There is a famous story about Cézanne’s effort to paint a portrait of his dealer Ambrose Vollard. He worked at the picture for many weeks, requiring what seemed like countless sittings by his subject. One day, the sessions ended. After stepping back from his canvas, the master considered for a while. Then he announced that he was not dissatisfied with the front of the shirt.
What this story suggests is that, as far as Cézanne was concerned, the painting was not complete. Indeed, more than a few of Cézanne’s paintings, including some of his finest, intimate a sensation of incompleteness—even as they convince us that they are fully realized works of art. It has been said of Cézanne that he did not so much “finish” a picture as simply stop working on it. And from some of his paintings one gets the sense that, but for the limitations of genius, he could have kept at them indefinitely.
One gets something of the same sensation from the works of Alberto Giacometti, currently the subject, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (It closes on January 8, 2002.) The exhibition, which opens with a remarkably authoritative group of youthful pencil and paper portraits, covers all phases of the artist’s career—from the early Brancusi- and cubist-influenced sculptures through a seemingly unrelated surrealist phase to the mature sculptures and paintings with which museum- and gallery-goers are probably most familiar: the radically thin, flattened, and elongated bronze figures with huge feet/pedestals and the somewhat spooky, often hollow-eyed portraits of less dramatically elongated solitary individuals seated in rooms.
Among the nearly 200 objects on display—drawings, paintings, and, above all, sculptures—are many of the artist’s most important works. They include the delightful Torso (1925), with which Giacometti made his debut at the Salon d’ Automne, and the extraordinary Gazing Head (1928), which Christian Klemm, in a fine catalogue essay, calls “the completely innovative starting point for future developments.”
It was this sculpture, in fact, that caught the attention of Andre Breton and Georges Bataille, two leaders of the surrealist movement, and that catapulted Giacometti into the center of the Parisian avant-garde—and early critical acclaim. Two other notable works, from the 1930’s, are the Egyptian-like Walking Woman (1932-34) and Cube (1934); the latter seems to be Giacometti’s most purely abstract work, and it marked, says Klemm, the end of his engagement with the avant-garde. That disengagement came at the close of his surrealist period, which he later referred to as his “Babylonian captivity.”
This remark suggests that surrealism was a kind of detour for Giacometti, but if so it was a fruitful one. Notwithstanding the alternately disturbing, lurid, or frightening—and somewhat dated—character of such sculptures as Cage (1930), Disagreeable Object (1931), Woman with her Throat Cut (1932), Point to the Eye (1932), and Head-Skull (1934), these works are highly accomplished. In fact, to look at them is to see how brilliantly Giacometti assimilated surrealist ideas—in particular, the pictorial ideas of Miró—just as he had earlier absorbed the innovations of Brancusi and cubism. And there are also some formal continuities to be discerned in the surrealist works, both with what preceded them and with what came after, the most significant being the use of forms based on primitive and archaic art. Indeed, in many ways, the MoMA exhibit suggests that Giacometti’s underlying concerns remained fairly consistent throughout his career.
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That career began in a village near Stampa, in the southeastern Swiss Alps. Born in 1901, Alberto, the first of four children, followed in the footsteps of his father, a painter who had returned home after receiving training in Munich, Paris, and Italy. As a child, Alberto worked in his father’s studio, and it quickly became apparent that he was something of a prodigy. At eighteen, he was sent to study in Paris, but he shortly dropped out and spent part of the year traveling with his father in Italy. In Venice, he was stunned by the paintings of Tintoretto; in Padua, he was overwhelmed by the frescoes of Giotto. On his way to Rome, where he would spend six months, he stopped in Florence; there, according to Klemm, he saw an Egyptian head “that made an unforgettable impression on him.”
Giacometti’s decision to become a sculptor took him to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. He studied there off and on over the next several years in the teaching studio of Antoine Bourdelle, a former assistant to Rodin. Giacometti would live in Paris from 1922 on, making frequent return visits to Stampa. In 1927, he moved into a small studio where he would live and work until his death in 1966. (Two extremely precise drawings of this cramped space are included in the MoMA exhibit.) Despite the money that would come with success and fame, he lived modestly, having no real interest in material comforts.
Klemm says that initially Giacometti saw himself as an heir to Rodin, but that it was Cézanne—the painter who had the most decisive influence on 20th-century art, and who had profoundly influenced Giacometti’s father—who became his “guiding star.” The influence of Cézanne is readily apparent in Giacometti’s drawings and paintings (especially the two versions of Apple on a Sideboard done in 1937). Early on, it is evident in Self-portrait (1921), an impressively confident display of modeling form and collapsing space through a dense accumulation of taches of color. And it is evident again in a second self-portrait, done in 1923, in which the head and neck assume a massive, stone-like quality. (Of Cézanne’s Five Bathers, a work dated 1885-87, the critic Roger Fry wrote, “If it is lacking completeness as a pictorial design, it would at least make a remarkable sculptural relief.”) Unlike in the earlier painting, though, the figure here seems to emerge out of, or to be situated within, a palpably larger space than that contained by the canvas.
This points to the problem Giacometti struggled with through all the permutations of his stylistic development: how to render space and the figure within it. In drawing, this problem typically presents itself at first as a question of where to place a figure (or object) on the paper. The choice is both elemental and crucial, for it raises further questions as to what kind of space the artist is creating and why. Put another way, the issue becomes: what is the relation of this space to reality, and how does the figure belong in it? Giacometti famously said that while art interested him a lot, truth interested him much more. With his figures and the space he created for them, what truth was he searching for, or seeking to illuminate?
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One of the best descriptions of Giacometti’s “truth” was offered by David Sylvester, who organized an exhibit of some of the artist’s mature paintings in London in 1955. The striking thing about these works, Sylvester wrote,
is the density of their space. The atmosphere is not transparent: it is as visible as the solid forms it surrounds, almost as tangible. Furthermore, it is uncertain where the solid form ends and the space begins. Between mass and space there is a kind of inter-penetration.
The space of which Sylvester speaks is created by Giacometti’s intense, scratchy, yet delicate modeling, and by the use of a device that appears regularly in his drawings and paintings: a drawn box, just inside the edges of the paper or canvas, that encloses the representation of the room and its centrally placed figure. In his sculpture, this box has a counterpart in the cage-like structures that appear in such surrealist works as Cage, Suspended Ball (1930), and The Palace at 4 A.M. (1932) and, later, in The Nose (1947), The Cage (Woman and Head) (1950), and Figure in a Box between Two Boxes which are Houses (1950).
As has often been noted, Giacometti’s sculptures have a manifest pictorial quality. “Drawing is the basis of everything,” he told the writer James Lord. Walking through the exhibition rooms at MoMA, one gets the distinct feeling that, whether one is looking at drawings, paintings, or sculptures, one is somehow seeing the same, invisible “thing”—namely, the impulse, energy, and activity that went into producing, and seems to flow back and forth among, different material expressions of a common underlying search.
That search is explicit in a series of three busts from 1927 and a painting from 1932 of the artist’s father, works that exude the manifold pleasures of filial affection, aesthetic experimentation, and physical execution. The first, in bronze, is heavily modeled, with the features fully articulated. In the second, done in marble, the features are barely there, being little more than faint Brancusi-like impressions in the white stone. In the third, they are scratched into the surface of the roughly cut bronze, giving the work an archaic quality. In all three heads, the ever-more flattened front of the face is delineated by an inverted triangle, an effect achieved in the painting through the use of a thin layer of highlighted gray paint over the underlying rose.
These busts, like the one Giacometti did of his mother in 1927, reflect an ongoing effort to combine representation and stylization (in particular, stylization based on archaic or primitive forms): an effort that could be said to constitute the core of Giacometti’s formal experiments. Of the bust of the artist’s mother, Klemm writes that “we see for the first time the central problem of Giacometti’s mature work: the difficulty of embodying what he saw with visionary intensity, namely, the reality of the human being in its double role as a visible presence, but also, in physical terms, as reified ungraspability.”
The seemingly unbearable nature of this difficulty is vividly evoked by James Lord in A Giacometti Portrait (1965), an account of sitting for the artist. Lord’s description of the sessions, which extended over several weeks, is notable for its insights into Giacometti’s artistic process and for capturing the spirit and personality of an artist whose daily efforts were dogged by uncertainty of the most extreme kind.
“It couldn’t be going worse. It seems impossible to do,” Giacometti told Lord in a characteristic outburst during one of their working sessions. “And, after all, it would not be any better if you were farther away. The distance between the artist and the model doesn’t matter. A head is simply impossible to paint.” At their very first session, Giacometti had exclaimed, “You have the head of a brute. . . . If I could paint you as I see you and a policeman saw the picture he’d arrest you immediately!”
As others have remarked, it is the quality of uncertainty that seems to characterize, more than any other, Giacometti’s mature work. It is somewhat gloomily evident in some of the drawings and paintings. But it is resplendent in the sculptures. The delicacy and precarious balance of such figures as Walking Man (1947), Standing Woman (1948), Man Walking in the Rain (1948), Man Falling (1950), and Seated Woman (1950) are emphasized by the massive bases as well as the heavily modeled surfaces, which suggest an intensive effort to manipulate a living thing into existence out of the lifeless clay (later cast in bronze).
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Giacometti’s effort to breathe new life, as it were, into an art rooted in an interest in the human figure—at a time when abstract expressionism was just beginning its march to dominance of the American and then the international art scene—may have been what displeased the critic Clement Green-berg when he saw some of the sculptor’s breakthrough works in a show at the Pierre Matisse gallery in New York in 1948. Greenberg viewed these sculptures as a sad falling-off from Giacometti’s more abstract cubist/surrealist phase, and as a retrograde return to “the statue.”
In this case, Greenberg’s justly fabled eye failed him, blinded perhaps by his belief in the inevitable progress of abstraction. But his complaint does raise an interesting issue. In the United States, cubism and surrealism eventually produced abstract expressionism; yet Giacometti, who had fully absorbed both influences, subsequently turned in an entirely different and more traditional direction. Greenberg once told the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, who in his 1950’s Woman series also tried to return to the figure, that painting the figure was no longer possible. Giacometti proved him wrong. And in so doing he created a more universal and more profound art than that of the abstract expressionists, whose quest for a transcendent “absolute” (in the historian John Golding’s phrase) led often to a more parochial, solipsistic, and limited achievement.
Giacometti was no transcendentalist. Nor was he seeking, as some have claimed, to give artistic expression to a kind of existentialist alienation. This misreading—its most notable proponent was Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue for the 1948 show at the Matisse Gallery—seems to have been the result in part of a faulty interpretation of Giacometti’s obsession with death: he told James Lord that he talked about immolating himself so often that his wife finally told him either to do it or to shut up, and that as a result he had to stop talking about it. The same misreading also clearly has something to do with the postures, shapes, undersized heads, and often anguished expressions of Giacometti’s figures. But to the limited extent that these aspects of his work convey an emotional or psychological state, they do not do so as a negation of reality. (As Giacometti himself said, “I’m incapable of expressing any human feelings at all in my work. I just try to construct a head, nothing more.”) They are simply necessary components of the whole—choices dictated, like those about materials, scale, design, and modeling, by the artist’s overriding preoccupation with finding a formal solution to the problem of representing what he saw.
Giacometti returned to the same models and the same motifs again and again. His genius is captured in an exchange recorded by Lord (there are many others like it) after he had stopped working on Lord’s portrait and turned his attention to one of his sculptures-in-progress:
Nodding at the sculpture, he said, “I’m doing something here that I’ve never done before. It may not be apparent to you, but I am.”
It was not apparent to me. The figure looked very much like a number he had done in the past. But the point, I thought, was that his feelings in relation to it were unlike any he had had before. To him the plastic problem, the visual response to reality, was utterly new, because he possesses the rare capacity of seeing a familiar thing with the intense vividness of a completely new sight. And it is this extraordinary, though taxing, ability which enables him to imbue with fresh vitality subjects he has treated numerous times before.
In Giacometti’s signature sculptures, the box that in his paintings frames the room and figure is replaced by the relatively massive base, which creates the same sensation that his paintings do of a much larger space than that which one “sees”—a sensation, in short, of the presence of an absence. The critic and painter Fairfield Porter got close to the heart of this mysterious matter in a 1960 review:
Giacometti’s concern is to place the relationship of man and landscape with the ground. And he further considers man and everything else as having a dual relationship to the environment as a link between the earth and infinity. . . . Infinity, in short, has the single limit of its beginning; it is actual, it exists, and one can experience it. . . . [It] makes physical existence and spiritual existence (where a thing is and what it is), its displacement and its position, its relation to the horizontal and the vertical—it makes all these things inseparable, as mind is inseparable from body.
Which brings us back to the question of incompleteness. Given their nature, Giacometti’s works at times invite the feeling that something remains to be done—there is this, they seem to say, and there is much more. Yet they do not invite a search for meaning. In that sense, they are complete, or, rather, as complete as this uncertain but unflinching and accepting artist, perhaps the last great artist of the 20th century, could make them.
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