Flora Mayo responded with mixed feelings to Alberto’s success. It had become increasingly evident that their relationship would never be settled or permanent. Any change in Alberto’s life could be seen as a threat to her place in it. True to his ambivalent disposition where women were concerned, Alberto made efforts to please her, but her expectations had become oppressive. “With her I had the feeling that I was suffocating,” he said. “I wished that she would find someone else.” Lying in bed with her at night in her studio, he felt a frightening sense of imprisonment. He wanted to get out, to run away. It was the dark, he thought, which caused his anxiety. By his own bedside, of course, the reassuring light would be burning.
On the frequent occasions when Flora found herself alone in the evening, she habitually sought consolation in alcohol and in the company of such casual drinking companions as could be met in the cafes of Montparnasse. One evening at the Dome she met a handsome young Pole who offered her a drink. She accepted. He invited her to spend the night at his hotel. She agreed. They enjoyed themselves, and in that particular respect it must have been an agreeable change for Flora from the troubling uncertainties of relations with Alberto. But there was to be no sequel, even had she desired one, because the Pole left the next day for Warsaw and Flora never saw him again.
Her unfaithfulness troubled her. She naively imagined that if she confessed her transgression, forgiveness would follow. A week after her encounter with the Pole, she and Alberto went one afternoon to Versailles. They had a happy time strolling about
in the gardens. That evening, when they had returned to Flora’s studio in Paris, she told him of her infidelity.
He was wounded and enraged. When upset, he was always prone to clamorous outbursts. He shrieked with anger and made such an uproar, lasting so long, that the occupants of adjoining studios complained of the disturbance. Flora was alarmed and astonished. She tried to reason with her obstreperous lover, telling him that a passing infidelity need not be of consequence, that there were, in fact, plenty of married people who were sometimes unfaithful yet remained together and loved each other no less for it.
Alberto replied that there were also couples who were never unfaithful, and that that was how it should be. One can guess what ideal couple he had in mind to validate such a categorical imperative, and the thought, not to mention the contrast, would have added to the anguish of the moment. But how is one to consider his attitude in light of the knowledge that he was himself all the while regularly frequenting prostitutes? Pure love had not been betrayed. Flora was not allowed to know this, however, for what had been threatened and offended was not a spiritual ideal but Alberto’s emotional constitution. The ambivalence of his attitude toward women spared neither him nor the person he loved. Still, his suffering was genuine and can only have been compounded by the fact that it flowed from such deeply troubled and ambiguous sources.
“Something is broken between us,” he told her.
It was. They stopped meeting, but they could hardly avoid seeing each other. Before long, Flora had a new lover, a handsome American gigolo. Alberto was furious. Though he did not want to continue their relationship, he couldn’t help being jealous. To his surprise, he found that he could not put Flora out of his mind. He wrote long letters, outpourings of feeling, carried them to the nearby post office, but couldn’t put them into the box. The longing of which Flora had been a temporary object was not appeased, but she could no longer serve it. He never again engaged in a relationship quite so overtly and unrealistically romantic. Henceforth, his love affairs, of which there were to be four
important ones, grew from needs more primal than any Flora could have hoped to satisfy, and they increasingly became embodiments of the destiny toward which his creative urges drove him. As for his work, it was at this juncture that Alberto entered the phase during which profound personal feelings and deeply buried desires were most powerfully and revealingly expressed.
In 1929, for the first time, there openly appeared in Giacometti’s work the theme of sexual cruelty and violence. It would reappear in numerous sculptures during the coming years but was stated at the outset with an explicit force and trenchant purpose never afterward quite the same. Man and Woman is the only sculpture in Giacometti’s oeuvre which shows one figure in active relation to another. The act is one of naked and violent aggression. Freely stylized, the figures of both male and female are concave, as if recoiling from one another, while from the center of the male protrudes a rapier-like implement which might either ravish or slaughter the woman, who appears about to collapse before its menacing thrust. Still, the male’s rigid weapon does not quite touch the fragile orifice of the female. The two figures remain frozen forever in an image of fateful but poignant ambivalence. Man and Woman represents a decisive step in Giacometti’s evolution away from the strictures of Cubism and the limitations of the “flat” sculptures. He was anxious to try to convey the visual experience, the “sensation,” as Cézanne would have said, of a figure in space, making the perception of space itself an integral part of the sculptural object. Neither the sensation nor the resulting object therefore would need to have direct reference to the lifelike appearance of an actual figure. This apparent freedom imposed a radical constraint upon the artist. In order to demonstrate—to himself first, and then, perhaps, to others—that sculpture was a viable medium, he would be compelled to try to work as if he were the first man who had ever sculpted, while at the same time never neglecting to take account of the sculpture of the past. This seemingly contradictory imperative would oblige him to delve with infinite caution and perspicacity into the personal sources of his art, striving to distill from their essence the emotional content of his work in such a way as to both liberate and
obliterate the personal character of its origin. This necessity would soon make him ready to contribute to, and benefit from, the activities of an artistic movement dedicated to expression directed chiefly by the unconscious, freed from the inhibitions of conventional discipline and academic standards. Giacometti gravitated into the Surrealist group as simply and spontaneously as if it had been devised for him alone.