This is precisely what happened to Giacometti around 1935. At that time he was alternating between sculpture objects with poetic overtones, which leaped fully equipped from his imagination, and flawless plastic constructions whose success, in his eyes, was confined to the merely aesthetic level. The desire to realize compositions with figures prompted him to make several studies from nature. He hired a model for two weeks: The model came to pose every day for five years. “Nothing was as I imagined it,” he wrote later on. “A head—I dropped the figure quite soon; it was too much—became for me a totally unknown object without dimensions. Twice a year I would begin two heads, always the same ones, without finishing them, and I put my studies aside.”
Once again he had come up against this impossibility of sculpting a head which had made him give up representation in 1925, but this time he was to persist, to force himself with furious stubbornness up a path which seemed to him without a goal but also without an alternative.
This human head of incredible density is not a sum of parts or details, nor their more or less complex organization: It is the manifestation of a whole, indivisible and unanalyzable, which emerges out of the emptiness and night like a fantastic apparition. Giacometti sees it loom for the first time—at each moment for the first time—at that impassable distance which it maintains in order to be and to appear. In his attempt to represent this new head, the unknown quantity that is every head, neither his artistic culture (so many copies made in so many museums) nor his mastery of his own means of expression, nor his practiced sensibility is enough. The purified vision which reveals it demands that the sculptor discover new means and new instruments, that he reinvent them at each moment. That he abandon the hand of former days, the obsolete tool, so as to learn everything all over again, and to approach, correct, prune, destroy, and begin again without respite. Without hope. In order to fix reality as he finally sees it, in its emerging and its brutal withdrawal, all the sculptor can do, paradoxically, is to imprison it in the close-knit mesh of a lived period of time, and to approach it gradually in an alarming and exhausting series of advances and retreats, with the painful knowledge that his work is only an attempt and the finished work only an approximation.
After five years of failures with the model, Giacometti attempted on the eve of the war to do heads from memory. Each time, without his intervening, they became curiously pointed. Then he reacted against this irritating deformation and fell into another trap. His sculptures, heads and figures, grew smaller and smaller. “They were only ‘like’ when they were small,” he writes,
And yet their dimensions repelled me, and I would begin untiringly all over again, only to arrive after several months at the same place. A large figure was false for me, but a small one intolerable all the same, and then they became so tiny that they often disappeared into dust with a final stroke of the penknife.
From 1942 and the years which followed in Geneva, Giacometti saved only a small number of these tiny figurines, most of which fitted easily into a matchbox. Once back in Paris, he succeeded in realizing larger sculptures, but he could not avoid new deformations: extreme elongation of the figures, threadlike thinness of the bodies and limbs, reduction and flattening of the head, voluminous development of the feet. What happened between the real person and his depiction, since in no case did Giacometti yield to an expressionistic intent, and since he was seeking only the pure equivalence of the work to his vision of the subject? Giacometti elongates his figures and flattens his heads, without ceasing to copy the model, because it is the only means of which he disposes, at a given moment of his experience, to render what he sees, to make a likeness. The characteristics of his work which seem to remove it from realism are merely manifestations of a superior realism, at once broader and more precise, which no longer has as objects man or the world as they are, but as Giacometti’s eye sees them. “Man” of the realists, that abstraction, that mental reconstruction, has given way to the other, to the encountered, near, and inaccessible being, who has depths within him and the void outside and around him, without which he would not be alive for us.
6
Face to face with his sculpture, we are scarcely freer than Giacometti in front of his model. For it carries its distance within it and keeps us at a respectful distance. And our relationship re-creates the strictly evaluated space so that its totality, and that alone, may appear. This figure does not allow us to rest our eyes on one or another of its parts; each detail refers us back at once to the whole. It does not develop a rhythm which would gradually conduct us toward an encounter. It does not reveal itself as a series of plastic events leading to a harmony, a chord. It bursts forth in its immediate presence: It is an advent.
If we run the risk of defying the interdict, of crossing the prescribed distance, that is, if we linger over a detail, if we look at the sculpture as a sum of parts, we see it literally disintegrate before our eyes. The human portrayal gives way to that of a monstrous being, a tracked monster, inert as though pinned down between two moments of agony. A monster which has just emerged recently out of a volcano, still dripping and sticky with warm lava. This body which was that of a man or a woman is now nothing but a deformed or clenched mass, swollen and horribly distended. We are witnessing its torture and its disintegration. We slide after it into an infrahuman region. We participate in the dislocation of the human edifice through the upheaval, the insurrection of the very substance of which it is made. We are implicated in this ultimate disintegration. If this flesh is still alive, it has nonetheless been riddled, lacerated, plowed like a field and sown with plague sores. Already it is nothing but the convulsions of disorganized matter in search of a form, the petrified tumult of chaos, that chaos from which the creature came and to which it returns, and to which we would not dare to admit that man is so close.
Let us back up a few paces and once again seize the figure in its totality. The vision of chaos becomes blurred. The fury of matter subsides. The forms organize themselves, become precise, justify one another reciprocally. The mortal collisions between light and shadow are submitted to the laws of a ritual struggle, a strict dance. The volumes become ordered and equilibrated. A tolerant space develops around the figure, who comes to life again under our eyes. If the recaptured form contradicts the formless substance from which it issues and from which it is molded, it still keeps the stigmata of its terrible birth.
The figures keep us at a distance; they carry their remoteness inside them and reveal their profound being. Naked, unmasked, it is now their unknown doubles who come to light. Their hieratic attitude reveals an imperious insensitivity. They elude our understanding, reject our impulsive gestures. They do not distain us; they ignore us and dominate us. One would think them fastened on their pedestals for eternity, rooted to their rock. The gravity of their bearing, the asceticism of their demeanor, and their gaze which traverses time and traverses us too without flinching, without suspecting our opacity and our stupefaction, gives them the appearance of divinities. They seem to await a primitive cult. Disposed in groups in a gallery or a studio, gathered in clusters in Square, on a single pedestal, they form an assembly of sacred figures whose distance accentuates their enigmatic likeness and their obsessive questioning. One feels them at grips with a truth which consumes them and makes them spring up out of their pedestals, a truth hardly more terrible than death, perhaps the presentiment of impossible death … Giacometti would like to enclose his figures this way between rigorous, but intangible and moving, boundaries, beyond which they could not stray without returning to the chaos from which they issued or be condemned to the torturing lucidity of the gods, to that annulment in a sacred space which gives them the rigidity but not the peace of death.
7
Drawing is for Giacometti another breathing. In order to model or paint one must have earth, canvas, colors. Drawing is possible anywhere, at any time, and Giacometti draws anywhere, at any time. He draws to see and can see nothing without drawing, mentally at any rate: Eac
h thing seen is drawn within him. The drawing eye of Giacometti knows no rest, no fatigue. Nor does our eye, as it contemplates his drawings, have the right to rest. It is forbidden to linger over a detail, a form, an empty space. A strange, perpetual motion, without which it would lose sight of the subject, draws it on. This optical phenomenon results from the very nature of Giacometti’s drawing, from its mobility which is the product of the repetition and discontinuity of the line. The form is never immobilized by an outline or held within isolated and sure strokes. It is not detached from the background or separated by a reassuring boundary from the space which surrounds it. It issues from a multitude of overlapping lines which correct and weight down each other, and abolish one another as lines as they increase. Thus the line is never continuous but broken, interrupted, open at every moment on the void but revoking it at once by its renewals, its unforeseen returns. This results in an imprecision of detail and an intentional indefiniteness which repel the eye at each impact, as though by a miniature electric shock, sending it from one detail to the next, and from each to the totality which they produce as they disappear. These goings and comings, this dancing race of our eye, gives us the subject to see at a distance, as Giacometti sees it, in its impassible space, across the ambient void which disturbs and inflects its image.
We may note how much this highly personal manner of drawing is basically calculated on the movement of the eye in normal perception. The eye does not isolate several lines of an object to the detriment of the others; it is incapable of following an outline or dwelling too long on a detail to the exclusion of what surrounds it. All these operations are mental. The eye comes and goes rapidly, moves restlessly from one point to another and from a part to the whole. In its leaping course and its thousand capricious turnings it comes back constantly to the same object but each time in a way that is slightly different. The eye has until now scarcely found a more formidable rival in the speed of its travels than Giacometti’s line.
In the majority of his drawings a multiplicity of horizontals and verticals seem to search out a certain space; they define it less than they evoke it—and invoke it—by their insistence and their indecision. This space has the peculiarity of being both immense and enclosed. Thus the modest dimensions of his studio always seem vaster in the drawings. Whatever the place is, it gives us a feeling of confinement, of seclusion, but in immensity. One cannot escape it; at most one is in danger of getting lost or dissolving in it. We are prisoners but the cell is as vast and mysterious as a palace or a temple. This space, which seems to illustrate the title of Irénée Philalèthe’s work Open Entry to the Closed Palace of the King, proceeds no doubt from extremely precise proportions, from a particular density of emptiness, from a certain vibration of light which is very easily obtained and very easily compromised. For Giacometti there is no question of a formula to be discovered and applied, there is only a pursuit which he must experience intensely and render visible. And the coordinates he traces, separately imprecise, constitute together the surest approach to that privileged space, charged with a secret power.
In contrast with this scheme of straight, slanting lines, the figures and heads are obtained by dense curved lines, fluid and nervous, a mesh of lines which appear subject to a circular, or more precisely, centripetal force. If the drawn form is not marked off from what it is not by an outline or any other intangible frontier, it still has to affirm and define itself. It succeeds in this by expressing an internal cohesion, an energy folding upon itself, a kind of gravitation which the network of interrupted lines reveals. In its rapid whorls the drawing carves out depth, or rather breathes it in, opens itself to it, and renders it active between the strokes. It is as though a force issuing from within beings or things gushes out like a fluid through the interstices of the drawing and the porousness of the forms. And the lines must reveal this force, that is, both contain it and provoke its escape. This is the reason for their discontinuity. The interruptions and accumulations of line are never felt as superfluous repetitions and incongruous stops since they are the equivalent of the eye’s mobility. On the contrary they contribute to give the objects this trembling, this feeling of truth and life. Thus it may happen that a figure may lack part of his body, and yet one sees him in his entirety. It may happen also that he is made of lines so vague, so far in appearance from the human form that he seems almost a wager or a tour de force: and yet he lives. One cannot examine him, but his living presence imposes itself with force. In extreme cases, as in certain drawings and a well-known poster, Giacometti is attracted by the vertigo of the white page, that is, of limitless space. But one must still draw, for the virgin sheet of paper is nothing—neither white, nor void, nor space. We can experience the white page, the absolute void, only when the drawing is still sufficiently sure, sufficiently present to give us intimations of its imminent suppression.
What Giacometti’s drawing gives us, it gives us in a way that is both imponderable and intense. For his line is at the same time light and incisive. He grazes the paper and tears space open. He lets vacancy invade the form through innumerable fissures and simultaneously drives it off with the promptness of his repeated interventions, like a sudden swipe of claws. The purposeful indefiniteness which results isolates the objects and figures, expresses my separation from them, leaves them free, that is, in a position to choose among various possibilities. When Matisse draws a leaf with his lively and supple line, he also fixes it in a single one of its appearances and thus immobilizes it tyrannically for eternity. Giacometti cannot or does not care to gather such an image and immolate it according to his whims. As he multiplies its possibilities of seeming, he leaves the object its uncertain development, its anxious mobility. He does not draw up a single course but opens a multitude of paths among which the object can choose, or at least seem to hesitate continually, drawing from its indecision its quivering autonomy and the trembling of a separate life.
Isn’t this multiplying of lines nothing more nor less than the refusal to allot significance and certainty to a single one? Here we come again upon contention as a creative principle. To trace a second line is to call the first into question without erasing it, to formulate a regret, to repent and correct, to start a debate, a quarrel between them which a third line will come to arbitrate and revive. From dispute to dispute, all certitude is withdrawn from the form which can only appear in an interrogative mode. Doubtless we still see this landscape, this bouquet of flowers, this head, but they will not let themselves be seized. They manifest themselves only by moving away, which prompts us to call to them, to question them. Once we have discovered them we must still constantly ask them: “Are you there?” For them, being means to be questioned, invoked, to be the object of our desires. Giacometti does not hand over the world for our embrace, our consummation, but to our desire which is still kept in suspense, to our thirst for the impossible.
And for him, a successive, line-by-line contestation of his drawing is the only way of placing himself in the world without betraying the truth of the excisions and the solitude which his lucidity shows him. Loneliness and the urge to have done with it, the wound and the prostration followed by a new hurtling against the wall—this is also the way we ourselves enter and do not enter the space of communication that Giacometti partially opens for us and from which he is excluded.
8
Except for a few paintings done in Stampa, Giacometti abandoned the model and even all realistic figuration during a ten-year period from about 1925 to 1935, in order to interpret the human figure freely, to make abstract constructions and above all to compose sculpture objects with symbolic or erotic content. And yet at no moment did he deliberately renounce his desire to represent reality: It was reality which abandoned him. In Bourdelle’s studio or at the Grande Chaumière, he would vainly strive to copy a figure or a head from a model. If he starts with a detail he cannot succeed in a synthesis of the whole. And how can he render the whole without passing through the parts of which it is made? So he
tries to take up the same subjects from memory. This results in the flat sculptures of 1926–28, which, satisfying as they are from the plastic point of view, only allude to a real head or figure. He tries again to model a bust, to paint a portrait. Reality eludes and rejects him. After a final unsuccessful attempt at self-portrait, Giacometti learned a lesson from his failures and turned from reality.
This wholly provisory decision was nonetheless the sign of a soul-searching whose consequences were to prove incalculable. Giacometti had just experienced not only the divorce between classical representation and real perception, but also the absolute impossibility of a total realism. A partial image of reality is false, a total expression humanly impossible. From this observation one can deduce two diametrically opposed alternatives: to cast one’s lot with this impossibility, turn one’s back on reality and substitute the imaginary as a field of experience (this is what Giacometti, out of spite, was to do for ten years); the other, which he will later adopt definitively, is an absurd and heroic obstinacy in the pursuit of unseizable reality.
The flat sculptures of 1926–28 are the first consequences of his abandoning of the model. These heads and figures which have the aspect of thin, smooth plates touch us through the rightness and the sensitivity of their forms and their proportions, but their very perfection betrays their limitations. And yet they are not the result of a preconceived idea, but of an involuntary deformation, of an organic metamorphosis. Starting with a head or a figure as they appeared to him at the time of his fruitless exercises at the Grande Chaumière, the sculptor sees the structure become flat in his hands, the details disappear, the surface become smooth. The thinning of the volume shows the temptation to abolish the third dimension as much as possible; Giacometti goes as far in this direction as the resistance of his material allows. The thickness of the plates is thus determined by technical and tectonic reasons. A transposition without hitches but also without surprises. The flat head gives the totality of a head, simplified to the extreme by total perception, stripped to its essentials and made thin so as to give the impression of bursting forth, of a sudden presence. The extreme stylization results however in changing the head into an idea of a head, into a beautiful object. Paradoxically it is the allusions to the details of a figure, added by incising or lightly hollowing the surface, which identify the head and convey the meaning of the whole.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 38
