A pretty young woman could make her living in Montparnasse without a specific occupation. She could encourage the clients in a bar to do a bit more drinking, or strike up acquaintance with potential admirers who might be glad to give a girl a helping hand without expecting much more than a handshake in return. An easygoing, senseless sort of life. One of the girls who lived that way in the mid-thirties was called Nelly.
Diego met her at the Café du Dôme. He was about the same age as the century, handsome, experienced; she was only nineteen, but self-sufficient and beautiful. They were attracted to each other, and one may suppose that an affair began soon after they met. He asked her to come and live with him in the rue d’ Alésia, though he called the place a hovel. Not quite that bad, yet it was certainly not the kind of place young couples usually dream about to set up housekeeping. But the housekeeping dream of most young couples had nothing in common with the expectations or desires of Diego and Nelly, for she turned out to be quite as casual as he was about bourgeois comforts, both moral and material.
She was not a girl like the others. Strangely apathetic, it sometimes seemed that she was immune to most of the emotions which ordinarily determine people’s lives. She was fond of animals, even of insects, but rather indifferent to humans. A little while after moving into the rue d’Alésia, she made a confession. It was all the more surprising—and unpleasant—for having been delayed rather longer than its importance could conveniently explain. She had a child, a baby boy, at present in the care of an aunt in the suburbs. Who the father had been remained obscure
and was probably irrelevant. Though Diego can have had no illusions about Nelly’s innocence, and may have been attracted to her in part for that reason, he had hardly expected to find himself a man with a family because he had asked a girl to live with him. The prospect was not appealing. Still, he wanted to do the right thing and knew that a child should not be separated from its mother. He proposed that the boy be brought to Paris. Nelly was, if possible, less interested in playing the role of mother, albeit to her own child, than Diego in playing the role of father. But they tried it for a time. The experiment did not work. Nelly had no patience with infantile behavior; she tied the baby to the top of a table in an effort to keep him out of trouble. Before long, he was sent back to the suburbs.
After the pseudo-parental interlude, Diego and Nelly continued to live together as before, but their lives remained strangely separate. Diego’s daily existence was entirely occupied by his work with Alberto. Nelly can never have had any inkling of what that was all about, and her visits to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron were rare. Diego seemed to feel that, for social purposes, a woman’s place was in the home, however humble, and Nelly was apparently willing to stay there. They almost never went together to a cafe, to the movies, to a restaurant. Many friends of both Alberto and Diego remained for years unaware of Nelly’s existence. Still, Diego had occasion to complain of her apathy. He tried to persuade her to work, even found prospective employment for her in the Guerlain perfume shop. But Nelly declared that she would never consent to do anything so bourgeois. Though that argument might well have won his sympathy in other circumstances, Diego was annoyed. In a peculiar way, he was something of a misogynist. He enjoyed women but could not help finding them irritating. “There’s always something the matter with them,” he would say. Still, he and Nelly cared for each other. They even contemplated marriage.
No such step, however, could conceivably have been made without taking account of Stampa. Diego went about this with characteristic circumspection. He knew his mother’s stern view of morality. Before risking an introduction, he wrote a letter in
which he enclosed a photograph of Nelly. One may surmise that he made no mention of maternity. Annetta Giacometti was not one to mince words when it came to the conduct of her sons’ lives. She wrote to Alberto: “That is not the sort of woman I could approve of.”
Diego never married. Despite his raffish past and indifference to appearances, nothing meant more to him than his mother’s approval. All the same, he would live with Nelly for twenty years.
Alberto was now the only one of the Giacometti children who had not yet found someone with whom to settle down and share his life. To settle down, of course, was the very last thing he meant to do. As for sharing his life, he knew only too well that it was not really his to share. He and Denise had drifted apart. And yet he had hopes of a kind. For the moment they were turned toward Isabel Delmer. The sculptor and the journalist’s wife had gradually become better acquainted. There was no lack of opportunity. The metallic shriek of her laughter had become familiar in the cafes of Montparnasse and at artistic parties on Left Bank and Right. Sustained by plenty of drink, she easily held her own with the most spirited companions. Admirers were numerous. She welcomed them. If her husband was often called away to report on ever more alarming crises, Isabel did not lack for persons anxious to entertain her in his absence. Lots of lively gatherings took place in the luxurious apartment. Actresses and aristocrats mingled with ballet dancers and police inspectors. Giacometti was often present, adding largely to the fun, for he always knew how to make people laugh and could see the comic inside the dramatic.
Isabel was pleased by Alberto’s interest. A shrewd judge of male potential, she realized that the artist’s attention might offer significant gratifications while never inhibiting her prerogative to behave as she pleased. Though not herself a true artist, Isabel instinctively understood a great deal about men who were.
For his part, Alberto seems to have grasped very soon that Isabel might represent not only the tangible person, who could be touched and desired, but also an idol, to be adulated and adored from a distance. This may have lent enchantment; it also made
for safety. She was the first woman to present Alberto with an authentic challenge. Part of her spell may have come from the sense that she could compel him—not by caprice but by her very nature—to expose himself completely to contingent aspects of experience.
One evening in 1937 at midnight, Alberto happened to be on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Isabel also was there but stood at a distance. His impression of her identity was exceptionally powerful, with buildings beyond and an immensity of darkness above. It may have been determined in part by the state of relations between them at the time. She was the most important person in his emotional life, but her importance had not been affirmed by any act or commitment. He never knew quite where he stood. She went her own way, lived her own life, did not take account of his desires. These, on the other hand, may not have been made explicit. If he did not know where he stood with Isabel, he did not know quite where he meant to stand, either. He, too, went his own way and lived his own life, a fact which he was too honest—and perhaps too perverse—to conceal. He made it a point to let Isabel know that there were other women, though he maintained that they were no more than “shadows.” So both contributed to the distance which characterized their relationship. It must have seemed at times that the distance and the relationship were the same thing.
An approximation of intimacy nonetheless prevailed. It was confirmed in the most fitting way: Alberto sculpted two portraits of her—the first in 1936, the second two years later. Both were characteristic of the working style of the moment, and neither appears to have caused difficulty. But they are very unalike.
The first is sometimes called The Egyptian, because its smoothly modeled features, purity of line, dynamic interaction of forms, and lifelike immediacy are all reminiscent of Egyptian portraiture. A pleasing but forceful likeness, it appears to have been executed with ease, as if to show what authority the artist could command if he chose simply to reproduce what his mind knew to be before his eyes. The second portrait is something else altogether. No sign of ease. The likeness of the model has vanished.
In its place is the evidence of a prolonged struggle with looking. A victorious struggle, since a work of art is the outcome. The sculptural surface is roughly textured, granulated, striated; it gives a sense of matter on the verge of animation, almost aquiver, of the artist striving to maintain the integrity of his act. The model’s likeness merges with the work of art as a conjecture concerning the riddle of human appearances; the portrait is like her but does not look like her; her gaze and expression are inscrutable.
The heads of Diego and Rita which Giacometti was sculpting at the same time as this second portrait of Isabel are akin to it in treatment and effect. All these sculptures, few of which survive, were important steps toward the development of a visual self-discipline capable of infinite persistence and infinite renewal. For that reason, they are satisfying as works of art. For the same reason, they were for the artist dissatisfying evidence of his inability to create a sculptural equivalent of what he saw.
Since he had begun to feel that he might never succeed in sculpting a head to his satisfaction, Alberto decided to try making a complete figure. Working directly in plaster, he started with a figure about eighteen inches high, representing a nude woman standing with her arms at her sides. As he worked, he found to his amazement, and to his consternation, that the sculpture grew smaller and smaller. The smaller it grew, the more troubled he became; yet he could not keep it from shrinking. The sculpture itself seemed to have determined in advance its appropriate size, would accept no other, and compelled the sculptor to comply. After several months of work, the figure had shrunk to the size of a pin, standing in precarious isolation upon a pedestal several times its own height. Those dimensions were intolerable to the artist, but the likeness he sought seemed somehow attached to the tiny size of the sculpture.
Bewildered, alarmed, he began again with a figure the same size as the first. Again it shrank while he worked on it, growing smaller and smaller despite his reluctance and distaste, finally ending as tiny as the first. Again he began. Again the outcome was the same. However, he could not stop. Sometimes the figure grew so
minuscule that a last touch of the sculptor’s knife would send it crumbling into dust. He was working at the limit of being and on the frontier of non-being, confronted with the sudden passing of existence into nonexistence, a transition which took place in his hands but over which he had no control. For twenty years, he had been obsessed with life’s frailty. Now it presided over his work. In a very real sense, it became his work. “I always have the impression or the feeling,” he said, “of the frailty of living beings, as if at any moment it took a fantastic energy for them to remain standing, always threatened by collapse. And it is in their frailty that my sculptures are likenesses.” It is fitting that very few of those tiny figurines survived. Their impermanence was their importance.
Giacometti had wanted to renew his vision, to see with original freshness what stood before him. He had not foreseen that the creations which embodied his vision would be symbols of regeneration. The sculptor’s problem had become anthropological. Having determined to make a new beginning in his art by trying to work as though art had never existed, he made works which evoke the origins of creativity, its mysteries and rites. The tiny sculptures have something of the talisman, charged with anthropomorphic vitality and magical feeling. So they ask to be seen as inhabitants both of actual space, the space of the knowable and the living, and of metaphysical space, the space of the unknowable and the dead.