At the Grande-Chaumière, old friends began to drift apart. Carefree student days were coming to an end. Bourdelle had started to suffer from the heart attacks which in 1929 killed him. Studio jokes and happy-go-lucky dreams of fame gave way to knowledge that the world didn’t care two straws for an artist until he was successful or—even better—dead.
The discoveries and great works of Cubism had all been made before Alberto’s arrival in Paris. But no young artist anxious to make his mark during the twenties could afford to disregard the Cubist revolution, for it seemed to have destroyed the age-old concept of a work of art as a creation which embodied a meaningful human statement separate from its material existence. To be sure, the inventors of Cubism presumed to represent fragmented aspects of observable reality. However, their ultimate aim was not to depict reality but to create works of art. Their aesthetic principles generated an art of pure form, and they brashly attributed its paternity to Paul Cézanne, who would have recognized little of himself in such contrary offspring. Though most of the Cubists eventually turned away from the rigid strictures of their system, it remained an imposing influence, one to be reckoned with.
Giacometti felt compelled to test his sculptural power in Cubist terms. In 1926 and 1927, he produced a number of essentially abstract sculptures in the Cubist style, entitled Composition or Construction, though he was unwilling to acknowledge a complete abandonment of representation and gave the pieces subtitles such as Man, Woman and Personages. There are certain stylized elements which recall features of human anatomy, but they are
subordinated to the plastic imperative of the sculpture as a whole. Although these constructions are the work of a highly talented young man, it would be a mistake to see them merely as brilliant exercises in a style which was not fundamentally congenial. Alberto had something to learn—about sculpture and about himself—from Cubism; its history was enriched because he approached the lesson with enthusiasm and candor.
About sculpture he learned from Cubism that he could solve the formal plastic problem of creating an essentially abstract three-dimensional object of self-sustaining variety and interest. About himself he learned that the solution of such problems could not provide him with the kind of fulfillment he sought. As he was often to say in years to come, what interested him was not art but truth. Still, one regrets that he produced only ten or twelve Cubist constructions, for they possess a bluff beauty unlike any other works in Giacometti’s production. The juxtapositions of convex and concave, of angle and line, of inert mass and animated space are so tensile and inventive that they leave no question as to Alberto’s mastery of the Cubist idiom. It was not an original mode of expression, but with vigor and sincerity he made something personal of it.
Henri Laurens and Jacques Lipchitz were the two most visible influences on the young Giacometti. Both were older and both disposed, though in different ways, to foster the talents of younger artists.
Lipchitz was a vain self-seeker, gratified when beginners turned to him for guidance, which he gave in generous measure so long as no one, and especially the general public, took the work of the beginner too seriously. Giacometti knew him in the mid-twenties and visited his studio occasionally. The Cubist constructions of 1925 and 1927 frankly show his influence, though they are more straightforward and virile. Unfortunately, cordial relations between the two men did not survive the first promises of success for Alberto; and the greater fame in later years of the younger artist unhappily prompted the older to spiteful belittlement.
Henri Laurens, on the other hand, was a man of exquisite
modesty and creative integrity. He never sought to overawe younger artists and welcomed them with friendly interest to his studio. His candor and artistic rectitude were as inspiring to others as the subtle luxuriance and vigor of his sculptures. From the beginning of their acquaintance, Alberto admired both the man and his work without reserve, and never afterward found any reason to alter his high opinion of either. He expressed it not only in direct contact with Laurens and others but also in an essay of appreciation and praise published in 1945. The actual artistic influence of Laurens upon his admirer and friend appears to have been more spiritual than sculptural. A few of Alberto’s Cubist works reflect some of the elegance and rhythm of Laurens’s early style, but the curvilinear abundance of form so characteristic of his maturity is completely absent from Giacometti’s sculpture. Unalike in their work, the two men were very similar in their uncompromising humility and their determination to work solely as they saw fit, however contrary that might be—and was—to the prevailing mode of the time.
Giacometti’s studio in the rue Froidevaux was never completely satisfactory. The ceiling was too low, the light no more than adequate. But Alberto waited two years before deciding to look for another place. In those days, studios were easy to find. In the spring of 1927, a Swiss friend told him that something was available at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron. He went to see it. His first impression was that it was tiny. However, he decided on the spot to take it, and one warm afternoon in April the two brothers loaded onto a handcart their belongings and such early sculptures as Alberto wished to preserve. The move was not a long one, as the distance from one studio to the other is barely a thousand yards.
The rue Hippolyte-Maindron, ironically enough, is named after a nineteenth-century sculptor whose posthumous reputation has not justified the confidence of those who thought to celebrate his achievement by giving his name to a public place. As a thoroughfare, its most distinctive feature has always been its anonymity and insignificance. Running from north to south between the rue Maurice-Ripoche and the rue d’Alésia, it is only four hundred
yards long and does not provide an important means of access from one point to another. Fifty years ago it was lined with shabby, low buildings, small cafes and shops, a lumberyard, and a few of those nondescript little houses with a scrap of garden which the French call pavilions.
On a sizable plot at the southwest corner of the rue Hippolyte-Maindron and the rue du Moulin-Vert stands the jerry-built hodgepodge of studios and flimsy dwellings to which Alberto and Diego came on that spring day. It had been thrown together about 1910 by a single workman, a Monsieur Machin, using junk materials salvaged at little cost from the demolition of sturdier structures. The haphazard conditions of its origin made the ensemble look more like a number of separate buildings than like a single one—some parts of it being one story in height, others two, and yet others three—and together they gave the impression that only the presence of each unit next to its neighbor prevented the collapse of all. An open passageway provided access to the various studios and apartments. One corner of the property was occupied by a small garden, in which stood a couple of trees. All in all, the place had a certain derelict charm. It had nothing, however, of what might be called modern comfort, neither electricity nor running water nor central heating nor plumbing of any kind. Halfway along the open passageway was an outside faucet and adjacent to it a primitive toilet, its flimsy door open a foot at both top and bottom. All other amenities were to be provided at their own expense by the tenants. The best that most of them could manage was a small coal stove for heat and a gas jet for light. The fire hazard was of course flagrant, but poor artists were perhaps not supposed to worry about such contingencies.
Alberto’s studio was the first to the left in the open passageway. His impression of its smallness was accurate enough, for it was appreciably less spacious than the other two he had occupied, measuring only about sixteen feet square. The ceiling was good and high, however, although at the back there was a narrow wooden balcony reached by a steep flight of stairs. A large window onto the passageway faced north, with a skylight above. Artificial illumination was provided at first by a gas jet, and there was never
any other heating facility than an iron stove for coal. The furnishings were minimal, because there was no room for anything more than a bed, a table, a cupboard, a chair or two, and the necessary sculpture stands and easels.
An obscure, prosaic, shabby little place. No effort was made to improve its appearance during the next thirty-eight years. Alberto, of course, did not expect to remain there for the rest of his life. “I planned on moving as soon as I could,” he said, “because it was too small—just a hole.” During the thirties he and Diego occasionally looked at other places, but no change was seriously considered. In time, Alberto came to feel that it was quite spacious enough. “The longer I stayed,” he said, “the larger it grew.”
Life in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron was never comfortable. At first, it was frankly austere. Diego slept on the balcony at the rear of the studio, Alberto in the corner directly below. Winter and summer, they washed at the faucet in the open passageway. They took their meals in the cheap restaurants of the neighborhood or in Montparnasse, which was only a twenty-minute walk away. Later, when they had begun to earn a little money, Alberto often slept at an inexpensive hotel nearby named the Primavera. No such luxuries were ever indulged in by Diego.
The move to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron coincided with an important change in Alberto’s work. In the new studio, he began to develop a sculptural style owing nothing to anyone else. In 1926, he had accepted a commission to sculpt the portrait of a Swiss collector and dilettante named Joseph Müller, producing a straightforward, vigorous sculpture and excellent likeness. The following year, Alberto executed another. Though personality traits are still apparent, the portrait is close to caricature, for the artist was now endeavoring to make an object which would offer to the beholder an artistic equivalent of visual experience. The second portrait of Miiller is disproportionately flattened and asymmetrical. The features are only slightly in relief but emphasized by incising of the plaster. Not at all lifelike, still this sculpture is astonishingly alive. Art takes candid precedence over nature, yet conveys a powerful sense of a human individual.
Alberto executed another of these “flat” portraits using his
mother as the model. It also combines extraordinary vivacity with deeply felt veracity in a form which does not try to reproduce naturalistic appearances. Evidently the execution of this portrait —in a style now altogether his own—caused the young artist no difficulty. He never again had any trouble portraying his mother.
It was in a surprising series of portraits of his father that Alberto most forcefully pursued this new path. Oddly enough, these are the first portraits the son had ever executed of the father. The first is a highly skilled academic likeness, suggesting an effort by the artist to please, if not to flatter, his model. The effort failed, for it offers only an appearance, not the conviction of life. It was followed, however, by others, which grew gradually more distorted and abstract until all resemblance to Giovanni had vanished and there remained but the work of art itself. The front of the head became flatter and flatter. In one version it is a completely flat plane on which the recognizable but distorted features of the model are carelessly scratched—almost as an afterthought—and are, in any case, irrelevant to the validity of the sculptural object. A version in white marble is so close to abstraction that it is identifiable only because the roughly triangular shape of the face is similar to the completely “flat” portrait. Finally, there is a small sculpture which is in fact but a mask, and which presents the father’s features in a violent, almost brutal caricature.
With this series of works, Giacometti evolved radically and in a very personal manner away from the traditional means of representing a human head: he separated the face from the physical form upon which it is, so to speak, superimposed. By a slow, difficult evolution, the “flat” portraits led in 1928 to a number of sculptures which are essentially thin, rectangular plaques with very subtle, non-figurative shapes engraved upon their frontal surfaces. A plastic image had now completely taken the place of straightforward representation: “I was working in an effort to reconstitute solely from memory what I had felt in the presence of the model.” And yet the representational imperative was not repudiated. On the contrary, these plaques constituted Giacometti’s first formal effort to bring new vitality and meaning to a sculptural
tradition which had begun with the Greeks and led to Rodin. But this tradition insisted that a sculpted head or figure must have the same physical configurations as a living figure or head. Giacometti, however, knew that sculpture need not be lifelike in order to generate a sense of life. The flat, slender forms of the Cycladic idols, vibrant with verisimilitude, had shown him that. The lesson of Cézanne had taught him that only absolute fidelity to psychic and visual experience, however surprising or unpredictable, can mark an artistic work with integrity. Moreover, he was beginning to learn that an artist can discover through arduous practice how to be true in creative terms to his deepest feelings without openly indulging them.
At this juncture, Giovanni told Alberto that the time had come for him to test himself as an artist. It was doubtless not meant as an ultimatum, but in effect the father was bidding his son to take a step which would influence the subsequent course of his life. Alberto was being asked not only to prove himself as an artist but to stand on his own feet as a man, respond to the challenge of Paris, and prove his powers.
At first, he hesitated. “I did not want to play the part of an artist or have a career,” he explained later. “I had the position of a young man who’s taking a chance on a few experiments, that’s all, just to see. As long as my father supported me, I had no idea of playing the part of a professional artist.” But now he had been admonished to take a step. To be sure, the thin plaques were a faithful expression of visual experience and an honest embodiment of deep feelings. But to the artist they were not satisfying demonstrations either of his ability or of his ambition.
“It was always disappointing,” he said in reference to those works, “to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.” However, Alberto did long to win the admiration, approval, and affection of others. Therefore, he determined to exhibit two of his plaques, a Head and a Figure.
On several occasions he had exhibited his work in group shows with Italian friends, of whom the most noted were Campigli and Severini. The former, as it happened, was just preparing to show recent works at the Jeanne Bucher Gallery when in June
of 1929 Alberto decided to exhibit his plaques. The gallery was well known. Madame Bucher had earned a reputation as a dealer of farsighted discernment. Her approval was a mark of prestige for a young artist. If she agreed, as she did, to exhibit along with Campigli’s paintings the two sculptures by his friend Giacometti, it must have been because she saw the originality of his work and realized that it gave promise of finer things to come. At his father’s behest he had taken a fateful step.
Within a week, she had sold the two sculptures Giacometti left with her. She offered to handle his work on a regular basis, and he agreed. His career had begun with a success. He was surprised, and perhaps in some way disappointed, because he had not expected it to be that easy. “How can people acquiesce so quickly?” he said to himself. “And for such foolishness?” Yet the questions he asked suggest that he had never doubted his ability to win admiration. Besides, as he willingly acknowledged, “I was pleased, because of my father.”