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD SKULL, 1934
Plaster
Dimensions: 18.4 x 19.9 x 22.3 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
AMERICA, COPY AFTER AN ATLAS, JANUARY 1951
Graphite and Eraser on Vellum Paper
Dimensions: 35.1 x 25 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
BUST OF DIEGO, 1964
Bronze
Dimensions: 49.8 x 22 x 18.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
SMALL BUST ON A DOUBLE SOCLE, 1940 – 1941
Bronze
Dimensions: 11.3 x 6.1 x 5.3 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
FIGURE (CUBIST 1) CA. 1926
Bronze
Dimensions: 63.3 x 27.6 x 27.8 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD OF THE MOTHER (FLAT), 1927
Plaster
Dimensions: 33.4 x 23.7 x 12.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
SMALL HEAD OF MARIE-LAURE DE NOAILLES ON A BASE, CA. 1946
Bronze
Dimensions: 12 x 5.5 x 5.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
WALKING WOMAN I, 1932-1936
Bronze
Dimensions: 150 X 29 X 38 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
BUST OF MAN (NEW YORK II), 1965
Bronze
Dimensions: 47.1 x 24.5 x 15.8 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
ALL THE CAFÉ (LA COUPOLE) TWO BUSTS AND TWO HEADS, 1959-1965
Black Ball Point Pen on Papernapkin
Dimensions: 54.5 x 54.8 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
BUST OF MAN, 1956
Bronze
Dimensions: 35.1 x 30.8 x 9.9 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THE SEARCH FOR THE
ABSOLUTE BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE
One does not have to look
at the antediluvian face of Giacometti to sense this artist’s pride and will to
place himself at the beginning of the world. He does not recognize such a thing
as Progress in the fine arts, he does not consider himself more ‘advanced’ than
his contemporaries by preference, the man of Eyzies, the man of Altamira. In
that drastic youthfulness of nature and of men, neither the beautiful nor the
ugly yet existed, neither taste nor people possessing it; and there was no
criticism: all this was still in the future. For the first time, the idea came
to one man to sculpt another in a block
of stone. There was the model: man. Not dictator, general, or athlete, he did
not yet own those ornaments and decorations which would attract the sculptors
of the future. There was only a long indistinct silhouette, moving against the
horizon.
But one could already see
that the movements did not resemble those of things: they emanated from the
figure like veritable beginnings, they outlined an airy future; to understand
these motions, it was necessary to start from their goals –this berry to be
picked, that thorn to be removed – and not from their causes. They never let
themselves be separated or localized: I can consider separately from the tree
itself this wavering branch; but I
cannot think of an arm rising, a fist closing, apart from a human agent. A man
raises his arm, a man clenches his fist; man is the indissoluble unity and the
absolute source of his movements. Moreover, he is a symbol-charmer; signs are
caught in his hair, shine in his eyes, dance between his lips, fall from his
fingertips; he speaks with his whole body; if he runs he speaks, if he stops he
speaks, if he sleeps, his sleep is worded. Now, here is the matter to be formed: a rock, a simple clot of space.
With space then, Giacometti has to make a man; he has to write movement into
the total immobility, unity into the infinite multiplicity, the absolute into
the purely relative, the future into the eternally present, the chatter of signs
into the obstinate silence of things. Between the model and the material there
seems to be an unbridgeable chasm; yet the chasm exists for us only because
Giacometti took hold of it. I do not know if we should regard him as a man who
wants to impose a human stamp on space, or as a rock about to dream of the
human. Or rather, he is the one and the other, and the mediation between them.
The passion of sculpture is to make oneself totally spatial, so that from the
depth of space, the statue of a man may sally forth. Thoughts of stone haunt
Giacometti. Once he had a terror of emptiness; for months, he came and went
with an abyss at his side; space had come to know through him its desolate
sterility. Another time, it seemed to him that objects, dulled and dead, no
longer touched the earth, he inhabited a floating universe, he knew in his
flesh, and to the point of martyrdom, that there is neither high nor low in
space, nor real contact between things; but, a the same time, he knew that the
sculptor’s task is to carve in this infinite archipelago the full form of the
only being who can touch other beings. I know nobody as sensitive as he to the
magic of faces and gestures; he regards them with a passionate desire, as if he
were from another realm. But sometimes, tired of warfare, he tried to
mineralize his fellows: he saw crowds advancing blindly towards him, rolling on
the boulevards like the stones of an avalanche. Thus, each of his obsessions
coincided with a task, an experiment, a way of feeling space. ‘ He is mad ,‘
people tell you, ‘ Men have made sculpture for three thousand years – and done
pretty well, too –without so much fuss. Why
doesn’t he try to achieve something perfect, relying on some reliable
technique, instead of seeming to ignore his predecessors? ’ But, for three
thousand years, sculpture modeled only corpses. Sometimes they were laid out to
sleep on tombs, sometimes they were seated on curule chairs, they were also
perched on horses. But a dead man plus a dead horse do not equal the half of one
living being. They lie, these people of the Museums, these people with white
eyes. These arms pretend to move, but they float, steadied between high and low
by supports of iron; these frozen forms contain within themselves an infinite
dispersion; it is the imagination of the spectator, mystified by a gross
resemblance, which lends movement, warmth and life, to the eternal collapse of
matter. So one must begin again from scratch. After three thousand years, the
task of Giacometti and of contemporary sculptors, is not to enrich the
galleries with new works, but to prove that sculpture itself is possible. To
prove it by sculpting, as Diogenes proved movement by walking. To prove it, like Diogenes, against Parmenides
and Zeno. It was necessary to go to the very end, and see what can be done.
Were the effort to fail, it would be impossible, in any case, to decide whether
this meant the failure of the sculptor or of sculpture: others would come, who
would begin again; Giacometti himself perpetually starts fresh. However, it is
not a question of an infinite progression; there is a definite goal to be
attained, a single problem to be solved: how to mould a man in stone without
petrifying him? It is all or nothing: if the problem be solved, the number of
statues matters little.
‘ Let me know how to make
only one, ‘ says Giacometti, ‘ and I will be able to make a thousand … ‘ So
long as he does not know this, Giacometti is not interested in statues at all,
but only in sketches, insofar as they help him towards his goal. He breaks
everything, and begins all over again. From time to time, friends are able to
save a head, a young woman, a youth, from the massacre. He doesn’t care, and
goes back to his task. He has not had a single exhibition in fifteen years.
Finally, having a show has become a necessity to him, but he is nevertheless
disturbed; he writes to excuse himself: ‘ It is mainly because I don’t want to
be thought of as sterile and incapable of achieving anything, as a dry branch
almost; then too, it is from fear of poverty ( which my attitude could very
well involve ), that I have brought these sculptures to their present point (
in bronze and photographed ) but I am not too happy about theme; they represent
something of what I intended just the same, not quite. ‘ What bothers him is
that these moving outlines, always half-way between nothingness and being,
always modified, bettered, destroyed and begun once more, setting out at last
on their own and for good, are
commencing a social career fra from him. He will forget them. The marvelous
unity of this life lies in its insistent search for the absolute.
This eager and obstinate
worker does not like the resistance of stone, which moderates his movements. He
has chosen for himself a material without weight, the most ductile, the most
perishable, the most spiritual to hand: plaster. This he scarcely feels at the
ends of his fingers, it is the impalpable reverse side of his movements. What
one sees first in his studio are strange scarecrows made of white crusts
curdled around long red strings. His adventures, his ideas, his desires and his
dreams project themselves for a moment on the plaster dolls, give them form and
pass, and the form passes also. Each of these nebula in perpetual metamorphosis
seems to be the very life of Giacometti transcribed in another language. The
statues of Maillol insolently fling in your eyes their heavy eternity. But the
eternity of stone is synonymous with inertia; it is a forever frozen now.
Giacometti never speaks of eternity, never thinks of it. I like what he said to
me one day about some statues he had just destroyed: ‘ I was satisfied with
them but they were made to last only a few hours. ‘ A few hours: like a dawn, a
distress, an ephemera. But it is true that his figures, by the very fact that
they have been fated to die in the very night wherein they were born, are, of
all the sculptures I know, the only ones able to keep the ineffable grace of
seeming perishable. Never was matter less eternal, more fragile, nearer to
being human. The matter of Giacometti, that strange flour which gently powders
and covers his studio, slips under his nails and into the deep furrows of his
face, is the dust of space.
But space, even if naked,
is still superabundant. Giacometti has a horror of the infinite. Not of the
Pascalian infinite, of the infinetly great: there is another infinite, more
devious, more secret, which slips away from divisibility: ‘ In space ‘, says
Giacometti, ‘ there is too much. ‘ This too much is the pure and simple
coexistence of parts in juxtaposition. Most sculptors let themselves be taken
in by this; they confuse the flaccidness of extension with largesse, they put
too much in their works, they delight in the fat curve of a marble hip, they
spread out, thicken, and expand the human gesture. Giacometti knows that there
is nothing redundant in a living man, because everything there is functional;
he knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for
him, is to take the fat off space; he compresses space, so as to drain off its
exteriority. This attempt may well seem desperate; and Giacometti, I think, two
or three times came very near to despair. If, in order to sculpt, it is
necessary to cut and then resew in this incompressible medium, why, then
sculpture is impossible. ‘ Just the same, ‘ he said, ‘ if I begin my statue, as
they do, with the tip of the nose, then an infinity of time will not be too
much before I get to the nostrils. ‘ It was then that he made his discovery.
Here is Ganymede on his
pedestal. If you ask how far away he is from me, I will reply that I don’t know
what you are talking about. By ‘ Ganymede ‘, do you mean the young lad who was
carried off by the eagle of Jupiter? In that case, I will stay that from him to
me there is no real relation of distance, for the simple reason that he does
not exist. But perhaps you have in mind the marble block which the sculptor
shaped in the image of the darling boy? In that case, we have something real to
deal with, an existent mineral that we can measure. Painters have understood
all this for a long time, because, in pictures, the unreality of the third
dimension causes ipso facto the unreality of the other two. Thus the distance
of the figures from me is imaginary. If I approach, I come closer to the
canvas, not to the figures on it. Even if I put my nose against it, I should
still see them twenty paces distant, since it was at twenty paces from me that
they came to exist once and for all. Thus painting escapes the paradoxes of Zeno: even if I were to divide in two the
space separating the foot of the Virgin from the foot of Saint Joseph, and each
one of the two halves in two again, and so on infinitely, it would be a certain
length of canvas that I should be dividing, and not the pavement supporting the
Virgin and her husband. Sculptors have not recognized these elementary truths
because they have worked in a tridimensional space on real marble. And in spite
of the fact that the product of their art was to be an imaginary man, they
thought it possible to project him in a real space. This confusion of two
spaces has had curious results: in the first place, when they worked from
nature, instead of rendering what they saw – that is to say, the model, ten
paces off – they outlined in the clay what they knew to be there – that is to
say, the model. As they wanted their statue to give a spectator standing ten
feet off from it the impression they had experienced before the model, it
seemed to them logical to make a figure which would be for the spectator what
the model had been for them; and that was only possible if the marble were here
as the model was there. But what does it mean to be ‘ as it is ‘ and ‘ there ‘?
At ten paces, I form a certain image of that nude woman; if I approach her, and
regard her from up close, I no longer recognize her: these craters, tunnels,
cracks, this rough black hair, this smooth shiny surfaces, this whole lunar
orography: how could all these qualities go to compose the sleek fresh skin
that I admired from far off? Which is it then that the sculptor ought to
imitate? However close he comes to this face, one can approach closer still.
Thus the statue will never truly resemble what the model is or what the
sculptor sees; one must construct it in accordance with certain rather
contradictory conventions, imagining certain details which are not visible from
so far off, under the pretext that they exist, and neglecting certain others
which exist just the same, under the pretext that one does not see them. What
does this mean if not that one finally leaves it to the spectator to recompose
a satisfying figure? But, in that case, my relation to Ganymede will vary with
the position; if I am near, I will discover details that from a distance I
would miss. And this brings us to the paradox that I have real relations wşth
an illusion; or, if you like, that my real distance from the block of marble
has become one with my imaginary distance from Ganymede. Thus, it results that
the properties of real space cover up and mask those of imaginary space: more
especially, the real divisibility of the marble destroys the indivisibility of
the figure. It is the stone which triumphs, along with Zeno. So the classical
sculptor falls into dogmatism, believing he can eliminate his own glance, and sculpt
human nature in general; but he does not know what he does because he does not
make what he sees. Seeking the true, he has arrived at convention. And, as, in
the last analysis, he leaves it to the visitor to animate these inert
semblances, the classical seeker of the absolute ends by making his work
subject to the relativity of the points of view one can adopt towards it. As to
the spectator, he takes the imaginary for the real and the real for the
imaginary; he seeks the indivisible, and everywhere encounters its opposite!
In frontally opposing
classicism, Giacometti has restored an imaginary and indivisible space to
statues. In accepting relativity from the very start, he has found the
absolute. This is because he was the first one to take it into his head to
sculpt man as he appears, that is to say, from a distance. He confers on his
plaster figures an absolute distance, as the painter does for those who live in
his canvas. He creates his figure ‘ at ten paces, ‘ at twenty paces, ‘ and
whatever you do, there it says. By the same token, the figure places itself in
the unreal, since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the
block of plaster: art is liberated. One has to learn a classical statue, or
come near to it: at each moment one sees new details, the parts appear
separately, then parts of the parts, one ends by getting lost. One does not
approach a sculpture of Giacometti. Do not expect this breast to swell to the
degree that you come close to it: it will not change, and you, in approaching,
will have the strange impression that you are stamping on the nipples; we have
intimations of them, we divine them, now we are on the point of seeing them:
another step or two, and we are about to have them; one more step, and
everything vanishes: there remain the corrugations of the plaster; these
statues only permit themselves to be seen from a respectful distance. However,
everything is there: the whiteness, the roundness, the clastic subsidence of a
beautiful ripe breast. Everything except matter: at twenty paces one thinks one
sees, but one does not observe the tedious desert of adipose tissue; it is
suggested, outlined, meant, but not given. We know now what squeezer Giacometti
used to compress space: there is only one: distance. He puts distance within
reach of your hand, he trusts before your eyes a distant woman – and she
remains distant, even when you touch her with your fingertips. The breast
glimpsed and hoped for will never expose itself: it is only hope these bodies
have only as much matter as is necessary for making promises. ‘ Nonetheless, ‘
some say, ‘ that ‘s not possible: it can’t be that the same object can be seen
from near and far at once. ‘ But it is not the same: it is the block of plaster
which is near, the imaginary figure which is distant. ‘ Even in contracting,
the distance cannot get away from tridimensionality. But only breadth and depth
are changed: the height remains intact. ‘ It is true. But it is also true that
man possesses absolute dimensions in the eyes of other men: if he moves away, I
do not see him dwindling, but his qualities become more compact, while his ‘
shape ‘ remains constant; if he approaches, he does not become larger: the
qualities expand. It must be admitted however, that the men and the women of Giacometti,
are nearer to us in height than in breadth: it is as if their size were in
front if them. But Giacometti has elongated them deliberately. What must be understood
is that these figures, who are wholly and all at once what they are, do not
permit one to study them. As soon as I see them, they spring into my visual
field as an idea before my mind; the idea alone possesses such immediate
translucidity, the idea alone is at one stroke all that it is. Thus Giacometti
has resolved in his own way the problem of the unity of the multiple: he has
just suppressed multiplicity. It is the plaster or the bronze which can be
divided: but this woman who moves within the indivisibility of an idea or of a
sentiment, has no parts, she appears totally and at once. It is to give
sensible expression to this pure presence, to this gift of the self, to this
instantaneous coming fort the Giacometti resorts to elongation. The original
movement of creation, that movement without duration, without parts, and so
well imaged by these long, gracile limbs, traverses their Greco – like bodies,
and raises them towards heaven. I recognize in them, more clearly than in an
athlete of Praxiteles, the figure of man, the real beginning and absolute
source of gesture. Giacometti has been
able to give this matter the only truly human unity: the unity of the
Act.
Such, I think, is the sort of Copernican revolution Giacometti has tried to introduce into sculpture.
Before him the effort was to sculpt being, and that absolute melted away in an
infinity of appearances. He has chosen to sculpt the situated appearance, and
he has shown that in this way the absolute may be attained. He shows us men and
women already seen. But not already seen by him alone. These figures are
already seen as the foreign language we try to learn is already spoken. Each
one of them reveals man as one sees him to be, as he is for other men, as he
appears in an intersubjective world, not, as I said above, to entangle himself
at ten or twenty paces, but at a proper human distance; each shows us that man
is not there first and to be seen afterwards, but that he is the being whose
essence is to exist for others. In
perceiving this woman of plaster, encounter athwart her, my own glace, chilled.
Hence the delightful disquiet that seeing her puts me in: I feel compelled and
I do not know to what end or by whom until I discover that I am compelled to
see, and by myself. And then, often enough Giacometti likes tu put us at a loss
by placing, for example, a distant head on top of a near body, so that we no
longer know what position to take, or how to synthesize what we see. But even
without this, his ambiguous images disconcert, breaking as they do with the
most cherished habits of our eyes: we have become so accustomed to the sleek
mute creatures, made to cure us of the illness of having bodies: these domestic powers kept an eye on us when we
were children; they bore witness in the parks to the conviction that the world
is not dangerous, that nothing happens to anybody, that actually all that
happened to them was to die at their birth.
But to the bodies of
Giacometti something has happened: do they come, we ask, from a concave mirror,
from the fountain of youth, or from a camp of displaced persons? At first
glance we seem to be up against the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald. But a
moment later we have a quite different conception; these fine and slender
natures rise up to heaven, we seem to have come across a group of Ascensions,
of Assumptions; they dance, they are dances, they are made of the same rarified
matter as the glorius bodies that were promised us. And when we have come to
contemplate this mystic thrust, these emaciated bodies expand, what we see
before us belongs to earth. This martyr was only a woman. But a woman complete,
glimpsed, furtively desired, a woman who moved away and passed, with the comic
dignity of those long impotent and breakable girls that high – hecled slippers
carry lazily from bed to their bath, with the tragic horror of the grimy
victims of a fire, given, refused, near, far, a woman complete whose delicious
plumpness is haunted by a secret thinness, and whose terrible thinness by a
suave plumpness, a complete woman, in danger on this earth, and yet not utterly
of this earth, and who lives and tells us of the astonishing adventure of the
flesh, our adventure. For she, like us, was born.
But Giacometti remains
dissatisfied. He could collect his wager at any time. He has only to decide
that he has won. But this he cannot resolve to do, he puts off the decision
from hour to hour and from day to day; sometimes, in the course of a night’s
work, he is ready to admit victory; in the morning everything is broken. Does he
fear the boredom that lies on the other side of triumph, that boredom which
chilled Hegel when he imprudently bolted his system? Or perhaps matter has
revenged itself. This infinite divisibility that he trust out of his work
returns incessantly perhaps, to insert itself between him and his goal. The end
is achieved; now one must do it a little better. And then a little better
still; this new Achilles will never catch the tortoise; a sculptor must in one
way or another be the scapegoat of space: if not in his work then in his life.
But everything considered, there is between him and us a difference of
position. He knows what he wants to do and this we do not know; but we know
what he has succeeded in doing and which he does not notice: these statues are
still more than half sunk in his flesh, he cannot see them; he has hardly made
them when he is already dreaming of women still more slender, still longer and
lighter, and it is thanks to what he has done that he forms the ideal in whose
name he judges it to be imperfect. He will never be finished with it; this is
simply because a man is always beyond what he has done. ‘ When I have finished, ‘ he says, ‘ I shall
write, I shall paint, I shall enjoy myself. ‘ But he will die before finishing.
Is he in the right, or are we? He first, because, as da Vinci said, it is not
good for an artist to feel satisfied. But e too, are right, and in the final
accounting; Kafka, dying, wanted his books burned, and Doestoevsky, in the last
days of his life, dreamed of writing a sequel to Karamazov. Perhaps they both
died wretched, the one thinking he had done nothing meritorious, the other that
he would be forced to lie outside of the world before he had even been able to
scratch its surface. Yet both had won, whatever they thought. Giacometti has
won likewise, and he is perfectly well aware of it. Vainly does he hook himself
to his statues like a miser to his treasure; in vain does he temporize, delay,
find a hundred excuses for putting off the reckoning: men are going to come to
his place to strip it, and carry off all his works, even to the plaster that
covers his floor. He knows it: his hunted look gives himaway: he knows that
despite himself he has won and that he belongs to us.
NOTE: From Alberto
Giacometti & Jean Paul Sartre, Exhibition of Sculptures, Paintings,
Drawings, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York 1948. The text was published
simultaneously in French: ‘ La Recherche de l’Absolu’in Les Temps modernes 3,
no. 28, 1948.
Essay of ‘’ The Search
For The Absolute by Jean Paul Sartre ‘’ quoted from exhibition book. You may
have exhibition book to read whole essays.
HEAD OF THE FATHER (FLAT I), 1927-1930
Plaster
Dimensions: 28.2 x 22 x 14.6 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD OF A MAN IN A FRAME, CA. 1949
Graphite on Vellum Paper
Dimensions: 51 x 34.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
HEAD WITH A LARGE NOSE, 1958
Bronze
Dimensions: 51.6 x 14.1 x 15.4 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
FOUR FIGURINES ON A STAND (LONDON FIGURINES, MODEL B), 1950
Bronze
Dimensions: 157.5 x 41.5 x 32 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
STANDING WOMAN, 1957
Bronze
Dimensions: 131.5 x 19 x 32.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
BUST OF ANNETTE IV, 1962
Bronze
Dimensions: 58.4 x 23.7 x 20.3 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
TALL FIGURE, 1949
Bronze
Dimensions: 165 x 17.2 x 34.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THE CAGE, 1950-1951
Bronze
Dimensions: 175.6 x 37 x 39.6 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
STANDING WOMAN, 1959-1960
Bronze
Dimensions: 69.5 x 15.5 x 19.8 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
WALKING LIMPING FIGURE (FAMILY GROUP), 1930
Wood
Dimensions: 21.5 x 15.5 x 19 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
STANDING MAN IN A PERSPECTIVE, HEADS AND ARCHITECTURE, CA. 1959
Blue Ballpoint Pen on a Paper Tablecloth
Dimensions: 56.8 x 55.7 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
THREE FIGURES AND A HEAD (THE SQUARE), 1950
Bronze
Dimensions: 56.8 x 54.5 x 41.5 cm.
Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto
Giacometti / Adagp, Paris, 2024
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI
1. A
YOUTH SPENT IN A STUDIO
Alberto
Giacometti grew up in Switzerland in the Val Bregaglia alpine valley, a few
kilometers from the Swiss-Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti
(1868-1933) was an impressionist painter esteemed by Swiss collectors and
artists. He shared his thoughts with his son on art and the nature of art.
Alberto
Giacometti produced his first oil painting Still Life with Apples,
circa 1915 and first sculpted bust Diego, circa 1914-1915 in
his father's studioat the age of fourteen. His father and his godfather, the
Symbolist painter Cuno Amiet(1868-1961) were two crucial figures in young
Alberto’s artistic development. In 1922, Giacometti went to Paris to study,
enrolling in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, where he attended classes
given by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Drawings of nudes attest both to this
apprenticeship and, like his earliest Cubist sculptures, to the influence of
Jacques Lipchitz and Fernand Léger.
2. THE
ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARTS OF AFRICA AND OCEANIA
Giacometti’s
work shows the influence of African and Oceanian sculpture. When the young
artist developed an interest in African art in 1926, it was no longer a novelty
for the modern artists of the previous generation (Picasso, Derain); it had
even become popularized to the point of becoming decorative.
The
two works which first brought Giacometti to the attention of the public were
the Spoon Woman and The Couple, both shown in
1927 at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris, and both illustrating the upheaval
created in the young artist by that cultural encounter. In 1928, Giacometti
embarked on a series of women and flat heads, whose novel quality earned him
acclaim in 1929, and resulted in his first contract with the Pierre Loeb
gallery, which exhibited the Surrealists. In those years, Giacometti was
friends with Carl Einstein, author of the seminal book on African sculpture,
Negerplastik (1915) and Michel Leiris, who would become a specialist in Dogon
art. Several later works, including some outstanding painted plasters and one
or two paintings, show how non-western art had a lasting influence on his
output. The artist moved away from naturalist and academic representation, in
favour of a totemic and at times wild vision of the figure, filled with a
magical power.
https://www.fondation-giacometti.fr/en/biography#https://www.fondation-giacometti.fr/en/article/2/2-the-encounter-with-the-arts-of-africa-and-oceania
3. THE
SURREALIST EXPERIMENT
Giacometti
joined André Breton’s Surrealist movement in 1931, as an active member of
Breton’s group, Giacometti in no time stood out as one of its rare sculptors.
Despite his being expelled in February 1935, surrealist procedures continued to
play an important part in his creative work: dreamlike visions, montage and
assemblage, objects with metaphorical functions, and magical treatment of the
figure.
The Gazing Head, caught the
attention of the group in 1929, and the Walking Woman of 1932, conceived as a model for the major
Surrealist exhibition of 1933, in the version with neither arms nor head,
featured in the 1936 Surrealist show in London. A painted version of the set
construction titled The Palace at 4 a.m.
conjures up the theatrical aspect of his dreamlike world. When, in 1965,
Giacometti created a final version of the Suspended Ball for a
retrospective in London, and by also providing a painted version of it, the
artist showed how his links with the movement lived on.
4. OBJECTS
The creation of
decorative art objects shows Giacometti’s interest in utilitarian objects which
he admired in ancient and primitive societies. In 1931, Giacometti created a
new typology of sculptures, which he called “mobile and mute objects” – things
moving in a latent, suggestive way, which he had made of wood by a carpenter.
Like the Disagreeable Object and
the Disagreeable
Object To Be Thrown Away To Be Thrown Away, the Suspended Ball established
a bridge between object and sculpture, and challenged the actual status of the
work of art. In some of these sculptures, Giacometti had recourse, for the
first time, to the procedure of the “cage”, which enabled him to delimit a
dreamlike space of representation. From 1930 on, Giacometti created many
utilitarian objects: lamps, vases, and wall lights which were sold by the
avant-garde interior decorator Jean-Michel Frank. He also designed plaster and
terra cotta bas-reliefs for special commissions – those on view here were made
for an American collector, and the Louis-Dreyfus mansion in Paris. In 1939, he
was one of the artists approached for a major commission by a couple of
Argentinian collectors for whom he designed fire places, chandeliers, and console
tables. Just before being dispatched to Buenos Aires, the complete décor,
coordinated by Jean-Michel Frank, was installed in a life-size model in Paris.
After the war, Giacometti went on creating other objects, including, in 1950, a
lamp inspired by Dogon statuary and Egyptian funerary objects, and, in 1959, a
scarf for a commission from his gallerist Aimé Maeght.
5. WHAT
IS A HEAD ?
The issue of the human
head was the central subject of Giacometti’s research throughout his life, as
well as the reason for his exclusion of the Surrealist group in 1935. In that
year, the representation of a head, which seemed to be a common-or-garden
subject, was, for him, far from being resolved. The head and, above all, the
eyes are the core of the human being and of life, whose mystery fascinated him.
After the Head-Skull of
1934, developed after the death of his father Giovanni in 1933, his many
different variations on heads show that the subject was inexhaustible, and all
the more so if it was combined with the question of scale: for Giacometti,
coming up with an exact rendering of his vision also meant providing the
distance with which the subject had been looked at.
In the 1930s, the models
for his research into the head were his brother, Diego, an English artist
friend, Isabel (Delmer),
and a professional model, Rita (Gueyfier).
Glimpsed from afar in the Quartier Latin, Isabel was the subject of one his
very earliest miniature figurines. After his return to Paris from Switzerland
in 1945, Giacometti once again showed that monumentality was separate from
size, by making small-format portraits of important personalities: the patron
of the arts Marie-Laure de
Noailles, the writer Simone de Beauvoir,
whom he had met in 1941, and, at Aragon’s request, the Resistance hero Rol-Tanguy.
6. A
WOMAN LIKE A TREE, A HEAD LIKE A STONE
It was in Switzerland,
where Giacometti spent the Second World War, that he had the idea in 1944-45
for the sculpture which would be the prototype for his postwar standing
figures: the Woman with
Chariot, which depicts the image of his English friend Isabel
from memory.
The sculpture of a
standing figure, facing forward with her arms beside her body and her face
expressionless, is a fine example of Giacometti’s research between 1945 and
1965 involving the space of representation: the figures were either set on
pedestals which isolated them from the ground, or incorporated in “cages”
forming a virtual space. Some compositions like The Glade were
placed on flat surfaces raised above pedestal level – here, too, it was a
matter of establishing a space parallel to ours. The standing female figures
are allusive silhouettes, sometimes reduced to a line, and invariably
approached by way of successive phases conveyed by series.
The Four Women on a
Base and Four Figurines on
a Stand materialize two visions involving four standing women
seen from a distance, and in different circumstances. With the Three Men Walking Giacometti
tried to grasp in sculpture the fleeting sight of figures in motion. In 1950,
Giacometti produced a series of sculptures conveying the image of a clearing
where the trees were women and the stones men’s heads – an image which he would
later push to its extreme, in a life-size piece.
7. FRAGMENTS
AND VISIONS
Giacometti’s work studies
the part as an evocation of the whole, and the emergence of a vision in the
spectator’s space. In 1921 and 1946, Giacometti witnessed two deaths which left
him with an indelible memory.
At the bedside of the
first dying person he was fascinated by his nose which seemed to him to grow
longer as life ebbed away. In front of the corpse of the second person, he
remembered the head tipped backwards, the open mouth, the skeletal limbs, and
the terror felt at the idea that the dead was everywhere and that its hand
might pass through the walls and reach him. Pursued by visions of heads
suspended in the void, he strove to convey them in sculpture.
He had been fascinated
since boyhood by the human gaze, and the impression that life lies in the eyes
was now heightened. Talking about those years, he declared: “I cannot simultaneously
see the eyes, the hands, and the feet of a person standing two or three yards
in front of me, but the only part that I do look at entails a sensation of the
existence of everything.”
8. ENCOUNTERS
Giacometti met
philosopher Jean-Paul Startre in 1941, who is the author of two essential
essays about the artist’s work, published in 1948 and 1954, dealing with the
issue of perception.
Just as significant were
his conversations with Sartre’s Japanese translator, Isaku Yanaihara, a
professor of philosophy, who posed for Giacometti between 1956 to 1961. In
1948, keen to honour French intellectuals and artists, the French state
commissioned Giacometti to design a medal dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre; the
medal was never actually made, but there are drawings for it.
Between 1951 and his
death, Giacometti produced a series of “dark heads”, which, together with some
anonymous sculpted heads, lent substance to the “generic” man concept, which
Sartre would sum up, in 1964, in his novel Les mots, with the sentence: “A
whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him”.
This was Giacometti’s quintessential contribution to the history of the
portrait in the 20th century.
9. PORTRAITS
Giacometti’s portraits,
be they painted or sculpted, are the translation of the model as an implacable
otherness, which can never be grasped in its entirety. These portraits, devoid
of all emotion and expression, are the receptacle of what the spectator brings
to them. What was involved for the artist was capturing and rendering the
vibration of the life of his models and not their psychology. Under
Giacometti’s brush, his mother’s cook, Rita, became a sacerdotal
character relieved of any sociological context.
His favourite models were
people who lived around him: his wife Annette, whom he married in 1949,
and Diego, his
brother and assistant, who acted as a medium for his most advanced research.
Working from memory, he brought forth their image within an imaginary space.
Working from models, he turned his back on classical perspective and
reconstructed his models posing as he saw them – in their fragmented or
deformed, but ever-changing, aspect. Their distinctive features dissolved and
sometimes merged, or were reduced to essentials. Giacometti also painted
occasional models, as long as they agreed to pose for hours in front of him:
the English industrialist and collector Sir Robert Sainsbury, the sophisticated
intellectual Paola Carola-Thorel, and the artist Pierre Josse. Every modelling session gave
rise to a new sequence of perceptions, which the artist sought to build up with
his brush. Caroline, a pretty woman with a complex
personality who hung out with criminals and posed from 1960 onwards, was
presented in three very different aspects: a remote goddess, a dangerous and
totemic figure, and a sculptural beauty.
10. FIFTY YEARS OF PRINTS
Giacometti produced his
first prints – wood etchings – alongside his father when he was still a
schoolboy. During his life, Giacometti tried his hand at every print technique:
wood, engraving, etching, aquatint, and above all, lithography, from 1949
onward.
As a witness at André
Breton’s wedding in 1934, he illustrated the anthology offered by the poet to
his young wife, L’Air de l’eau. Giacometti, who was a great book lover and
friend of many writers and poets, also illustrated the writings of René Crevel
(Les Pieds dans le Plat, 1933), Georges Bataille (Histoire de rats, 1947),
Michel Leiris (Vivantes cendres, innommées, 1961), and René Char (Retour Amont,
1965). From 1951 onward, he produced lithographic plates which were separately
published by the Maeght Gallery. Giacometti was always in favour of
disseminating his work through quality editions. Lithography involving the
transfer of a drawing onto a zinc plate offered the advantage of requiring
lightweight equipment that was easy to handle: special paper and a lithographic
pencil.The artist was thus able to leave his studio, go out into the street and
sketch his city, café terraces, the overhead Metro, modern building sites like
Orly airport, and the lithographer’s print shop, and then return to his studio.
This would be the subject of Paris sans fin, a collection of 150 prints
commissioned by the publisher Tériade, on which Giacometti worked from 1959 on,
but which was not published until after his premature death.
11. LANDSCAPES
Giacometti creates a
system of equivalences between the human figure and nature: the busts are
mountains, the standing figures are trees, the heads are stones. In the
sunlight, the mountain vibrates with a throb which resembles breathing. Like
the tree, the human being is caught in a process of growth and death which can
never be halted.
This theme adorns the
door which Giacometti finished making in 1956 for the vault of the Kaufmann
family in Pennsylvania (United States). In 1958, gripped by a nighttime vision,
he hurriedly painted a picture which brought together that trilogy: man, tree
and mountain. For Giacometti, however, it was above all the most ordinary which
contained the unknown and the wonderful. He observed that the landscape he
painted from his studio window in Stampa was forever changing, and that he
could “spend every day looking at the same garden, the same trees, and the same
backdrop”, or, in Paris, remain in front of the small house, on the other side
of the street, which he painted from his door. He was amazed by “all the
beautiful landscapes to be painted without changing places, the most ordinary,
anonymous, banal and beautiful landscape you could ever see.”
12. MONUMENT
In December 1958, through
his New York dealer Pierre Matisse, Giacometti was invited to submit a project
for a monument to be installed in the square being built in front of the new
Chase Manhattan Bank skyscraper in Manhattan. In February 1959, the architect
of this urban complex, Gordon Bunshaft, sent him the dimensions for making a
model of the square, designed to help Giacometti to imagine the space, because
the artist had never set foot in the United States.
Giacometti decided to
use, on a grand scale, the three motifs which had haunted his oeuvre since
1948: a gigantic standing female figure, a large walking man, and a monumental
head set on the ground, all arranged in relation to each other. With this
monument, for the first time, he permitted spectators to enter his wonderful
world where trees were women and stones were heads, a magical glade
criss-crossed by the fleeting forms of walking men. In the end, the monument
was not installed in New York, because the artist backed out of the competition
in 1961.
Giacometti chose to
produce each of the sculptures separately in bronze, and showed a first version
of this set at the 1962 Venice Biennale. Another version was installed in 1964
in the Fondation Maeght’s courtyard overlooking a pine wood on the Côte d’Azur.
13 THE LAST MODEL
Eli Lotar, a film-maker
and photographer, was Giacometti’s last male model. Lotar, a had been part of
the Surrealist avant-garde in the 1930s. In the postwar years, he was dogged by
failure and became destitute; he lived off the generosity of old friends like
Giacometti, who gave him money in exchange for running small errands and
posing.
Giorgio Soavi has
described these sessions, where Lotar had to remain absolutely still, as
follows: “[Giacometti’s] eye was filled with strange gleams, his body vibrated
in every limb, all he followed were the impulses which governed his hands, his
arms, and his legs: he was in ecstasy. As I looked closely at the two faces, I
understood the secret which enabled Lotar not to breathe: if Eli was the ideal
model for that sculpture, it was because he was dead. He didn’t breathe, he
didn’t think, he remained focused on the highest point. An electric current
connected the artist to the model, wrapping them in a real complicity. They
played together, without any ball, racket, or net.” In these sculptures, which
evoke the reliquary and Egyptian statuary, the man who became a tramp was given
the dignity of a priest. Jean Genet noted that, for Giacometti, women were
goddesses and men priests “belonging to a very senior clergy”, all of them depending
“invariably on the same haughty and gloomy family. Familiar and very close.
Inaccessible.”
You may visit Alberto
Giacometti’s past four news from My Magical Attic Blog to click below links.
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2017/07/alberto-giacometti-sculptures-and-their.html
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/01/alberto-giocometti-at-bucerius-kunst.html
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2014/01/alberto-giocometti-s-studio.html
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2014/03/alberto-giacometti-without-end-at.html
.png)
