On the 30th of August 1915 there was some excitement at the Evangelical Secondary School in Schiers. It was the start of a new term, and a personage of note and unusual appearance had arrived at the school. It was the painter Giovanni Giacometti, who was finally at the age of forty-seven beginning to receive the attention he deserved. A number of the students as well as members of the faculty had heard of him. They were impressed by his dignified bearing and red beard. He had come to the school to accompany his oldest son, enrolled as a new student.
Alberto was not obliged by his parents to go to boarding school. The idea was that he should give it a try and see what happened. He was not quite fourteen, and he thought that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life.
Schiers is a pretty village standing amid fields in the valley of the Landquart River. The school is its principal establishment and had originally been founded to transform young boys into missionaries, though by 1915 few students were enrolled for that purpose. The prevailing atmosphere was nevertheless religious. There were prayers eight times a day. The director was a serious-minded man with a black beard named Jacob Zimmerli.
Alberto loved the life at Schiers. He seems never for a moment to have been homesick, which is interesting and even, perhaps, a little surprising. Maybe he felt at Schiers for the first time an exhilarating intimation of freedom and the challenge of a world beyond Stampa. Besides, home was only forty-five miles due south across the mountains, though the journey by post coach and train via Saint Moritz and Chur was not easy.
Giovanni and Annetta went quite often to see their son during
the four years he spent at the Evangelical Secondary School. Letters passed regularly back and forth. It was then that Alberto formed the habit of sending home long, lively letters in which he described his feelings, experiences, and activities. He continued to do so as long as his mother lived, for he obviously wished to assure himself of her concern and secure her involvement in most—but not all!—of the important happenings and feelings of his life. The schoolboy received packages of books from his father and food from his mother. In fact, she sent so much food that he sometimes had to tell her to send no more for the moment. He asked, instead, for shoes.
Outside his own home, where he had triumphed by the simple feat of being born, Schiers was the first province offered to Alberto to conquer. He was anxious to do so. He was young, with all the exuberance and expectations of youth. He wanted to receive admiration and to demonstrate that he deserved it. He wanted to enjoy his natural ascendancy over others. He wanted to charm, to fascinate, to dominate. He succeeded superbly, for he was intelligent, intuitive, independent. But the extraordinary sweetness of his nature saved him from seeming aloof or arrogant. Fifty years after his departure from Schiers, his schoolmates remembered him with an emotion enhanced not only by the realization of his greatness, which they had suspected from the first, but also by the fact that he had never asserted it to the detriment of anyone else.
Of all the means by which he rapidly gained the admiration and affection of his schoolmates and masters, it was his pencil, his trusted weapon, that served him best. No one could fail to be impressed by the ease with which he was able to bring people and things to life on a piece of paper, or to be moved by the sincerity and simplicity of his desire to do so. The world seemed to belong to this schoolboy because he found such delight in looking at it and such satisfaction in recording that delight. And it was the delight which counted for him more than the record of it. Then, as always, he was generous. He gave away his work without hesitation to those who liked it and to those whom he liked. The other pupils seem to have taken great pleasure in these gifts from their schoolmate. They competed to be his model, posing patiently in the small
studio which Alberto was permitted to fit out for himself in an unused attic room above the gymnasium. When the portraits were finished, fellow students and even the teachers came to inspect and admire them. Alberto painted, or drew, landscapes and still lifes, too, and even made a few sculptures. All are marked by the simplicity and happiness of those years and by the beautiful felicity with which art and life added to each other. No foreboding, no anxiety, no failure seems to have intruded upon this happy period.
Much as Alberto enjoyed life at school, he looked forward eagerly to vacations. The first vacation came in mid-December of 1915. Traveling by himself for the first time, the fourteen-year-old schoolboy proceeded from Schiers to Chur. There he was to take the train to Saint Moritz, where he would have to spend the night in a pension before going down the next morning by the post sleigh to Stampa. Finding that there would be a considerable wait in Chur, Alberto took a stroll in the town. He came to a bookstore and went in. A large volume of reproductions of the work of Rodin caught his attention.
Auguste Rodin was then still living and universally regarded as one of the titanic figures in the history of art, the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo. The book was expensive and Alberto had with him only enough money to get home. He didn’t hesitate. He bought the book and returned to the railway station. Fortunately, he already had his ticket to Saint Moritz. But when he arrived there late in the evening, he had no money left for the pension. The last post sleigh had departed. He set out on foot in the dark, carrying his book and a bundle of clothes.
At midnight in mid-December in the Alps at five thousand feet it is cold. The road was deserted. It was ten miles to Maloja, where his mother’s house stood dark. Alberto trudged on to the pass and started down in the icy blackness. Several times he slipped and fell. His book slid off into the snow and he had to hunt for it. Arriving in Stampa at five o’clock in the morning, he was half frozen but hugged the precious volume. One can imagine with what care the impetuous lad must have been taken in, warmed up, and fed. But perhaps parental afterthoughts may have included some wonder concerning the future of a son who was prepared to
subject himself to such an ordeal for the sake of a book about sculpture, albeit the work of the greatest sculptor living.
In 1916, no doubt during a vacation from Schiers, Alberto for the first time modeled a bust of his mother. It is strikingly unlike the one he had previously made of Diego. The act of the artist had formerly been subordinate to the presence of the model. No longer. It is the artist now, and he alone, who imparts life to the work of art. This evolution is evident in the use of the sculptural material, the texture of the surface, which in its strong but sensitive modeling resembles certain works of Rodin.
It is interesting that the sculpture in which Giacometti first seems to have asserted his dominance as a creative individual should have been a portrait of his mother. Just as the artist has come nearer to us, however, the model is placed at a distance, as if Alberto were not prepared or able to approach her any more closely than he allows us to. He has determined not only how we shall see the individual but also our relation to her in space. The early bust of Diego shows the child present at the very surface of the sculpture, but Annetta Giacometti in person is situated beyond the bronze integument of her effigy, and the ambiguous expression which Alberto has given to her eyes seems to imply that there may never be a way for anyone to cross that frontier.
Alberto as a boy, and even as a young man, apparently did not feel impelled to portray his father, though he made portraits of every other member of his family, not to mention friends and acquaintances. The first known portraits of the father by his son date from 1927, when Alberto had already spent five years in Paris and was on the verge of achieving his first successes there.