A day came when Alberto stopped using his cane. He saw this as a great occasion, and called it to the attention of his friends. Henceforth, he would go his own way with a difference.
In Geneva, Annette Arm was thinking about going with him. Apparently, it no longer mattered that he was lame. All she wanted was to join him in Paris. Nor did it seem to matter, either, that he had expressly told her she couldn’t. She wrote anxious letters, and they may have borne the ominous implication that the docile young thing might still turn out to be “clinging.”
Alberto replied, telling his correspondent that she had better stay where she was. So long as he was living with Isabel, he could hardly have told her otherwise. Annette, however, did not welcome the prospect that her role as a woman of passion should be played out on a provincial stage with a supporting cast of unproven competence. She kept on writing. Meanwhile, she was not exactly a prototype of lovelorn despair. Having been initiated by Alberto into a certain way of life, she kept on living it and may have sustained the hope of rejoining him by being the sort of woman whose company he enjoyed. She went out regularly with a couple of friends, Madeleine Repond and Manon Sachot, to the cafes, bars, and nightclubs where he had so often taken her. The three girls had plenty of good times.
When Isabel ran off with René Leibowitz, things were different. The artist found himself face to face with himself in a way he had not been for a long time. Remembering the dusty years in the little hotel room, he must have remembered the person whose company had given him comfort and refreshment. He asked her to do him a favor, and he would hardly have done that unless he had been
prepared to let her take a step in his direction. He asked her to send him a pair of shoes.
It was a thoughtless and irresponsible thing to do. Borrowing money had been bad enough. This was worse. But perhaps it merely seemed practical. Shoes of decent quality were hard to get in Paris. Alberto recalled having seen in a shop window in Geneva a pair especially to his liking. Why he felt Annette to be the right person to provide him with those shoes, when others on the spot, beginning with his mother, could have done so, we cannot tell. It may have had something to do with the likelihood of her being, in fact, the wrong person. He wrote a lengthy, detailed letter, describing exactly the shoes he wanted, that pair and no other, giving his size, the location of the shop, and instructions as to how the package should be forwarded to him. It was to pass from hand to hand, beginning with Albert Skira in Geneva and ending with a young painter in Paris named Roger Montandon.
Having followed its appointed itinerary, the package was delivered one evening to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron. Alberto opened it. Immediately he started to shout and sputter with rage. These were not the shoes he’d wanted. Annette was an idiot. She would never understand anything about anything. Rushing outside, he flung the shoes furiously into the garbage bin without even having tried them on. Montandon was astonished. Having known Alberto for several years, he had witnessed many irascible outbursts, but never one like this. It seemed doubly incomprehensible because the sculptor, who had so little money, had not hesitated to throw away a valuable and sorely needed pair of shoes. But the soreness of the need cannot have proceeded from a realm accessible to common sense.
One evening Giacometti went to the movies. While seated in the theater, without forewarning, he experienced one of those miraculous instances of self-creation in which the present abolishes the past even as the future abolishes the present. It caused a radical change in the artist’s view of the world and of his art. He saw this at once and later he spoke of it repeatedly.
“The true revelation,” he said, “the real impetus that made me
want to try to represent what I see came to me in a movie theater. I was watching a newsreel. Suddenly I no longer knew just what it was that I saw on the screen. Instead of figures moving in three-dimensional space I saw only black and white specks shifting on a flat surface. They had lost all meaning. I looked at the people beside me, and all at once by contrast I saw a spectacle completely unknown. It was fantastic. The unknown was the reality all around me, and no longer what was happening on the screen! When I came out onto the Boulevard Montparnasse, it was as if I’d never seen it before, a complete transformation of reality, marvelous, totally strange, and the boulevard had the beauty of the Arabian Nights. Everything was different, space and objects and colors and the silence, because the sense of space generates silence, bathes objects in silence.
“From that day onward I realized that my vision of the world had been photographic, as it is for almost everybody, and that a photograph or film cannot truly convey reality, and especially the third dimension, space. I realized that my vision of reality was poles apart from the supposed objectivity of a film. Everything appeared different to me, entirely new, fascinating, transformed, wondrous. So there was a curiosity to see more. Obviously I wanted to try to paint, or to make a sculpture of what I saw, but it was impossible. Still, at least, there was a possibility of trying. It was a beginning.
“I began to see heads in the void, in the space which surrounds them. When for the first time I clearly perceived how a head I was looking at could become fixed, immobilized definitively in time, I trembled with terror as never before in my life and a cold sweat ran down my back. It was no longer a living head, but an object I was looking at like any other object, but no, differently, not like any other object, but like something simultaneously living and dead. I gave a cry of terror, as if I had just crossed a threshold, as if I was entering a world never seen before. All the living were dead, and that vision was often repeated, in the subway, in the street, in a restaurant, in front of my friends. The waiter at the Brasserie Lipp become immobile, leaning toward me, with his mouth open, without any relation to the preceding moment, to
the moment following, with his mouth open, his eyes fixed in an absolute immobility. And not only people but objects at the same time underwent a transformation: tables, chairs, clothes, the street, even the trees and the landscapes.”
The instant of revelation came like the gift of sight to a blind man. Giacometti’s exultation brings back memories of the sixteen-year-old artist in the first glory of his powers. In some vital way he seems virtually to have been reborn. But bliss was now conditioned by somber insights into the nature of vision, for the innocence of youth had been lost long since. Still, somber insights could contribute to clarity of purpose. Having seen that he had been blind, Alberto saw that looking, not thinking, gave access to reality. By concentrating his vision for nearly ten years on what was aesthetically next to nothing, though at the same time humanly almost everything, he had purified perception to such an extent that the act of seeing could become the basis of a style.
When Giacometti entered the theater, he was committing himself to a situation set apart from direct experience of reality but devised for the credibility of the visible. This comes easily to most people in the blind belief that things are not only as they appear but can remain stable in an uncertain world. Giacometti had long been peering beyond stable appearances in order to analyze, if possible, the sensory process itself, and adapt its means to the end of his creative purpose. This effort, of course, would never be done, and had to be sustained by conceptual confrontations with the unknown. These could not be commanded by the artist but came in their own good time, turning to account his visual vicissitudes with a will of their own. The movie theater was the perfect place for an encounter of this kind, because the seeming credibility of the visual challenges the power of vision to make use of illusion not only as an aspect of reality but as an access to further perception. There is a lovely logic in the fact that the images which suddenly appeared unintelligible to Giacometti remained perfectly intelligible to his neighbors, who were by the same token so transformed in the sight of the artist that only the full resources of illusion could hope to register his vision of their reality. For years he had been making and remaking minuscule sculptures which to
most people looked like meaningless specks. Now a convulsion within the matrix of appearances would compel him to make his sculptures lifelike by making them look only like themselves.
Night is the title of a sculpture which represents first evidence of the breakthrough into a new realm. Fragile, skeletal, it represents a solitary figure in the arrested act of walking, feet apart, hands raised, body bent slightly forward, featureless, immobile, poised upon a rectangular pedestal. Night is the entire work, not the figure alone. As in all of Giacometti’s sculpture, the pedestal is not only an aesthetic device but also a conceptual necessity, for it represents the world in which the figures stand on their own. This slender, attenuated being was a direct descendant of the tiny figurines, isolated in space as they had been, but now clearly on the way to a more positive destination.
The sculptor set to work with exuberance. After a decade of baffling labor, he had seen how to fuse the rediscovered energy of youth with the disciplined vision of experience in order to activate —again, but not in the same way—the expressive potentialities of his innermost self. He worked from his imagination and memory but also directly from life. That, too, was a change, and all in all, in every way, it seemed that change begot change.
As usual, Alberto turned to those close to him. Diego first. He posed for paintings and drawings, and it was just like old times. The artist also made drawings of Sartre and Aragon. He worked on a bust of Simone de Beauvoir, painted the portrait of his friend Tériade, editor of Verve, began a bust of Marie-Laure de Noailles and one of Picasso. In addition, he kept working on sculpture of less specific inspiration and fought its old tendency to grow tiny. “I swore to myself,” he said, “no longer to allow my statues to shrink even an inch.” He could not have made that vow with much conviction a few months before.