Giacometti invariably stated in later years that he had arrived in Paris for the first time on New Year’s Day, 1922. In fact, he arrived on January 9. The inaccuracy is intriguing, because at first it seems so pointless.
To arrive for the first time in Paris was a signal event for a young artist in 1922. If his arrival coincided with the first day of a new year, the coincidence would probably have impressed him and might have seemed a good augury. But if he did not arrive on that day, then neither impression nor augury could have existed. By stating that he had arrived on the very first day, he was taking destiny into his own hands, demonstrating his disposition to live with experience in such a way that a mythical imperative can take precedence over mere fact.
Paris in 1922 was the world center of intellectual and artistic ferment. The chaos and devastation of the Great War had spawned movements which were intended to annihilate traditional concepts and practices. Of these, the most forceful was Dada, originated in 1916 in Zurich by the Rumanian poet Tristan Tzara, the sculptor Hans Arp, and others. Dada was based on deliberate irrationality, nihilism, and the systematic denial of all traditional canons of composition, form, and beauty. After the war, Tzara and the movement migrated to Paris, where the young poets André Breton and Louis Aragon and artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia were attracted to it. Its ascendancy was not long-lived, for it came to an end as a movement in 1922, but some of its ideas and many of its adherents found an ampler field for expression two years later when the Surrealist movement was brought into being by André
Breton. Thus, a turmoil of artistic change was sweeping Paris when Alberto arrived there.
The proven masters of the previous generation had no part in it. After the extraordinary adventure of Cubism, Picasso was peacefully installed with a new wife and baby boy in the bourgeois repose of his classical period. Braque was turning out decorative still lifes. Matisse, the most authentically wild of the so-called wild beasts (les fauves) of 1905, had become a tame painter of graceful odalisques on the Riviera. Derain, Vlaminck, Rouault, Utrillo all had left their best work far behind. There was an open challenge for some young man to come along and prove his ingenuity and daring. Plenty were eager to try.
The center of all the creative excitement was Montparnasse, that area of Paris surrounding the intersection of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail. That was where everything interesting and inventive in the arts happened, or seemed to happen. There the young artists lived, studied, and worked. They sat in cafés drinking and arguing till all hours of the morning. And none doubted that Montparnasse was the hub of the universe. Its inhabitants, in any case, came from all over the world. From the Americas, from Asia, Africa, Australia, and every part of Europe.
The rue de la Grande-Chaumière is immediately adjacent to the Raspail-Montparnasse intersection, and it was in that street, at No. 14, that the academy of the same name was located, and still stands today. It was the best-known academy in Paris during the twenties, and its most celebrated teacher was the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle.
Then a man of sixty, Bourdelle had been a pupil of Rodin and for fifteen years his assistant. He conceived of himself as an epic figure, a creator on the scale of Beethoven, whose effigy he produced in more than a score of grandiloquent versions. His work presumed to be on a similar scale, turning for inspiration to archaic Greek sculpture and the rough-hewn carvings of medieval craftsmen. But his exaltation proved to be mediocre and his monumental sculptures are great in size only. It was Bourdelle’s fate to be unaware of the crisis of his epoch, oblivious to the eventualities
inherent in European culture, and blind to the drift of his own career.
The most eminent sculptors of the time were Brancusi, Laurens, Lipchitz, and Maillol. All of them were older than Giacometti, the last having been born exactly forty years before him. All were more gifted than Bourdelle and well known in Paris before Alberto’s arrival.
The Rumanian Constantin Brancusi had come to France in 1904, declined Rodin’s offer of tutelage, and before long had been recognized as a leading abstract sculptor. His work is characterized by extreme simplification of form, which is frequently symbolic, and by a remarkably subtle exploration of the aesthetic potential of sculptural materials.
The early works of Henri Laurens illustrate with authority and refinement the fundamental principles of Cubism. In this style he created sculptures and bas-reliefs, often polychromed, more lyrical and less theoretical than the paintings of Picasso and Braque. In the mid-twenties, however, he returned to the human figure, the female figure almost exclusively. This return liberated unforeseen powers, and he developed a highly personal style, voluptuous, lyrical, and ideally suited to celebrate the mythical fruitfulness of womanhood.
Jacques Lipchitz, Lithuanian by birth, arrived in Paris at the age of eighteen. He soon came under the influence of Cubism, producing with brio and virtuosity a series of works which exemplified the then radical genre. After the First World War he evolved a more original style, but later became preoccupied with allegorical, symbolic themes, the results of which were turgid and bombastic.
The continuity of the classical sculptural tradition after Rodin is seen at its most obvious in the works of Aristide Maillol. His simple, massive figures of women were meant to proclaim a deep affinity with Greek sculpture. The style was idealized but stereotyped, and it produced works of ponderous plenitude.
Both Picasso and Matisse, as it happened, had done important work in sculpture prior to the First World War. However, it
remained for many years nearly unknown. The day would come when Picasso was to be considered the potent progenitor of an entire new tradition in contemporary sculpture, a tradition which repudiated former concepts of the sculptural object and ushered in a new era of aesthetic discourse. But in 1922 that day was still more than a decade in the future.
Giacometti was vigilantly attentive to all the aesthetic happenings of his time. To scientific, political, and social happenings, too. He knew what was going on and he responded to it with such ardor that his life became important to the history of his century, of which it filled the first two-thirds.
All in all, and more or less, Alberto spent five years at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. There he could always work from a live model when he wished, and the presence of other students, some of whom were very skilled, obliged him to look at his own work more objectively and to take careful stock of the evolution of his creative ambitions. But there were many days, even weeks, and sometimes months, when he didn’t go to the academy, preferring to work by himself.
During those early years, Alberto had no fixed residence. He lived here and there in hotels, moving frequently, as if reluctant to establish himself in a manner that might entail a commitment to permanence. Just as he avoided taking anything in life for granted, he avoided situations that could seem to take his presence for granted.
It was among the other students at the academy, naturally enough, that Alberto found his first friends in Paris. Most of them were foreigners like himself. There were a few Frenchmen, to be sure, but they tended to keep to themselves. Alberto was startled by the French reserve. “There’s nothing more difficult than to make contact with Frenchmen,” he said. “It’s like a wall.”
Among those unfriendly French students at the Grande-Chaumière was a young man of twenty-two who may have been even more unsociable and reticent than the others. Perhaps he had cause to be, for he was the youngest son of a painter who even then was world famous. His name was Pierre Matisse. His father had wished to make a musician of him, but he aspired to become a
painter. Though skilled, he was lacking in self-confidence, and the pursuit of an artistic career was abruptly interrupted when in 1923 he impulsively married a headstrong young woman whom he had met while staying with an aunt in Corsica. When the match promptly turned out to be an unhappy one, Henri Matisse, never a man of indulgent family feeling, dourly packed his son off to America and set about haying the union annulled. In New York, Pierre found that he would have to do something about supporting himself, so creative aspirations were set aside to make way for the career of an art dealer, as it must have seemed obvious that in this profession circumstances could help him to make a name for himself. It was an activity, moreover, in which his father had occasionally engaged in order to support his family before Matisses started to sell. As an art dealer, at least, the son did eventually manage to outdo his celebrated parent.
Alberto’s first friends in Paris were Yugoslavian, Swiss, American, and Greek. There was also a group of Italian painters he saw from time to time. They went to the movies together, to concerts, to the Louvre, and sometimes made excursions into the surrounding countryside on Sundays. Full of confidence for the future and elated by the new freedoms which had followed the war, they exuberantly enjoyed their youth and each other. However, like Alberto’s schoolmates at Stampa and Schiers, they sensed from the beginning that their friend was different. He often kept to himself. There was something about him which seemed incommunicable. Perhaps this was in part the extraordinary passion with which he applied himself to his work. All of them were serious, of course; all had great aspirations; but Alberto was driven by a compulsion surpassing mere ambition, and everyone sensed it.
Giacometti’s first three Parisian years were in reality little more than half years, if that, for he was continually making long visits home. Even after he had settled more permanently in Paris, he returned regularly to Stampa, as if there were two Albertos, one who lived abroad and another who never left home. From the latter the Parisian could receive reassurance but for his sake must periodically return to their birthplace. Its rocky soil nourished both. “One has to be born there to understand,” he said. Every aspect of
Bregaglia was essential and indispensable. Above all, Annetta Giacometti. It was her concern and her love that most nurtured and fructified.
Bianca, too, was to be found during the summertime at Maloja. While in boarding school she had not forgotten her cousin, and she thought that her schoolmates might be impressed if she received love letters from a young artist in Paris. So she began to write, never imagining that the one most impressed by the correspondence might be herself. Alberto replied. Letters between them became frequent, and little by little Bianca perceived that she had understood nothing about her unusual cousin.
His letters were beautiful and original. They showed how deeply he cared for life, how compassionately he looked at the world, how vividly he saw all of its features. They were whimsical and carefree on one page, thoughtful and grave on the next. Above all, Alberto was intensely present and alive in each one. Bianca was surprised, and gradually she began to realize that her cousin had touched her heart. By the time she was eighteen, she found herself as deeply in love with Alberto as ever he could have wished during those difficult days when she had so reluctantly posed for him in Rome.
None of the girls Alberto met at the Grande-Chaumière or in the Parisian cafes caused him to forget Bianca. He must have been profoundly satisfied to find her indifference replaced by passion. Though he loved other women after her, he loved her, too, and the romantic emotions he had first felt for the saucy fifteen-year-old girl were never supplanted by apathy.
Of other girls with whom Alberto fell more or less in love during those early years, Alice Hirschfeld was one of the more important. Her parents spent summers in Maloja. She was interested in art. The Giacomettis were cordial to callers. She and Alberto had long, serious conversations. He had been reading Hegel. She was able to appreciate his speculations and enjoy his dialectical turn of mind. Perhaps their parents imagined, or hoped, that the two young people might have intentions as serious as their conversations. But Alberto could not bring himself to make advances. He shied away from commitment. Perhaps he was content
to let his mother see him as the irresolute admirer of a respectable girl. Annetta always considered him very well behaved in this regard.
Alberto never learned to dance. He was often called upon to attend dances, however, especially at Maloja during the summer. Diego and Bruno both danced well, but their elder brother never even tried to learn, as if the activity entailed some relation in which he could not bring himself to participate. Dance is rhythmic movement requiring no precise situation in space. It involves an identification with the abstract realm of acoustics. A lively tune is said literally to carry the dancer away, leading him to move in a way neither determined by nor directed toward any goal. It is not by chance that people dancing often do so with their eyes closed. Optical space is the realm of man’s actions and the framework of his life history.
Alberto’s failure to learn to dance appears significant, because he nonetheless longed to participate in the sensuous experience of acoustical space. Not being lame, he was technically able, but clearly suffered from some inhibition, as he came to terms with his longing in a way peculiarly his own.
The dances held at Maloja and Stampa were communal affairs. Everyone attended. Because Alberto could not dance, however, all he could do was watch. It sometimes happened that when he saw a girl with whom he would have liked to dance, he asked Bruno to dance with her instead, and the younger brother usually obliged. While Bruno danced with the girl of his brother’s choice, Alberto would stand to one side, staring at them, his arms held stiffly at his sides and his fists tightly clenched. Often a single dance was not enough. He would insist that Bruno dance again and again with the same girl while he gazed at them. On one occasion, he even organized a dance in honor of a school friend of Ottilia whom he found attractive, paying all the expenses himself, though he could only watch her dance with others.
From August to October of 1922 Alberto did his military service. Stationed at Herisau in the canton of Appenzell, he took a basic training course in the Alpine Infantry. His penetrating eyesight stood him in good stead and he won a sharpshooter’s stripe.
However, he had too clear a mind and powerful an imagination to participate in anything so spurious as military morale. The warlike simulacrum of maneuvers was particularly demoralizing to one who lived with a constant sense of life’s frailty. To play at killing or being killed was more than his common sense could stand. Reacting impulsively but right in character, he ran away from the make-believe battlefield and hid.