The Enigma that is Alberto Giacometti
“What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.”
— Alberto Giacometti
That’s how Alberto Giacometti summed it up, as told by James Lord in Giacometti: A Biography, published in 1997. Giacometti was captive to his own genius, which transformed his studio into a lonely laboratory where he constantly was perfecting the formula of his artistic vision and expression. In the midst of this creative fervor, something which resembled to the work of a mad scientist, he dwelled in the despairing gap between his envisioned ideals and his perceived inability to fully convey them. His catharsis was his art, the relentless sculpting and painting were his modes of liberating himself from that ever sinking gap. This frustration seeps into his artwork. His prolific and financially successful did not fufill him. By the end of his life, the colors on his pallete had gone mute, resticted to a despairing range of black, grey, and tans. He is a mysterious artists. He is an enigma.
My renewed fascination with Giacometti stems back to now last weekend. Last Saturday, John and I explored the halls or “pasillos” of La Colección Carmen Thyssen, where I was delighted to find works by the Swiss artist. We’d just begun to browse the pasillos when I discovered a wall dedicated to his works. I was thrilled. We had kicked off the Thyssen with a bang I told John. We were standing opposite of his portrait, titled “El retrato de la mujer,” which hung alongside a group of sculptures (I have put photos below). I was explaining to him what I knew of Giacometti, principally his totemic, humanoid sculptures. These elongated human forms look like the result of wet sand that’s been dripped. They are not rendered perfectly which adds to their mystery. These were the skulptures on display.
His paintings are perplexing too. They are incredibly unique in their abstraction and sense of rugged desolation. They have this muted desperate cry. The portrait of the women was a haunting piece. I felt the painting gazing into me, as if it was alive. This gave it this haunted feeling. She was rendered in his unrefined and raw style, characteristic to the style he adopted in the 60s. The frowning look Giacometti captures and the pronounced bags under her eyes, convey a tangible sense of unease. There’s a sense of longing, and this particular style, of half rendering the figure, concentrating on the face I think lends itself well to capturing the emotional complexity. It a nervous portrait that contrasts oddly with the beautiful environment of the Thyssen.
John had moved on, and I remained captivated. This fixation stems from the fact that in high school I studied him and also returned to study him in college. I caught up with John after what must have been at least five minutes appreciating just a small sample of his brilliance.
Giacometti’s artistic journey was defined by a maddening pursuit of representing the human body. The human body was an issue to him. Mastering the form of the human body was his primary concern throughout his career. This passion inspired him and led to the creation of an impressive, profound, and enduring body of work in the 20th century. It’s unfortunate that his brilliance was something of an ailment to him: his talent was his sickness. He is quoted with, which amounts to something of a manifesto “The more one works on a picture the more impossible it becomes to finish it.” This workaholic strove relentlessly through sculpture, through painting ,through sketching, through various mediums, to arrive, to as he saw, to no conclusion. The subjectivity of capturing the body ailed him. He labored to perfect his thesis, to defend his strange vision of the human body (which we’ll continue to dive into). I’d compare him to a chemist who in perfecting their formula ultimately drives themself mad. Giacommeti was a mad scientist.
“The more one works on a picture the more impossible it becomes to finish it”
The movie “The Final Portrait” depicts Giacometti’s maddening obsession with capturing the essence of his friend James Lord (Armie Hammer) who sits for Giacometti’s portrait in 1964 Paris. It’s a great movie, a fascinating biographical drama worth the pain to watch. I’ve linked the trailed below for anyone who is curious.
His portraits in the 50’s and early to mid 60’s (displayed on the Alberto Giacometti Database). His fixation on the subjectivity of the face, his surrealist approach to depicting it, and the refined yet seemingly unfinished appearance of his portraits combine to create a captivating experience with his work. One which in the Thyssen was incredible to experience. As evident in the portrait mentioned above, of the women he painted in 1965, he frequently in the 60’s left substantial areas of the canvas blank, demonstrating his unwavering focus on capturing the essence of the face. The face demanded his total concentration. He infused an objective portrayal of the human subject with surreal elements, effectively placing him in a category of his own. The borders of his canvas are often blank and the lower arms and torso are suggested but not substantively painted. Negative space exists on a complete spectrum in his portraits, where there are absolute negative spaces on the exteriors and a progression of less negative space as one works towards the center of the body (most often the tie and neck area). The effect is it pulls our attention towards the face.
His relation to the canvas is perplexing too. How he treats the backgrounds of his portraits is worth examining. You can note how he repeatedly fidgets with shortening then expanding the frame around the subject, so what’s left are many lined frames. Within such lines, normally concentrated around the immediate parts of the body he cares to fill in with muted tones (various tones of grey, mixed with white mustard yellows). Sometimes the entire background is filled. But the incompleteness of his portraits leaves the viewer a little unsettled. Like something reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” that same sort of anxiety lingers especially in his series from the 60’s. His surrealist influence waned as he pursued a more thorough analysis of the human body. His drawings reflect a constant relation of each component of the face (the eyes, nose, lips) to one another. No component exists in separation. This is done by a fast motioned, loose mark-making and this process has no concern with repeating mark makings. The muted palette Giacometti painted in which consisted of grays and blacks created a displeased and solemn emotion. It’s rare to detect any facial emotion which conveys happiness. The lips always remained sealed withholding the face from any exaggerated emotional expressions. No one smiles. They simply stare, devoid of any sense of joy. They abide in this hallowed state of desperation. I wonder if it’s more a reflection of his own inner turmoil and state of despair. It seem so.
What also is compelling about him, is that he loved using a ballpoint pen, which is distinct. Even in the later part of his career, when he achieved such critical acclaim he remained with it, and even refined his ink pen style employing several colors, black, blue, and red (like in the drawing of his brother above). Giacometti could also contrast the page’s background color with a choice of pen color. It was a preferential choice which enabled his marks to be fluid, to be able to transmit the energy of his hand. He appreciated gliding the pen ink across the page’s surface in a free and effortless manner.
Most of his portraits were created using oil paint. Additionally, plaster, bronze and clay were used for his sculptures. Wire, paper, cloth, and wood would be used to develop the sculpture’s structure and frame. In Giacometti’s drawings there are no significant props or other figures depicted. This enables the observer to focus solely on the body being presented: the essential narrative.
At age 21, while enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére in Paris, Giacometti practiced under Antoine Bourdelle who taught Giacometti classical sculpture methods. It was with this unique blend of non-western and classical western styles that Giacometti arrived with aid of his own genius to his particular, now renowned style. While in Paris, he befriended André Breton, a surrealist artist who introduced him to encourage him towards adopting Surrealism. From 1922 to 1935 Giacometti was an active and influential sculptor and voice in the surrealist movement. Despite being expelled from his Surrealist group in February 1935, Surrealist principles continued to serve an important part in his artistic process: fantasy-like vision, collage work, objects with symbolic and metaphorical functions, and distorted treatment of the figure.
The surrealist practice of “automatic drawing,” was a technique Giacometti used throughout his career. This exercise suppressed conscious control over a drawing’s journey, allowing his hand to move freely across the page — and the unconscious mind to instruct the imagery that surfaces. He used this liberating practice in a coordinated manner, which is to say within for example a portrait, his work would consist of moments of incognito is spontaneity supplemented with longer fixed studies of extreme, precise mark making to add structure and balance. Here, Giacometti combined suspended figures and symbolic markings in an effort to translate abstract processes of language into visual form. I remember my college art Professor instructing us to paint with movement, with conviction, with purpose. To feel the brush mark, to make painting an action, literally an extension of the creative thought. The tendency is to kill that expression by over focusing our attention on our hand and not between the connection between our mind and the tip of the pen.
The divorce from the Surrealists resulted from Giacometti’s exploration of the human body: his enduring concern throughout his career’s work. The surrealists were horrified to learn he was drawing from live models. Nonetheless, Giacommeti pressed onward and concerned himself with the issue of head and its relation to the body. In 1935, the presentation of a head, which seemed to others a subject so dull and self-apparent, was, for Giacometti, not even close to being resolved. He emphasized the head’s significance which held the eyes: portals which gave humans their very being and. life, and whose mystery fascinated him.
This procedure extended to his drawings of the head which often depict a long, slim face. The effect makes for a very engaging image as the observer’s view is constricted and forced up and down intently over the figure. In many of his portrait drawings the ball point pen he employs creates thin lines that take abrupt paths in their depiction of the head. The exercise of “automatic drawing” from an unconscious source creates an abstract representation of the head. This fast motion and layers of stroke making creates an energy that captivates the attention observation. The eyes are often the most pronounced featuring containing a concentration of pen marking. The prominent features of course contain the most outline parts, though it varies depending on the subjectivity of what Giacometti chose to portray. The study of that relation, of objective precision while remaining subjectively attune, is what captivates me to him. There’s something more than meets the eye when you see his work, and within that relation I think lies the reason.
In his surrealist phase he explored distorting the body by presenting the body without certain limbs or eliminating the entire body by creating solely the head or limbs suspended in air. He was comfortable leaving the majority of the canvas blank, as if to emphasize what solely concerned him. He didn’t want to waist time during his work on what didn’t matter to him. I’m that sense his work is honest, an honest reflection of what he found the most worthy. To Giacometti, each limb is seen as a component and worthy of its independent study apart from the unified figure. His drawings of the face show a constant effort to reach a fixed position as he compresses a significant amount of pen strokes within the head’s outline. The substance of the head is weighed down by this and fixed into place.
