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.”
That’s how Alberto Giacometti summed it up, as told by James Lord in Giacometti: A Biography, published in 1997. He was captive to his own genius, which transformed his studio into an isolating laboratory where he constantly was perfecting the formula of his artistic vision and expression. In the midst of this creative fervor, something which resembled 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 tragedy seeps into his artwork. His prolific and succesful career did not bring the joy one would expect it to. By the end of his life, the colors on his palete had gone mute, resticted to a despairing range of black, grey, and tans. Welcome to the enigma that is the Giacometti.
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 Alberto Giacometti. 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 and that is considered one of the most prolific sculptors of his time. His paintings, however, as we were observing, are incredibly unique in their abstraction and sense of rugged desolation, they cry longingly and desperatley, there’s a tense pessimism very palpable through the piece. The woman in the painting gazed into me, gazed through me. She was portrayed, better rendered in his unrefined and raw style, characteristic to the style he adopted in the 60s. The frowning looks he captures and the pronounced bags under her eyes, convey a tangible sense of unease. You contrast these nervous portraits with the beautiful environment of the Thyssen and your left with well your eyes just keep returning to his section. Here’s some photos of the rest of the gallery for the image.
John had moved on, and I remained captivated. I caught up with John after what must have been at least five minutes appreciating just a sample of his brilliance. What I attempt to do now is analyse him in context of art history and appreciate a bit more his artistic brilliance and contribution.
Despite my continued study, he remains an enigma, challenging to fully comprehend, as there are few artists to compare him to. I am a self confessed Giacometti enthusiast. There, I said it. Alongside other visual artists of the same era which I enjoy like Picasso, Philip Guston, and Basquiat, he stands out.
Giacometti’s artistic journey was defined by a maddening pursuit of capturing the subjective issue of the human body. The landscape is another principal theme Giacometti regularly treated throughout his life, but he placed greater emphasis on mastering the form of the human body. 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.” The human body was the picture he was most concerned with, specifically the human form. This workaholic strove relentlessly through sculpture through painting through sketkcing, thruogh various mediums, to arrive, to as he saw, no conclusion. 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 ultimatley 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. 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, which is Giacometti’s primary concern.
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 (greys of various tones, 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. Rare is it to find a facial emotion which conveys happiness. The lips always remained sealed withholding the face from any exaggerated emotional expressions.
What also is compelling about him, is that he loved using a ballpoint pe, which is distinct. Even in the later part of his career, when he achieved such critical acclaim he remained, and even refined his ink pen style. It was a preferential choice which enabled his marks to be fluid, to be able to transmit the energy of his hand. I remeber my Professor Leslie Schomp she instructed 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. Gicometti called this process “automatic drawing” which I will return to later in this blog to explain .
In my class I took at Holy Cross my freshmen year called “Drawing the Body” I studied his works. Taught by, as I already mentioned, Professor and artist Leslie Schomp we were impressed upon to loosen up how we drew and painted. By studying Giacommeti, well you can feel through these works how free his wrist was, it was like his wrist and his hand never impeded what creative image surfaced in his mind (they were directly translated through his arm by that utensil to the canvas). I even drew in his style, appropriating elements within my own way. You learn a lot from Giacommeti. There’s a economy of line making evident in the various faces
There’s an energy to them which is palpable. The faces are like a maze unto themselves and his markmakings wrap and bend to create the image of the face. His genius is fascinating to study.
Now for a little history of Giacometti. His life spans the 20th century. In 1901, Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland to a prominent artistic family. As a young boy he began surveying various art mediums and would copy images and artworks from books. In 1913 at the age of twelve he began oil painting in his father’s studio. The following year Giacometti began creating plaster sculptures of the heads of his younger brothers.
During the fall of 1919 through the summer 1920 Giacometti travelled to Florence and Rome, where he encountered the extensive collection of African and Oriental artwork, primarily from Ancient Egypt . The emblematic and stylized, yet riveting, figures with their fixed expressions and elongated silhouettes from Egyptian and African art pieces proved to have a lasting impact on his art. Inspired from these non-Western art traditions, Giacometti experimented with elongating parts of the body and this deviation from standard proportions would add great drama to his sculptures. At age 21 he left for Paris to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére, 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. A style which immediately captivated my attention when I laid eyes on his portrait and sculpture today.
But to continue, while enrolled at the Académie Giacometti 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. The results he achieved are increíble.
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.
Many of Giacometti’s sculptures of the human body were tall and skinny with exaggerated proportions, especially the legs. As can be seen in those arrangement of sculptures above.
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.
And to return to the pen again, Giacometti of course loved using a ballpoint pen with ink typically in the colors of black, blue, and red. This pen gave him an ability to freely glide the ink across the page’s surface and allowed him to employ “automatic drawing” quite freely and effortlessly. Giacometti could also contrast the page’s background color with a choice of pen color. Most portraits he made were done in 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.
