The continuity of days had a therapeutic effect. Alberto rejoined his family in Maloja. But he chose not to remain with them for long. His work, he said, required that he return to Paris. What this work may have been, however, we do not know. He produced almost nothing during the remainder of that year. Perhaps he destroyed whatever he did, as he was to destroy almost everything produced during the next decade. Being a man of indefatigable, one might almost say incorrigible, industry, however, it can be assumed he did not remain idle. The work may have been of a kind which produces no tangible result. A radical transformation of Giacometti’s creative outlook seems to have begun at this time.
One year after his father’s death, he executed a design for Giovanni’s tombstone. The decision to make the design was his own. It seems obvious. He was the eldest son, a sculptor. What more natural than for filial gratitude and piety to find expression in a tangible and enduring memorial? The funerary monument is sober, discreet, and impressive. It was carved by Diego, working from his brother’s design, out of a block of local granite. Only two feet high, it conveys an extraordinary sense of energy and mass. The front bears the name of the dead artist, and above it are carved in low relief a bird, a chalice, a sun, and a star. A bird with a chalice is the Christian metaphor for the certainty of eternal life; sun and star are age-old symbols of rebirth and permanence. Thus, it would seem that Alberto meant to consecrate his father’s memory with an assurance of immortality. To do so would no doubt have seemed appropriate.
The years 1930, 1931, and 1932 had been richly productive, establishing Giacometti as the most authentic Surrealist sculptor.
The first six months of 1933 indicate a weakening of the artist’s commitment to Surrealism; and in 1934 he executed but a single sculpture which can be described as Surrealist. So the effective end of Alberto’s Surrealist period appears to have come in June 1933. More than a year would pass, though, before a confrontation confirmed what had, in fact, already taken place.
The large sculpture begun in the spring of 1934 was the largest Giacometti had undertaken since the carved monolith for the Noailles’ garden and the first he had ever attempted as a representational image of an entire human figure. Even before it was finished, this sculpture fascinated Alberto’s Surrealist friends, and in particular André Breton. Haunting, hieratic, arcane, it represents a woman, almost life-size, but not the literal image of a female figure. The legs and torso are slenderly stylized, reminiscent of the two recent Walking Women, the arms tubular, and the hands like attenuated claws held in front of the breasts. The head is stark, staring, open-mouthed, a mask. This mysterious figure is perched upon a high, open-backed chair or throne, the seat of which slopes obliquely forward. Beside her lies the head of a long-beaked bird. The lower legs of the figure are hidden by a small plank which weighs directly upon the feet. Two titles were alternatively used by the artist to designate this sculpture, and their interplay contributes to its esoteric aura. The Invisible Object is one title, Hands Holding the Void the other. Accordingly, the focus of one’s attention, and of the sculpture’s significance, is placed precisely in the space which separates the raised hands. But the two titles are conceptually contradictory, for the existence of an object, however invisible, precludes the principle of a void. The conceptual contradiction is thus compounded by the metaphysical opposition of being and nothingness. Given the high intellectual acuity of the artist, it is legitimate to assume that the tension of this opposition contributed to the genesis of the work and influenced its expressive purpose. Contemplation has taken the place of revelation. This would account for the woman’s haunted stare and totemistic appearance.
Giacometti experienced acute difficulties while executing this sculpture. They were personal as well as aesthetic, symptomatic
of the work’s own character as well as of its importance for his life and career. The greatest difficulty, as one might expect, concerned the precise placement of the hands in relation to each other, since the significance of the whole sculpture stems from the evocative power of this relation. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that for some years the need—the compulsion —to discover a perfect placement for various objects in relation to each other had become increasingly pronounced. Nor did this apply solely to elements used in the making of sculpture. For example, there had been a time when Alberto spent sleepless nights because he could no longer decide exactly how to place his shoes and socks after taking them off. This passion for placement extended also to things of less obvious ritual importance.
“In my room,” he explained, “I found myself unable to do anything for days on end because I could not discover the exact and satisfying arrangement of the objects on my table. On it, for example, there were a pack of cigarettes, a pencil, a saucer, a pad of paper, a box, etc. The shapes, colors, and volumes of these objects maintained between themselves intimate and precise plastic relations which determined for each one its sole proper placement. The search for this order, either by reflection or by trial and error, was a veritable torment for me. So long as I had not found it, I was as if paralyzed, unable even to leave my room to keep an appointment. Thus, I would move the box to the left side of the table, turn the pad of paper slightly, place the pack of cigarettes at an angle, etc., but that didn’t work. I would change the position of the box and it seemed to me that that was better, but then the pad was too near the center. I would push it away, but the saucer all alone became too important. I moved the pencil closer. Was I free? No, for in this imperfect equilibrium there persisted an element of approximation which was intolerable to me. So I would always and tirelessly start over again and spend interminable hours on this disappointing task.”
Surrealism had helped Alberto to make personal and aesthetic progress. When it was done, it was done. His nature was too eager, too intransigent to accept the mere continuity of achievement, however distinguished. He grew impatient of the constraints and
compromises, hypocrisies, recriminations, jealousies, and conflicting ambitions common to any utopian movement. A parting of the ways had become inevitable. Even to Giacometti, however, the actual event was difficult to contemplate. Life for him had an ever-renewed but never-ending continuity. No part, no person could be relinquished without diminishing the whole. Almost all of his friends were members of the Surrealist movement. In addition to Breton, they were Max Ernst, Miró, Yves Tanguy, Eluard, and René Crevel—to name only the most notable.
In the autumn of 1934, Alberto was busy with preparations for an exhibition of his sculpture in New York. It had been arranged some time before with an American art dealer named Julien Levy, who specialized in Surrealism and had already exhibited works by other members of the group. Giacometti himself selected the eleven works which were shipped to New York, the earliest being the Gazing Head of 1927, the most recent The Invisible Object—Hands Holding the Void. The exhibition—entitled, a little inaccurately, Abstract Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti —took place in December. The United States, then mired in the adversity of the Great Depression, was in no mood for Surrealism. Though Giacometti’s prices were low, nothing sold. On December 9, 1934, the critic of The New York Times wrote: “For five minutes I have stared blankly at my typewriter, trying to think of something to say about the abstract sculpture by Alberto Giacometti at the Julien Levy Gallery. If you want the blunt truth of the matter, Mr. Giacometti’s objects, as sculpture, strike me as being unqualifiedly silly.”
Sometime during that autumn, Alberto began work on two sculptures markedly different from those he had executed before. Both were heads, seemingly of women, though it is difficult to be sure. Both were sculpted entirely in the round and both were life-size. That seems significant, for they convey a sense of human resemblance struggling to emerge from the matrix of evolving form, the effect of a generic image wrested from a space in which there was no original likeness.
One day Alberto decided to take a model, feeling that it would help him to work from nature for a while. “I knew,” he
said later, “that no matter what I did, no matter what I wanted, I would be obliged someday to sit down on a stool in front of a model and try to copy what I saw. Even if there was no hope of succeeding. I dreaded in a way being obliged to come to that, and I knew that it was inevitable … I dreaded it, but I hoped for it. Because the non-figurative works I was doing then were finished once and for all. To go on would have been to produce works of the same kind, but all adventure was finished. So that didn’t interest me a bit.”
He expected that work with the model would take a week, that he would see clearly what he wanted and be able to proceed without difficulty. The expectation was a snare. “After a week I wasn’t getting anywhere at all! The figure was much too complicated. I said, ‘All right, I’m going to begin by doing a head.’ So I began a bust and … instead of seeing more and more clearly, I saw less and less clearly, and I continued …”
Alberto was never one to make a secret of his thoughts or doings. Word of both soon made the round of the Surrealist group. It was received with consternation. Yves Tanguy said, “He must be insane.” Max Ernst sadly concluded that his friend was discarding the best part of himself. Andre Breton contemptuously declared, “Everybody knows what a head is!” He had been indulgent, had been patient. But even in the case of an intimate friend he was compelled to condemn failures of faith which denied doctrinaire hegemony.
Sometime in the month of December 1934, Benjamin Peret, a young poet and Surrealist zealot, asked Alberto to dine with him and Breton. During the meal, conversation naturally turned to Giacometti’s preoccupation with the possibility of sculpting from life a head which would not only be lifelike but embody the artist’s visual experience. Breton, and by definition Peret, regarded such an ambition as aesthetically frivolous and historically redundant. No argument, however, could sway Giacometti’s resolve, and he had the intellectual authority to defend it. By the time dinner was over, the conversation had become heated. This was just what Peret and Breton had expected, and they had arranged in advance for a group of Surrealist henchmen to witness Giacometti’s
recalcitrance. George Hugnet, another poet and courtier, was the fellow conspirator at whose home they waited. Alberto suspected nothing when Péret suggested, after leaving the restaurant, that they drop in on Hugnet. The discussion continued en route and had become almost acrimonious by the time they joined the others. In addition to Hugnet and his wife, there were Yves Tanguy, Madame Breton, and two or three more.
Giacometti was not easily intimidated, especially when his ongoing purpose in life was opposed. Attack from another flank therefore became necessary. Breton proclaimed that his work for Jean-Michel Frank was contrary to the spirit of Surrealism, that no true artist would debase his creative powers by devoting them to the production of utilitarian objects. How an artist might make ends meet if his artistic work did not suffice was a problem largely disregarded by Breton, who, incidentally, often made his own ends meet by the discreet sale of works of art, many of which had been gifts from his friends, Alberto among them. Giacometti replied to Breton’s charge by asserting that he had attempted to design objects beautiful in themselves which would also add to the comfort and convenience of people’s lives. Care for the comfort and convenience of people’s lives smacked of bourgeois leanings, blasphemous to the Surrealists, and Breton retorted that the objects—beautiful or not—were luxury items sold to the rich in a fashionable shop. So Giacometti’s activity was not only anti-Surrealist but anti-revolutionary, unworthy, and degrading.
This was too much. “Everything I’ve done till now,” Alberto exclaimed, “has been no more than masturbation.”
Breton saw at once the threat to himself. Imperiously he replied, “We’ll have to clear this up once and for all.”
“Don’t bother,” said Alberto. “I’m going.” He went without ceremony. Behind him, he left a room full of former friends and an important period of his life.
From one day to the next, Giacometti found himself a virtual outcast in the Paris he had known and conquered. He had been made much of, honored. Now it was as though some secret shame were suddenly public knowledge. Men who had been his close friends refused to speak to him, turning their backs in the
street. The power of the Surrealist leader was certainly great. This ascendancy, indeed, of one man over the judgment and conduct of others, who happened to be among the most gifted and intelligent of their generation, is astonishing. It illustrates the peculiar phenomenon of group behavior, which even then was assuming horrendous proportions in the two large nations neighboring France, an occurrence violently condemned by the Surrealists.
Giacometti had chosen to follow a solitary path. It went contrary to the dominant direction of the times. To follow it demanded a kind of rage of determination, a will, it might eventually seem, to mortify the spirit and punish the flesh.
Speaking of his Surrealist years, Alberto declared that reality was what he’d been running away from. The Surrealist works, however, exist with an aesthetic and psychic authority which Giacometti himself could neither diminish nor explain away. When one considers such sculptures as The Suspended Ball, The Cage, Point to the Eye, and Woman with Her Throat Cut, it seems curious that the artist should have characterized the work of those years as masturbation. The sexual allusiveness of his early sculpture is pronounced, but we know that for him the sexual act was never a simple matter. Masturbation is in its own way a flight from reality, an acceptance of facility and fantasy. This, apparently, is what Alberto had determined to put behind him.
The Surrealist revolution had failed. No radical change in the conduct of human life had come as a result of it. The exaltation of the irrational had not bettered society. As a matter of fact, the irrational side of human nature was soon to bring about worldwide devastation and tragedy.
The Communists were quick to diagnose the ineffectuality of the Surrealists, and a Soviet confidence man called Ilya Ehrenburg denounced them as fetishists, exhibitionists, and homosexuals. André Breton did not take disparagement lightly. Meeting Ehrenburg in the street, he saw an opportunity to vindicate his honor and struck him in the face. The incident stirred up a hullabaloo. This was especially troubling to Rene Crevel, who had long aspired to be the agent of reconciliation between friends of differing ideology, and who alone among the Surrealists made them
liable to the sexual slur. Troubled by all this, and by continuing ill health, Crevel went home and swallowed two bottles of sleeping pills, shut himself in his kitchen, and turned on the gas. Before lying down to die, and as a final, rather macabre gesture of Surrealist whimsy, he attached to his big toe a label inscribed René Crevel, so that there would be no mistaking his identity at the morgue.
The suicide of this personable, talented young man was deeply grieving to Giacometti. A particularly affectionate friendship had united them. Crevel had not turned his back on Alberto after the excommunication. He was the one Surrealist whose good humor never failed, whose sincerity went unquestioned, and whose tact often served to resolve misunderstandings. It is a sad, odd coincidence that Alberto’s exclusion from the Surrealist group should have followed so closely upon the suicide of one of its most dedicated members and the revelation that the movement itself was also dead.