Isabel had stood one night in the Latin Quarter, with dark buildings and darkness looming above, while from a distance Alberto had observed her. Years later in Geneva he began to realize that his creative compulsion was bound to the vision he had had of her that night on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. She was the figurine. It was meant to stand for her, but it also represented abstract womanhood. Its conceptual essence dwelt in this ambiguity, and in the correlative condition of being both present and inaccessible, a duality perfectly suited to the artist’s nature. Touching the plaster figurine, he did not touch a real woman. Remoteness was the prerequisite of the figurine’s being, enhanced by placement upon a pedestal, which Giacometti saw as essential to his vision of Isabel. He told a friend that if he could only succeed in making his figurine satisfactorily tiny, then it could exist in any dimension and would assume the aspect of a goddess. The thing he touched when he touched the figurine had an existence of its own. It controlled his life, but he could control it. He could destroy it, because it never satisfied him. His dissatisfaction, however, was its power, compelling him to create it again and again.
The figurines of this period—as well as the standing female figures of later years—were all conceived as nudes. This may not seem immediately apparent, but it is central to the importance and meaning of a major portion of Giacometti’s work. The nude is the most serious of all subjects in art, for it provides the most ample opportunities to express the greatest variety of attitudes concerning the significance of human life. The greatest artists of the Western world have all created great works with the nude
as subject, and in all of them an awareness of the sexual is present. The desire to touch and to be united with another body is such a primal part of human nature that it can interfere with the detachment essential to aesthetic pleasure. Sexual desire, however, has from time immemorial sought sublimation in images, which remove the object of desire from the province of the physical and place it at an inviolable distance in the realm of the imaginary.
Giacometti’s figurines—and the later works which grew out of them—are archetypes of such transcendence. Every artist of true originality creates a “type,” and the characteristics of its style correspond to fundamentals in his nature which determine the constitution of his art.
As a youth in Rome, Alberto had found that sexual relations were most satisfactory with prostitutes. He never altered that view. Real relations with an illusion remained irresistibly compelling for him till the end. “When I am walking in the street,” he said, “and see a whore from a distance, all dressed, I see a whore. When she is in the room and naked before me, I see a goddess.”
Truth in art and truth in life are not the same. But the two must unite in the creative act if it is to have significant consequences, which is to say that a work of art will be “true to life” when its existence, and its very form, embodies the truths of the artist’s life. A work of art can then serve the ancillary purpose of revealing those truths. The artist himself, however, exists inside his truth: he can see what he is only by seeing what he does. What he does remains eternally potential rather than actual, so that he can truly become himself only by dying. No one knew this better than Giacometti. That was one of the sources of his tireless compulsion to work. It was also part of the existential dilemma which made the tiny figurines so elusive and troubling. The measure of their greatness is one of feeling, not size, and by that measure they restored to sculpture something of its traditional monumentality.
All the sculptures made by Giacometti during the wartime years in Switzerland were tiny save one. That one is almost life-sized. It alone withstood diminishment to the least common denominator
of the visible. It also withstood the destructive impulse which reduced most of the others to dust. Its survival as well as its exceptional size single it out for special attention, an attention, moreover, by which the artist can only have meant to indicate special significance. The tiny figurines expressed much, but they could not express everything.
The Chariot is the name which the sculptor gave to this work. The figure is, as usual, of a nude woman, standing erect, her arms pressed to her sides, feet close together, poised upon a massive pedestal. The pedestal itself rests on a platform just large enough for it, with a wheel at each corner. The sculpture was executed in the studio at Maloja during the summer of 1943, made in plaster like its diminutive relatives. The wheels obviously gave the work its name and were therefore essential to its purpose. How essential they were we know from an incident which occurred when the sculpture was cast in bronze twenty years later. A friend of Alberto found the wheels and platform superfluous and removed them from the cast in his collection, so that the pedestal rested directly on the ground. When Alberto saw the sculpture in this state, he became furious, insisting that it be restored immediately to its original condition. By placing his female figure on wheels, Giacometti had determined her identity. She was herself only insofar as she was capable of motion. The importance of the figure was the importance of the wheels, and the unwonted largeness of her size was the necessary expression of an essential relation. If she had been tiny, the effect of her power to move would have been diminished. And yet this figure is like a magnified figurine, posed with hieratic detachment upon her pedestal. One can almost see the goddess Alberto had prophesied. But are wheels indispensable to the demonstration of divinity? Giacometti had not lost the power to invest his work with the significance and authority of his profoundest experience. He was beginning to see how that capacity could add formal power to the traditional expressive purpose.
Painting was only an incidental occupation of the artist during his war-enforced stay in Switzerland. He executed a few portraits of family and friends. Drawing, however, became an increasingly
important part of his work. Most of the drawings of the war years were copies of works of art of the past, made from reproductions in books. This lifelong practice of copying was a means not only of seeing other artists’ work more closely but also of establishing more explicitly his relation with them in respect to the tradition of which he meant to be part. Cézanne also had been a lifelong maker of copies. Nearly a third of his extant drawings are copies, and of these it is significant to note that the great majority are copies of sculpture. Alberto made many a copy of “Papa” Cézanne. And he later said that he had spent the war years meditating on Cézanne’s ambitions and achievements.