Diego always remembered the period between 1925 and 1935 as the happiest of his life. It was also the time of greatest change, for during that decade he ceased to be a happy-go-lucky youth and became a responsible adult whose maturity would be devoted to the fulfillment of another man’s genius. The symbiosis of need, help, and protectiveness began to assume a character of its own which would independently act upon the evolution of the fraternal relationship. In addition to doing most of the manual work required by the commissions from Jean-Michel Frank, Diego was making all the armatures for Alberto’s sculptures, even the most complex, and assisting in the execution of some of them. The artist supervised and decided, but Diego’s hand in things became more and more indispensable. The gradual change also expressed itself in ways less predictable.
It had come about—with an irony of truly exquisite relevance—that Diego did not always approve of the company Alberto kept. He himself continued to spend an occasional evening with shady pals of the past, though he no longer took part in their ventures, but, as always, he made a distinction between Alberto and himself. If he was prepared to dedicate himself to Alberto’s art, then it followed that he could do no less for the artist. Not a discriminating analyst of human motives, Diego nevertheless grasped the complexity of his brother’s nature in terms of day-to-day cause and effect. Knowing Alberto to be a man of genius, he also saw that in relation to others he could be amazingly naive and therefore exposed to undesirable eventualities. In this he was right, but brotherly concern was no match for creative ingenuity.
One evening early in April of 1932, both Diego and Alberto were at the Café du Dôme, seated, as was so often the case, with different people at different tables. Diego did not like the look of his brother’s companions. There were four men and two women. The poet Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, was one. The others were Jacques Cottance and Georges Weinstein, both in their early twenties, acolytes of the Surrealist movement, and a young artist aged twenty-three named Robert Jourdan. The women were Denise Bellon (not to be mistaken for Alberto’s mistress of that time) and her younger sister, Colette, who was engaged to Jacques Cottance; they too were friends of the Surrealists. It seemed to be a lively group out for an evening of drink and talk, nothing more. But Diego did not feel reassured.
He left the Dôme that evening before Alberto. Having recently rented at 199 rue d’Alésia a studio-lodging in a complex no less ramshackle and spartan than the one in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron, he returned there and went to bed. His sleep was troubled. He dreamed that he saw Alberto trapped, half submerged in a black, slimy morass from which he could not escape, while from a distance he, Diego, could only look on with dismay, powerless to help.
At the Dôme, in the meantime, Jacques Cottance and Georges Weinstein had also gone home, leaving the others to talk on. The conversation turned to drugs. Robert Jourdan was an exceptionally handsome and gifted young man. As much for his looks, perhaps, though he was not homosexual, as for his talent, he had been taken up by Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. It was they who prompted him to take opium. His father was a high official in the Department of the Seine, and Robert was still living at home, where he could hardly indulge his habit with the necessary sense of security. He suggested to his friends that they go somewhere together and take dross, the gummy substance left over after opium has been smoked. He had plenty of it with him. They agreed.
Denise Bellon, who had recently separated from her husband, was living in a small apartment in a pension in the rue Faustin-Hélie.
Though she knew that her two young daughters were in one of the bedrooms asleep, she offered the other bedroom for the party, and the five set out by car. When they reached the pension, Tzara begged off, after all, leaving Denise, Colette, Alberto, and Robert to go upstairs together. In order to reach Denise’s bedroom, they were obliged to pass through the one where the children lay asleep, but they managed to do so without waking them. Robert produced his dross. The two men and two women gulped it down. The effects, whether pleasurable or merely stupefying, were soon felt. Everybody drowsed.
Toward morning, Alberto came to himself. He gradually realized where he was and remembered what had happened. He lay fully clothed on the bed. Beside him lay Robert. It was not yet daylight. Robert lay without moving. The two women were somewhere nearby. Slowly Alberto became more conscious of his surroundings. Robert lay still, so still that it seemed he could hardly be breathing. He was not breathing. Alberto turned violently on the bed. Robert’s body was no longer warm. It lay there with a terrifying stillness, dead.
Once again, suddenly, unaccountably, Alberto found himself in a strange room at night beside a corpse. Once again, as in the rainy mountains of northern Italy, chance had brought him face to face with death. Was it by chance? He had never before taken drugs, never took them again. He had hardly known Robert Jourdan. If there was a necessity, where was it? In him or in the circumstances?
He could not face it. His first thought was to run away. Getting up from the bed where the dead man lay, he went quickly to the door, passed through the room where the two little girls slept, hurried downstairs into the street. It was cold and raining. Though the neighborhood was deserted, Alberto found a taxi and returned to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron.
Jacques Cottance was summoned from bed by a horrified telephone call. His fiancee and her sister had discovered the corpse of their friend soon after Alberto’s departure. Cottance went immediately to the rue Faustin-Hélie. Robert had clearly absorbed
a lethal overdose. In the interest of all concerned, it was evident that the circumstances of his death should insofar as possible be concealed. The young man guessed that Robert’s father would be only too anxious to use his influence. The police, of course, would have to be called. Reluctant to have such an embarrassing corpse found on his premises, the pension’s proprietor suggested carrying Robert’s body outside, where they could pretend to have come upon it by chance. In the adjoining bedroom, the little girls miraculously had not been awakened by all the coming and going, nor were they roused when the corpse was carried through. It was bundled around the nearest corner and left on the sidewalk in the Place Possoz.
The police, when they arrived, if fooled by the story they heard, were not fooled for long. The truth soon came out, and all concerned were taken to the police station at 2 rue Bois-le-Vent. A van was sent to bring Giacometti from his studio.
So it was that Alberto found himself once more detained by the police because of a death in which his involvement seemed to have been accidental. If detainment by the police entails a sense of guilt, the extent of its presumption need not derive from a rational judgment of the facts. He had kept the light burning at night in his bedroom for years, but it had averted nothing.
The formalities at the police station turned out to be no more than formalities. Cottance had been right. The dead boy’s father was anxious to conceal the truth, and Maurice Jourdan was in a position to do so. The witnesses were released. No report was prepared. The death certificate was issued six days later, after the funeral had taken place; it omitted to state the cause of death and declared only that this had occurred in the street in front of 5 Place Possoz.
When Diego arrived at the studio that morning, he was surprised to find Alberto absent. Remembering his unpleasant dream of the previous night, he felt apprehensive. It was midmorning before Alberto returned, distraught, to tell his brother what had happened. Diego was upset. The coincidence of his dream with Alberto’s experience, though subject to more complex interpretations than the one which he can have been expected
to make, certainly increased his disposition to feel that Alberto needed help and protection. This can hardly be counted in the score of chance.
No More Play, a sculpture executed in 1932, is one of the most telling of this period. Death is its theme, invoked with more powerful allusiveness and ambiguity than in any other work of Giacometti’s oeuvre. A flat, rectangular slab of white marble, the sculpture is concretely emblematic of its deeply buried meaning. The carved surface is divided into three oblong fields, of which the middle one, the smallest, contains three coffin-graves with removable lids. A tiny, stylized skeleton reposes in one of these. The fields at either side are pitted with oval or circular holes of varying size; standing in two of them are upright figures, each separated from the other by the field of graves, to the right a rigid hieratic woman, to the left a headless personage with arms upraised in a gesture of veneration or surrender. As an elegiac inscription, the title is engraved in the right front corner of the stone. A funerary symbol, No More Play is at once the embodiment of a metaphysical concept and an expression of existential irony: death exists but is the negation of existence, while art provides for immortality, but, in order to do so, entails the death of the artist. The title in French is On ne Joue Plus, which means literally that one is no longer playing. Giacometti was thirty years old when he made this sculpture—an age at which life has had plenty of time to prove that it is not a game. When asked why he was a sculptor, Alberto sometimes said, “So as not to die.”
Another important sculpture of the same year, Point to the Eye, alludes to similar preoccupations, though in different terms. Fixed upon a rectangular wooden slab, two sculptural elements stand in a deadly confrontation. A club-shaped form tapering to a stiletto point is thrust across the slab directly toward an eye socket in the skull-like head of a stylized skeleton. The point does not quite touch the socket. But has it not already done so? The figure is an image of death, and the point to the eye clearly the representation of a fatal occurrence. Its cause and character convey the expressive sense of the sculpture. For an artist, vision is equivalent
to life, and the natural outcome of their union is a work of art. Creation is procreation. To be blinded is to lose creative power, to be made impotent in a way which goes beyond artistic capacity, to have met with a living death. So our attention is directed to the nature of the lethal instrument. In Point to the Eye the point is not, as it were, the point itself but the whole form: the weapon is a club as well as a stiletto, suggesting by its shape the consummation of other acts which may entail fatal consequences. Thus, sex may seem to threaten what is most precious in life. Alberto’s nature worked upon his art with relentless subtlety. Reflecting psychic causes and embodying their effects, Point to the Eye is also a work of exquisitely conceived sculptural authority. Its power is inseparable from its frailty and the two relate to each other in haunting evocative balance.
A third significant sculpture produced by Giacometti during 1932 is entitled Woman with Her Throat Cut. The dominant theme of death is here subordinated to the artist’s recurring preoccupation with psychic anguish and sexual violence. The genesis of this work is especially revealing of its intent and relevant to its meaning, while both meaning and intent explicitly anticipate a strange, troubling concatenation of experiences which were still fourteen years in the future: a dream, a disease, a death. The open-work composition of stylized anatomical forms in Woman with Her Throat Cut is related to two earlier sculptures, the titles of which suggest similar symbolic intentions. The first of these had been executed three years before and was entitled Woman in the Form of a Spider. Although it is possible to visualize the various elements of this work as approximately suggestive of female and arachnid forms, the title seems arbitrary, as if Alberto had been determined to see, and to have us seek, in this sculpture an allusion which does a certain violence to its plastic integrity. Woman in the Form of a Spider was made to be hung on the wall. An inkling as to its possible significance for Giacometti may be gained from the fact that for some years he kept the original plaster version hanging on the wall directly above his bed. If this is a spider, however, it is one which has clearly been mangled. Its identification with a woman, not to mention the fact that the artist chose
to hang it directly above his bed, thus seems all the more revealing. The Tormented Woman in Her Room at Night, a sculpture executed a year or two later, is a tentative, transitional work in a semi-Cubist manner which owes something to both Lipchitz and Laurens. Less powerful, original, and effectively realized than either the Woman in the Form of a Spider or the Woman with Her Throat Cut, it is interesting above all in terms of the sculptural and symbolic transition. The disjointed, convulsive representation of a mangled woman-insect has been superseded by an elegant, intellectual creation meant to convey the anxiety of a woman alone at night threatened by a murderous intent which has been brutally carried out in the final sculpture. The spider woman, by nature menacing, is first mangled, then threatened, and at last slaughtered. The conclusive act is depicted in a sculpture of formally harmonious, original, and organic forms. As a representation of violence and bestiality, the Woman with Her Throat Cut is almost abstract and could not conceivably arouse horror. It is elegant, intellectual, aesthetic. The suggestive shapes are interrelated with extraordinary rhythmic subtlety, while the effect of creative self-assurance is masterful, and the work is among the most compelling of Giacometti’s Surrealist period.
Another peculiar and intriguing sculpture is entitled Hand Caught by the Fingers. It shows a human hand, made of wood, with the fingers outstretched toward several interrelated wheels or gears, which can be set in motion by turning a crank. The motion is arrested, however. Nothing happens. Danger is imminent, but no injury has as yet occurred. This sculpture has been interpreted as representing the predicament of men in relation to machines they can no longer control. It may have had a more profound, personal meaning, however, related to an incident which would have been recalled to the sculptor’s memory whenever he looked at his brother’s right hand. But he did not yet know the truth about that accident which had occurred a quarter of a century before. It was biding its time. The sculpture, perhaps, was one way of demonstrating that it—and the artist—had something to wait for which would make the wait worth all the time it needed.
In May 1932, the first exhibition devoted solely to recent works by Alberto Giacometti took place at the Galerie Pierre Colle, 29 rue Cambacérès. It was not, however, the introduction of an unknown artist to Paris. Sculptures by Giacometti had been included in more than a dozen group exhibitions during the previous few years. The Pierre Colle exhibition came as public consecration of a talent already recognized and praised. On the opening day, one of the first to arrive was Pablo Picasso, alert as ever to the latest artistic innovations and ready to turn them to advantage in his own work when possible. He and Alberto had made acquaintance in the context of the Surrealist group, but they were not yet friends. Other visitors to the exhibition included most of the younger artists and writers important at the moment, plus elegant members of society like Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles.
Informed critical comment in the press was farsighted and admiring. At that time, the world’s most influential journal devoted to contemporary art was Cahiers d’Art, edited in Paris by Christian Zervos. Of Alberto’s exhibition he wrote, in part: “Giacometti is the first young sculptor to profit extensively from the example of his elders (Brancusi, Laurens, Lipchitz). The newness of his work, as we have seen, lies in its very personal expressiveness, in its taste for adventure, in the spiritual curiosity of the artist, and above all in the primordial power which always triumphs. Giacometti is at present the only young sculptor whose works confirm and expand new directions in sculpture.”
Despite such appreciation, and the unstinting esteem of his peers, Alberto sold little from this first one-man exhibition. The market for avant-garde art was not flourishing in the midst of economic crisis. However, commissions from Jean-Michel Frank continued to provide the Giacometti brothers with a dependable, if modest, livelihood, and financial assistance from Stampa could be counted on in a pinch. Besides, none of the Surrealists had money, and none of them cared much about it.
Ten years had passed since Alberto’s arrival in Paris. He had achieved some success. A challenge had been met. He had proved the value of his art. It would have seemed natural for the artist to
accept the pleasures and rewards appropriate to this achievement, if not with pride, at least with a sense of receiving his due. He did not. A puzzling inhibition persisted, an inability to partake of normal enjoyments. Though his human relationships and professional experiences were predominantly successful, Giacometti felt very much alone, compelled to search for satisfaction and communion almost entirely through his work. So much self-absorption suggests a touch of hubris, the will of the individual to overstep himself, but that is a commonplace of the creative predicament.