Alberto Giacometti: Rue des Thermopyles

 

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT THERE IS

LOCATION: 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, Studio

MÉTRO: Pernety

 

As a schoolboy, Giacometti (1901–1966) was admired as a talented artist and brilliant student. He would become, in the words of art critic John Berger, “a most extreme artist,” a contemplative sculptor and painter who believed that “no reality could ever be shared.”

He grew up in a close family in a small village in the alpine valley of Bregaglia in southeastern Switzerland, about twelve miles from the Italian border. From November until February the high mountain walls along the valley cut off all sunlight. Alberto, born in October as the sunless, austere season got underway, had a profound connection with this place and his mother that lasted through both their lifetimes. As a child, his dearest friends were stones (more like boulders), a cave, and trees, the material of his future art. He loved to sit and read and illustrate his storybooks in his painter/father’s studio; he loved the art of Dürer and Rembrandt. At fourteen, returning home from boarding school for vacation, he spent his train money on a book of Rodin reproductions, which meant he had to walk ten miles over the Alps carrying his precious book. At fourteen, he made his first sculpture, of his brother Diego’s head.

Before he finally moved to Paris in 1922 just after his twentieth birthday, he had studied in Geneva, which he disliked, Venice (Women of Venice would be one of his most renowned masterpieces), Florence, and Rome where he fell in love and began to visit brothels. He also developed some themes of his lifework: the universe now became alien, beyond his own self, altogether incomprehensible. Reality is unknowable. His later friend and walking companion, Samuel Beckett, agreed. Some artists, according to Giacometti, achieve a partial view; most stay blind. He was no Cartesian. Seeing is being. “The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him … a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute.”1

On his father’s suggestion that he go to Paris to study with Antoine Bourdelle (Rodin’s former assistant) at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, he worked for five years in Bourdelle’s studio though teacher and student were never simpatico. The evidence of their radically different vision and gifts is on exhibit in Bourdelle’s hard-to-find studio/museum north of the Gare Montparnasse (16, rue Antoine-Bourdelle, www.bourdelle.paris.fr) and in the many museums showing the sculpture and paintings of Giacometti (the Beaubourg, Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and others in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., London, Zürich, Rome, Turin, Venice, Vienna, etc.) Take a tour at www.fondationgiacometti.fr/en/16 discover -the-artwork/. Or google “Images from museums in Paris showing Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture and painting.”

Paris in the era when Giacometti arrived, just after World War I, had become the countercultural center of artistic life in Europe. Dada was the first of the movements formed to overturn traditional canons in visual and literary art, soon replaced by André Breton’s Surrealist movement, which Giacometti joined in 1929 though he would eventually distance himself from Breton.

As his work became recognized in the international art world (France never held a Giacometti exhibition in his lifetime), he insisted, in writing, on what his sculpture did not signify. His essays and articles in the various cultural reviews of Paris, like his letters, are models of clear prose, exceptional intelligence, and powerful persuasion. Though friends with Beckett and Sartre, he argued against the critics’ interpretation of his skeletal figures of men and women as the embodiment of Sartrean existential alienation or Beckettian solitude.

While working I have never thought of the theme of solitude. I have absolutely no intention of being an artist of solitude. Moreover, I must add that as a citizen and a thinking being I believe that all life is the opposite of solitude, for life consists of a fabric of relations with others.…2

He thought the melancholy fixation on existential anguish in the cafés of Saint-Germain (see here), was nothing new. Read the Greek and Latin writers, he said. Since childhood he had been a voracious reader.

Giacometti broke his friendship with Sartre after the revered philosopher lied about a detail of Giacometti’s life in his autobiographical Les Mots, claiming the detail, which was important to Giacometti, was so trivial it did not matter whether it was told truthfully or not.

Truth, more than art, was what Giacometti cared most deeply about: to connect with it he unceasingly revised his paintings and sculpture. In a late interview, quoted by James Lord, he voiced an artistic credo that never changed:

For me, reality remains exactly as virginal and unexplored as the first time anyone tried to represent it. That is, all representations of it made until now have been only partial.…

Art interests me very much, but truth interests me infinitely more. The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.…

For the Traveler

The métro leaves you at rue Raymond Losserand in the tucked-away quartier of Pernety. As you start your search for Giacometti’s studio in the fourteenth arrondissement, everything depends on slowing down, taking it easy, opening yourself to the modesty of this old rural quartier once alive with goats and mules and horses. (Their stables were converted to the artists’ ateliers you see throughout Montparnasse.)

This neighborhood appears so ordinary; many travel guides ignore it. But to borrow the insight of twentieth-century Montparnassiens James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, it’s “the extraordinariness of the ordinary” you need to look for, wherever you are. In the backstreets of the fourteenth, the slower you go the more moments of surprise and pleasure you’ll have. A friend who grew up in Paris and now lives in Queens, New York, told me his favorite street in his hometown is the one you are about to discover on your way to the Montparnasse of Giacometti.

Start at the corner of rue Pernety and rue Raymond Losserand. A block south of this corner, you’ll find rue des Thermopyles, which runs east. It’s scenic and charming like a movie set of a secret Paris though it feels—it is—lived in. (Supposedly the street takes its name from the narrow coastal pass where in the fifth-century BC, 300 Spartans of Greece, led by Leonidas, tried to hold back the Persian army of 150,000. They failed, the army of Sparta was wiped out. The name of the place of battle stands for great patriotic courage against overwhelming odds.) The narrow cobblestone passage is lined with flowering plants; overhead bright-colored posters hang, noting upcoming exhibits and concerts. The passage winds right at the end, passing on the left a sort of artists’ commune, a cluster of low-slung houses, gardens, and ateliers. They face a long rectangle of green across the way.

This is the Square Alberto Giacometti, on the corner of Thermopyles and rue Didot. The plaque at the entrance says that Giacometti’s studio is nearby. Inside the square, through the arbor, the grass is partly covered with people stretched out under a bright sun, reading, sleeping, toddlers playing on blankets and in the flower beds. The plaque gives a few details of Giacometti’s years of living and working in the fourteenth, unsuccessful and, except for the money his mother sent him, almost destitute years, eventually to be followed by an explosion of recognition and praise. (Big money came his way but he gave it away, to friends and family in need, to the prostitutes he loved). The plaque mentions one of his masterpieces, the six-foot-tall bronze man—L’Homme Qui Marche (The Walking Man)—an image of a man at once humble and expressive of the essence and the glory of the human figure. Auctioned in 1961, it won the highest price ever paid for an artwork: $103 million.

One more block to the east, along rue Olivier Noyer, you come to rue Hippolyte-Maindron (named for a nineteenth-century French sculptor) where you turn right (south) for another block to arrive at no. 46 on the southwest corner: the double black doors framing another sign, will admit the public to Giacometti’s studio and living quarters when its restoration is complete in late 2017. Since his death, it has, according to The New York Times, been tied up in the financial and real-estate feuds of the Giacometti family and Foundation.

The low walls surrounding the 15 × 16-foot space of hidden workshops and apartment border a deep garden, like a small forest, dense with tall trees, orange trees, a frantic rush of singing birds overhead. In Giacometti’s time this plain street across from the beginning of rue du Moulin Vert, was lined with shabby small shops, cafés, houses, scraps of garden and farms; the artist and his brother Diego, moved in in 1927 to what Alberto called “just a hole. I planned on moving as soon as I could.” It had neither electricity, heat, or running water. He and Diego stayed for thirty-eight years.

Montparnasse, the area surrounding the intersection of boulevard du Montparnasse and boulevard Raspail, was the hub of that world of experimental artists from many continents and countries who crowded into the quartier and its cafés until the sun came up. In his early years in Paris, before rue Hippolyte-Maindron, Giacometti occupied a series of cheap hotel rooms including a studio on rue Froidevaux (running along the south side of the Montparnasse cemetery), which he preferred as a workplace to master Bourdelle’s studio. In the streets south, east, and west of boulevard du Montparnasse, you can still see tall-windowed artists’ studios in apartment buildings, one of them the residence of Jean Moulin (see here), another a setting in Patrick Modiano’s novella “Afterimage” in Suspended Sentences.

Giacometti knew that the important place for him was the city of Paris. Paris was “the indispensable idea,” the goal in the pursuit of achievement, “the place where the enactment of his destiny could attain the status of a creation in its own right” in the words of James Lord. When, during the German Occupation, he was trapped in Geneva without the necessary visa to return to Paris, he was miserable, longing to return to the place whose energy and tolerance were essential to his nontraditional art and nonconformist soul.

As a Parisian, he had from the beginning put on the mantle of modernism, embracing ambiguity, turning away from academic definitions and representation. Through the decades he lived there, his style changed and changed again, showing the influences of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern art; for ten years he meditated on the aesthetics of failure and experimented with tiny figures of human beings, always obsessed with the image of the human head and its gaze.

He also made many friends in the course of all-night conversations in La Coupole, Le Select, and Le Dôme as well as the cafés of rue Didot and rue d’Alésia, walking until dawn or taxiing through Paris, dressed like a hobo, chain-smoking, eating little, drinking heavily, visiting prostitutes in Le Sphinx, the best-loved brothel in Montparnasse. (His marriage to Annette Arm—Alberto, who had ambivalent feelings toward women, nicknamed her “Sound and Fury”—did not change his nocturnal habits.)

For the second production of Waiting for Godot, his night-owl friend Samuel Beckett asked Giacometti to create a new tree for the set (the tree of the original production had disappointed him). The middle-of-the-night itinerary of the two men whom Paris by that time considered two of its greatest geniuses took them all over Montparnasse (Beckett lived to the west on rue des Favorites). Allée Samuel Beckett is in the southern section in the middle of the sycamore-lined avenue René Coty, a short walk from boulevard Saint-Jacques where Beckett would later have another apartment (no. 38) and his favorite cafés.

The two artists were soul mates to the end. Both cared most deeply about truth, seeing it, shaping it, whether with language, bronze, or paint.

Nearby

RUE PERNETY  Walk east toward Place Flora Tristan, detouring left into the Jardin de la ZAC Didot, a communal preservation with lovely sections of gardens, housing, playground, beds of grass, a school, basketball court, all leading through and around many hidden paths to Place Marcel Paul. This UDE complex—Urbanism and Democracy—has become a local symbol of resistance to demolition and new luxury housing.

PLACE FLORA TRISTAN  A small pretty outdoor terrace-café, filled with locals on weekends, chain-smoking through the afternoons of long shadows from the surrounding trees and high wall of the “Boulangerie.” As told by James Lord in A Giacometti Portrait (about his weeks of sitting for Giacometti who painted his portrait) Giacometti had his lunch in the neighborhood cafés (on rue d’Alésia and rue Didot) most of them now gone. This café, off the beaten track, is a few blocks north of his studio.

RUE DU MOULIN-VERT  It starts across from Giacometti’s studio on Hippolyte-Maindron. Follow this narrow old street east, passing the pretty Hôtel de la Louvre. At the end is Auberge du Moulin Vert, surrounding an old mill and covered in greenery. Open evenings. Bear left and explore the quiet empty streets and gardens behind rue des Plantes: rue Léonidas, named after the leader of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopyles and rue Olivier Noyer.