Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) was an artist often held captive by
his enthusiasts. In Paris in the late 1920s, after creating totemic
Cubist fantasies like The Couple (1926) and Spoon Woman
(1926–1927), the Swiss-born artist was taken up by André Breton and
the Surrealists. Some of Giacometti’s works from those
years—Reclining Woman Who Dreams (1929),
Suspended Ball (1930), No More Play (1932), Le
Vide-Poche (1930), The Palace at 4
A.M. (1932)—instantly established themselves as Surrealist
icons. Looking back on them today, however, what seems most striking
about them is their plastic expressiveness. Surrealism proposed to
unlock the unconscious by exploding the rational. But these works
strike the viewer as eminently conscious and deliberative. They are
not accidents. They are works of art.
Giacometti’s filiation with the Surrealists came to a noisy end when,
following the lead of his art rather than Breton’s ideology, he
returned to sculpting human heads from a live model. Breton publicly
confronted Giacometti with his apostasy from Surrealist orthodoxy;
for his part, Giacometti dismissed his commitment to surrealism as a
mere “transitional exercise” and a form of “masturbation.”
Giacometti’s break with the Surrealists pushed him back into
obscurity. He reemerged in the 1940s, this time as a hero of
Existentialism, thanks largely to Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an
essay called “The Search for the Absolute” when Giacometti exhibited
his work at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in 1948. All at
once Giacometti’s extraordinary elongated sculptures—
the walking
men, the women standing at hieratic attention: doubtless his
best-known works—were hailed as symbols of Man’s Lonely
Confrontation with the Abyss, etc.
Well, perhaps they are. But they are also unforgettable sculptures,
moving in ways unconnected with expostulations about Being and
Nothingness, the “upsurge of freedom,” and so on. It might be said that,
when it comes to art, hell is other people’s theories. As
Giacometti’s biographer James Lord put it, “Seeing, not believing,
is what he cared about.”
The excellent sampling of Giacometti’s art
—seventy-odd sculptures,
thirty-odd paintings, and sixty drawings—at the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts should help corroborate
Giacometti’s independence from the theory-mongers. True, Jean-Louis
Prat, Director of the
Fondation Maeght (which owns sixty-five works by Giacometti) and
Guest Curator of the exhibition, declares that “more than any other
artist, [Giacometti] expresses the precariousness of our existence
and of the times in which we live.” Giacometti did not exactly
discourage this sort of talk. And there was much about his biography
that provided fodder for gloomy existential rumination. But as one
moves through this thoughtfully chosen and well-installed exhibition
(the elegant galleries designed by Moshe Safdie are perfect for
Giacometti), what
really seem precarious are such portentous statements about
Giacometti’s art expressing the precariousness of existence. This
exhibition reveals the distinctively aesthetic logic
of Giacometti’s art,
its development out of Cubism and post-Impressionism, its striving
to explore certain distinct modes of artistic expression.
Given the abstract nature of much of Giacometti’s art, it may seem
curious that “likeness” was one of his artistic bywords. He often said
that his main ambition was to “copy” what he saw, “to give the
nearest possible sensation to that felt at the sight of the
subject.” He was not being paradoxical. This exhibition shows how
the elusive—
indeed, the impossible—goal of “likeness” fueled an
artistic career of astonishing pathos. Giacometti frequently
complained that the more he worked on a picture or sculpture, the
more difficult it was to finish it. Evidence of that difficulty is
patent throughout Giacometti’s art. He set himself the impossible
task of fixing in visible form the evanescent heart of the moment.
What is extraordinary is how often his pictures and sculptures,
heavy with the marks of their making, distill the hard light of
naked reality.
“Alberto Giacometti” will not travel.
A catalogue for the exhibition, with an essay by Jean-Louis
Prat, has been published by The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (128
pages, CAN. $34.95).