As Giacometti grew older, he took to living and working later and later in the night. He disliked the dark, but he loved the hours of darkness. With increased prosperity, he was more able to frequent haunts that cater to people whose desires don’t like the light of day. In Montparnasse there was no lack of these. Alberto knew them all, and they became very familiar with him. In addition to large cafes like the Dome and the Coupole, there were numbers of smaller bars. The one most favored by Alberto was called Chez Adrien. In a side street off the boulevard, it had opened during the war, a shady time for going into business. Its decoration was baroque and ostentatious, with torsade columns and a curvaceous bar. Prostitutes who preferred, or were privileged, not to work directly from the sidewalk were welcome Chez Adrien. There were quantities of nightclubs as well, places like La Villa, tawdry and noisy, where vulgar simulacra of the high life were obtainable for a high price. There were also a number of obscure little hotels that catered to anonymous clients and transient tastes.
From his nocturnal wanderings Giacometti returned home late, when Annette would already have been asleep for hours with the light burning beside the bed. He did not necessarily join her even then. Having worked through the beginning of the night, he would now sometimes work until the end, waiting for dawn before going to bed, exhausted. The work that kept him from his rest was almost always sculpture. It consisted of redoing, reshaping, re-creating sculptures already in the process of creation. All were works made from memory or imagination. No model sat or stood before him during those solitary sessions at five or six o’clock in the morning. He was alone with his work, absolutely in touch with it, not only
through his eyes but especially through his fingers. His fingers traveled up and down, back and forth upon the surface of those sculptures as if with a will of their own. Every touch made every work at every moment different, a thing not necessarily better, but new, which had never existed before and which by its metamorphosis embodied the principle of creation. The sense of touch, of being touch with reality, of having the feeling of things as they are, the tactile experience in all its implications, is at the basis of our relation with ourselves and with the world. All these implications were joined in the contact of Giacometti’s fingers with his clay. Kneading, gouging, pressing, caressing, carving, smoothing, the artist activated and liberated his most profound urges and feelings. He transmitted them to the texture of his sculptures so that in addition to being images these would exist as surfaces, because the surfaces of works of art open directly upon their most obscure but illuminating depths. In those lonely dawns, while his fingers coursed interminably over the clay, Giacometti was at one with his self.
At 7 a.m. sometimes Diego came into the studio and found his brother still at work, wan with fatigue, wreathed in the smoke of innumerable cigarettes, so absorbed in what he was doing that he seemed to be elsewhere, having left behind him only the sculptor’s fingers to go on and on with their solitary task. Diego would say, “What are you doing? Go to bed.” Alberto would seem surprised, as if wakened in the course of a dream that turned out to be true, which it did. Come back to himself, he would wearily do as his brother bid him.
A routine like that was far from healthy. The artist suffered from ill-defined complaints and pains. Some, though, were too easy to diagnose, especially the hacking smoker’s cough. He warned himself: Smoke not so much! But by the early fifties he was smoking forty cigarettes a day. He began to be troubled by chronic fatigue, consequence of late nights exacerbated by little rest. Luckily, however, he had an exceptionally robust physique, inherited from forebears used to climes more trying than Montparnasse. Still, the punishing routine took its toll. At fifty, Alberto could have passed for sixty. The lines of his face grew deeper, and his flesh was the color of clay.
The answer to all complaints was a visit to Dr. Theodore Fraenkel. An incompetent physician, Fraenkel intended to be an efficient friend. He probably discerned the cause of Alberto’s various ailments, and saw that they were too serious to be taken seriously by a medical man. He prescribed aspirin and let it go at that, taking the opportunity to treat himself to some of Giacometti’s tonic conversation.
If Picasso had been uneasy during the summer of 1950, when it looked as though the conflict in Korea might turn into another world war, his nerves were steadied before the end of the year. In October, he attended a Congress for Peace organized in England by the Communist Party. In November, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. In January 1951, he painted a good-sized picture entitled Massacre in Korea. A political statement intended to decry American intervention in that country, it was meant to depict the slaughter of innocent and defenseless civilians by inhuman men at arms, bringing to the cause of rightful compassion the prestige of great art. It is a far cry from the humanitarian grandeur and enraged creativity of Guernica, and by comparison seems but a faint bleat in the pandemonium of political propaganda. As a formal production, it makes facile use of aesthetic devices long since done to death by the painter. That is its truest image of violence. Something had happened to Picasso. He was now a changed man, and artist. This was not the first time he had allowed himself to be manipulated, and his art to be used for political purposes. Posters of his so-called Dove of Peace had been plastered onto half the walls in Europe. Common sense might have warned that so conspicuous a display of principle could come home to roost one day. But Picasso had set out to soar above every storm, and his flight could not be renegotiated in midair lest he be brought low like a common mortal. His comrades in high places, however, were not his equals in the sphere of art. He surrounded himself with mediocre sycophants and third-rate artists, none of whom could remind him that moments of major attainment were no longer at hand. Georges Braque, who had shared such moments forty years before, was heard to say: “Picasso used to be a great artist, but now he’s only a genius.” In 1953, when
Stalin died, Aragon asked Picasso to make a commemorative portrait of the deceased dictator. He complied. The portrait was published, along with reams of ignominious lamentation, beneath a hortatory headline: What We Owe to Stalin. But the party regulars didn’t like it, and Picasso was rudely rebuked for want of respect. The uproar must have sounded brazen to ears addicted to adulation, but the artist kept his peace.
Giacometti’s visits to the studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins had become progressively less frequent, and then stopped. Whereupon Picasso began appearing regularly, though always unexpectedly, at the rue Hippolyte-Maindron. His preferred hour was noon, when Alberto would just be awakening, not yet prepared to face the day, much less a challenging, crafty visitor. Too shrewd to expect obsequiousness from the sculptor but too dependent on it to go without, Picasso seems to have come to Giacometti’s studio to test his welcome in a place where, in fact, he must have known it was no longer valid. He had stopped laughing behind Alberto’s back, and spoke of his efforts with sharp-eyed admiration, saying that they represented “a new spirit in sculpture.” When he came to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron, however, the works he chose to admire were invariably the worst, the ones half-finished or nearly destroyed, which he would praise with great gusto, crying, “The best thing you’ve ever done!” If Alberto was annoyed, it can only have been by the artlessness of the ploy. Knowing Picasso, though, he would not have expected him to let bad enough alone.
One day when the two men were together in Giacometti’s studio, Christian Zervos arrived unannounced, bringing with him an Italian collector named Frua de Angeli, whom he hoped to coax into buying some of Alberto’s work. This was at a time when a sale could still be important. Having been for years intimate with both artists, the Greek editor thought to turn to advantage the presence of the world’s most prestigious painter by having him express before a tentative purchaser his admiration for the works of their mutual friend. Pointing to one of the pieces in the studio, he enthusiastically expanded on its merits, then turned to Picasso and said, “Isn’t that so?” Picasso kept mute. Zervos tried again. Again Picasso kept silent. A third and yet a fourth time the surprised but
persistent editor attempted to extract a testimonial from the painter. To no avail. Picasso sat in stony silence, and his ostentatious refusal to accord his endorsement had the predictable effect. Zervos should have known better. Picasso, too.
In November of 1951, having had a good visit with his mother in Stampa, Alberto went on to the South of France with Annette to visit his friend Tériade, the other Greek editor, who owned a modest villa at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Thrilled by the profusion of flowers so late in the year, he wanted to make drawings of them all, but there were calls to be made. They went to see Matisse, who received them in bed but ebulliently kept them for three hours of enthralling conversation. The next day they went to see Picasso, now living with his mistress and their two young children in a small, ugly house on a hillside set back from the coast. Picasso also received his callers in bed, as he was suffering from an attack of lumbago. The similarity to Matisse stopped short of his humor, which was bad. He picked Alberto as the target for his petulance, saying, “You don’t like me as much as you used to. You never come to see me anymore.” Alberto protested that the frequency of his visits was no fair gauge of friendship, since he did not live on the Riviera and traveled little. Picasso didn’t care. If his friends were true, they came to see him. If not, what were they? Alberto’s presence in Picasso’s bedroom at that moment being apparently irrelevant, Picasso glared sullenly at his visitors, who were nonplused. Alberto made protestations, Picasso shrugged. An altercation ensued. It was the first open dispute ever to have occurred between the two artists. Both had violent tempers. The onlookers didn’t know where to look.
Then Picasso performed one of those abrupt, unpredictable pirouettes of style so typical of him. He extended an invitation. What a lovely thing it would be, he said, if Alberto came to stay with him there in Vallauris. That would be proof of friendship. A wonderful idea. Why not begin the visit at once? Tériade could go straight back to Saint-Jean and fetch Alberto’s suitcase. As for Annette, if her presence was required, she could go to some hotel in Cannes, which was only a few miles away, or Antibes, which was even closer. Alberto’s own lodging, though he may never have
known this, would have been a dank room in the basement, where Picasso had recently lodged the newly remarried Eluard and his ailing bride. The invitation, of course, was the crudest kind of taunt. Picasso gleefully pressed Alberto to accept. Twenty years before, when they had first met, Alberto had wanted to make sure Picasso saw that he was not on his knees. Picasso had seen, had appreciated, but his craving to see people in that posture had not yielded to the years but only become more arrogant, and now he wanted a show of force to prove he could make Giacometti comply with a condescending caprice. It would not do. Though easy to anger, Alberto possessed immense reserves of self-control. He excused himself from accepting Picasso’s invitation, and the visit lamely concluded with a poor pretense that amicable entente remained unimpaired.
The friendship between the two artists ended on that day. They had had strong feelings for each other, however. These did not automatically go away when friendship went. Picasso was too prodigious a phenomenon for anyone who knew him to become indifferent to him. Alberto did not stop talking about him, though what he said was severely critical. A year before the imbroglio at Vallauris, for example, after a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, he had had this to say: “Picasso altogether bad, completely beside the point from the beginning except for Cubist period and even that half misunderstood. French artist illustrator journalistic. Dubout, etc., but worse. Ugly. Old-fashioned vulgar without sensitivity horrible in color or non-color. Very bad painter once and for all.”
This was his judgment. It was final, and through the years to come he repeatedly confirmed it. One day, for example, he declared: “Picasso is certainly very gifted, but his works are only objects. If Picasso discovered African masks, that is because his origins were in the world of masks, that is to say, objects. Certain masks or dolls from Africa are very beautiful, but that is all. They are, so to speak, stagnant. There is no evolution in them. It is the same for the painting of Picasso. That is why—without pursuing a
single course of work to develop it—Picasso constantly changes his course. There is no progress in the world of objects. It is a closed world.”
The sculptor and the painter still saw each other occasionally, however, when Picasso came to Paris. Alberto tried to avoid the meetings, and went out when he sensed that Picasso might be planning to find him in. But he was vulnerable, having only Diego to protect him. Something drove Picasso to seek out the other artist, something, perhaps, akin to a suspicion that what he sought was a virtue which no man can procure from a mere mortal. If so, that was why Giacometti put upon their rare encounters as good a face as he could. Some years later, when Picasso exhibited recent work at Kahnweiler’s gallery, Alberto politely attended the opening. A number of sculptures were shown. Picasso asked Giacometti’s opinion of them. They were fine, all fine, Alberto said. Suspecting the reply to be a politesse, Picasso insisted, pressing particularly for appreciation of a painted bronze of a goat’s skull and a bottle with flowers. He had guessed shrewdly. Alberto admitted that he didn’t admire it. Picasso asked why. Alberto tried to explain, while Picasso tenaciously defended his work. Creative ideals so divergent could never be reconciled, especially now that friendship had gone out of the equation. But the two artists talked hard, though courteously, for close to an hour. Then Giacometti pleaded urgent business elsewhere and left Picasso in the company of his acolytes. The one stray from the flock, though, being the most precious, who should Alberto find on his doorstep when he reached home but Picasso. It is sad to think what he may have expected to gain by carrying his argument onto the home ground of the unbeliever. But he insisted. And it must have been hard to say no to a man whose insistence seemed to implicate him in the undoing of his own faith.
The two saw each other rarely thereafter.