Giacometti was well known and honored abroad long before official attention was paid him in the country where he lived all his adult life. No French museum mounted any exhibition of his work during his lifetime, nor did the Museum of Modern Art in Paris own more than a couple of sculptures from his hand at the time of his death. Alberto did not lust after honors; he tended to avoid them. But an artist honest with himself does not hunger for neglect, either.
In 1955, three large and important retrospective exhibitions of Giacometti’s works were organized in foreign museums, one in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, one in London at the gallery of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the third in the museums of three important cities of West Germany. These three foreign exhibitions brought added confirmation that Alberto Giacometti was one of the foremost living artists. Art critics and commentators on contemporary culture wrote at length about the inventiveness and originality of his achievement, though there was still a tendency to interpret it as an expression of twentieth-century angst and existential solitude.
One interesting aspect of the three foreign exhibitions is that they took place simultaneously, all in June or July of the year, which means that the artist had been far more prolific than he liked to admit. He was given to saying that his studio was empty, that there was nothing in it worth seeing, when it was often so crowded that little space was left for him to work in. The crowd would have grown still more inconvenient if he had been less destructive. What he prized was the experience of the instant, not the evidence of it. He was fearful of facility. The ease and
rapidity with which he could fashion a lifelike image in clay, paint, or pencil was prodigious. He was afraid of that power. Looking for what was impossible, he could expect to benefit from his failure to find it. Each effort was thus enriched by a concern for discovery rather than a craving for achievement.
Official indifference in his country of adoption cannot have pleased Alberto. It must have seemed peculiar then, and particularly French, when in the autumn of 1955 he received an official invitation to exhibit a selection of his works not in France but in the main gallery of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale the following June. In his letter of acceptance he said that no invitation had ever given him such pleasure, and we may assume that it was in proportion to the significance of representing his adopted country in a place that represented for him personally such an extraordinary complex of associations. He had refused to represent his real homeland in Venice, implying that he wished to be seen only in the perspective of an international viewpoint. His mother country could be constraining, like his flesh-and-blood mother. But Switzerland was not going to be slighted by her celebrated son. He proved it by agreeing that a large retrospective exhibition be held in Bern at the same time as the Biennale. This would oblige him to reserve numerous works which might otherwise have been shown in Venice, and so he declined to be a candidate for any prize awarded by the Venetian jury.
The famous Women of Venice, so-called because they were executed with the Biennale expressly in mind, ten in all, were created in a single sustained rush of energy during the first five months of 1956. Working with the same clay on the same armature, as he often did, Giacometti concentrated on a single rigidly erect figure of a nude woman, her body slender, attenuated, head held high, arms and hands pressed to her sides, feet outsized and rooted to the pedestal. She was modeled after a female figure in his mind’s eye, not from a living woman. In the course of a single afternoon this figure could undergo ten, twenty, forty metamorphoses as the sculptor’s fingers coursed compulsively over the clay. Not one of these innumerable states was definitive, because he was not working toward a preconceived idea or form. If pleasantly surprised
by the look of what his fingers had done, he would ask Diego to make a plaster cast, the business of a few hours. Alberto’s purpose was not to preserve one state of his sculpture from amid so many. It was to see more clearly what he had seen. In plaster, the revelation was more luminous than in clay. Once a figure existed in plaster, however, it stood apart from the flux in which it had developed. It had achieved an ambiguous permanence and made an apparent claim for survival. If the artist allowed it to survive, to be cast in bronze, this was by reason of curiosity and comparison, not as potential evidence of achievement.
That is how the ten Women of Venice came into being. They were directly descended from the tall, slender female figures that Giacometti had been making for nearly a decade. Although he was to make many more such figures in the years to come, and some of them very much larger, these ten may be seen as a summation of his findings in this particular form. It is unlikely that their Venetian destination had anything to do with their appearance. Though they were not modeled directly from life, they are characteristic of Alberto’s effort to make sculpture lifelike. To him, the most important part of a figure was the head. “When you think of a person, you think of the face,” he said. The heads of the female figures are disproportionately small, their bodies elongated, and the feet, as always, disproportionately large. Aesthetically, the two disproportions make for a single effect of ascending vitality. When a spectator’s attention is fixed upon the head of one of these figures, the lower part of her body would lack verisimilitude were it not planted firmly upon those enormous feet, because even without looking directly at them, one is aware of their mass, which counterbalances the smallness of the head, and between the two poles the remote but proximate body springs to life with an instantaneous surge. The eye is obliged to move up and down, up and down, while one’s perception of the sculpture as a whole image becomes an instinctual act, spontaneously responding to the force that drove the sculptor’s fingers. Comparable to the force of gravity, it kept those massive feet so solidly set on the pedestal that they affirmed the physicality of the figure as the one aspect of his creativity which the artist could
absolutely count on, all the rest being subject to the unreliability of the mind’s eye. On the score of those outsized feet, Giacometti was sometimes asked why, in fact, he made them so large. “I don’t know,” he replied, and the answer was good, because the strength of the artistic effect lay not in knowing but in doing.
Jean Genet, whose intuition Alberto honored, understood that and said as much, maybe more, when he wrote: “Strange feet or pedestals! I will return to this. Quite as much (in any case, at first sight) as to any requirement of sculpture and its laws (understanding and rendition of space) it seems here that Giacometti—and may he forgive me!—performs an intimate ritual by virtue of which he will give the sculpture an imperious, earthly, feudal basis. For us the effect of this basis is magical … (One may tell me that the whole figure is magical, yes, but the apprehension, the bewitchment which comes upon us from that fabulous clubfoot is not of the same order as the rest. Frankly, I hold that there is a cleavage here in the workmanship of Giacometti: admirable in both regards, but contrary. By the head, the shoulders, the arms, the pelvis he enlightens us. By the feet he enchants us.)”
Lifelike, though not meant to be likenesses, the Women of Venice represent one more step in the artist’s evolution toward work based on the direct experience of life. He was becoming increasingly conservative in his outlook as he became more and more uncompromising in his ambition. Works such as The Chariot, The Cage, The Forest, The City Square, which he had made only six or seven years before, works which corresponded to an inward view of man’s experience and which expressed the artist’s relation to his innermost self, were no longer necessary to his development. With the entire accumulation of his stylistic skill—wrought from a sheer disbelief in its efficacy—Giacometti was moving toward a greater and greater simplicity of means, which showed that he was going, as he had always meant to go, toward a confrontation with what was most difficult. When the going got hardest, he found help in drawing. From these years date scores of superb drawings, studies of interiors in Stampa and Paris, chairs, tables, pots and bottles, portraits of Diego, Annette, his mother, all executed with quick, dazzling, but skeptical mastery.
Painting was on the way to becoming interchangeable with sculpture as a means of responding to the visible. Advantages and adversities of one activity were brought to bear with enhanced insight upon the other. It would be tendentious to say which gave the fullest measure of his greatness. The paintings of the mid-fifties plainly marked the trend toward more exacting figuration, especially in portraits, where the search for definitive form generated greater verisimilitude. The same search in sculpture coincided with a series of busts of Diego, some very distorted, thin, and elongated, with salient features accentuated, in order to strike a likeness by way of what was most striking. Seen in succession as subliminal images of an ideal Diego, these busts appear to form a schema ever more profound and far-reaching, inasmuch as the sculptor’s very first bust had been a portrait of his brother.
Early in June, Alberto and Annette traveled together to Stampa. After a few days there, Alberto left his wife and mother in each other’s company and went on to Venice, where a number of his Women already stood waiting in the French Pavilion. In his suitcase he had brought along a few of their more recent, smaller sisters, and he was present to make sure that each one should be placed in relation to the others in a position as nearly perfect as possible. Placement as a physical and metaphysical problem had never ceased to obsess him. The search for the perfect situation obviously involved infinity, but that was just the challenge Alberto wanted. After a week, though, he hurried from Venice before the Biennale opened. His eye was wanted elsewhere.
The retrospective exhibition in Bern numbered forty-six sculptures of all periods, including five plaster casts of the latest female figures, plus twenty-three paintings and sixteen drawings. Of the works exhibited, the earliest had been executed almost forty years before. So it was a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career to date, the most comprehensive that he had yet had occasion to see. Seeing it, he cannot have failed to perceive from what a distance, from what a radically different point of departure, he had come. It must have looked like something of a watershed.
Annette had come from Stampa to Bern to be with her husband for the opening of the exhibition. The man who had organized it was a young art historian and curator named Franz Meyer, whose wife, Ida, was the daughter of Marc Chagall. Both had been friends of Alberto for years and gladly seized the opportunity for a public demonstration of esteem. Though Giacometti disliked honorific occasions, he recognized the need for ceremonial formalities which had their social benefit in the deceptive virtue of seeming natural. Also, to be sure, there must have been satisfaction in the knowledge that any honor done him would give pleasure to his mother, and that her pleasure was vital to his own, which meant that for her sake he must be entitled to a fair amount of admiration. He gladly agreed to attend the opening of the exhibition and go afterward to the party which Franz and Ida Meyer were planning to give in their apartment.
Annetta Giacometti was not present that June evening to preside over the display of her son’s genius. Her traveling days were done, and she would never leave Bregaglia again. But she presided over the exhibition. In the Kunsthalle hung four portraits of her to prove it. Annette, on the other hand, was present to enjoy her husband’s success. The question, however, of her readiness to enjoy it had not yet been put to the test. This was just the beginning of public recognition of Alberto as an artist of worldwide stature. We can assume that Annette had hoped for such recognition, and that her hope may have been part of her dowry. But there is no reason to believe she foresaw that Alberto’s success might ever tax her endurance. In being Madame Giacometti, to be sure, there was little, if anything, that the girl from Grand Saconnex could have foreseen.
The mood of the Meyers’ party was buoyant. The exhibition had been superbly installed. People were impressed, excited. A. small nation had brought forth a great artist, and in 1956 that fact could still seem to project upon the future the promise of the past. Alberto was enjoying himself. Though he did not look for opportunities to shine, he knew that he could be brilliant and entertaining. When the occasion offered, he sometimes enjoyed
outdoing everything it offered by way of high-spirited exuberance. Being Giacometti, in short, was something he had always looked forward to, and to have succeeded in becoming Giacometti brought moments of joy. So his response was wholly in character when in the course of the evening an attractive young woman made her way to his side to congratulate him and express her heartfelt admiration: he impulsively kissed her on both cheeks. Whereupon, to the consternation of all, Annette started shrieking with rage, rushed to an adjoining room, and remained there for the better part of an hour, while the guest of honor endeavored to placate her. The party was ruined.
Friends of Alberto and Annette had seen for some time that their marriage was falling short of perfection. This was one of the first public demonstrations of that fact. Everything about the evening had been conceived for, or by, Alberto, and artists were said with some reason to be motivated by a longing to attain honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women. To seal the triumph with a kiss, however, chance had not chosen the cheek of the artist’s wife. He, however, had never made a secret of his resolve to live as he saw fit, marriage or no marriage. That resolve, indeed, had been the condition of his troth.
Annette’s tantrum may have been irrational. But was the appeal to reason to be made solely on Alberto’s grounds? He had led her on. He had led her specifically into his studio, where she had surrendered entirely to his demands, albeit transfigured by them. It was as a woman, though, that she longed to be made much of, not as a work of art. And there were material grounds for grievance, too. Of these, the most appreciable was money. Alberto feared it. Leonardo da Vinci once said: “As for property and material wealth, these you should ever hold in fear.” Alberto did. He refused to be compromised by the triviality of ownership and possessions, and felt constrained to live by an ascetic scruple so pure as to look almost saintly.
The hard fact was, though, that he had begun to have a great deal of money. Clayeux and Maeght brought envelopes full of it. Pierre Matisse’s agent in Paris brought more. The accumulation became positively embarrassing. Alberto didn’t
know what to do with it. He gave a lot to Diego, who continued to squirrel it away. He gave handfuls to the girls he met in the bars and nightclubs of Montparnasse. To his mother he sent more than enough, lovely reminder of the days when his tiny figurines had seemed to promise so little. To Annette, however, he gave the bare minimum, which is odd. As her husband he apparently assumed that he could see her needs with a view to what best suited her condition, and what he appears to have seen was that it should suit his wife to live as he did. Annette didn’t see it that way at all. Having made the best of things when the going was poor, why should she not expect to do the same when it got rich? She didn’t want much, only to live in a good semblance of comfort as her parents and relatives and friends lived, as people lived, in short, in the background from which she had so earnestly longed to escape. She couldn’t get away from that, nor did she want to. Why, even Sartre and the Beaver, those ferocious loathers of the bourgeois, were set up in perfectly respectable comfort.
What Annette wanted was a household, nothing elaborate, but decently comfortable. She wanted a kitchen, bath, an indoor toilet, hot and cold running water, automatic heat. The kind of lodging which could reasonably be called a home. That could never be said of 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, with its coal stoves, cold water, and outdoor toilet. It happened about this time that a little yellow house of three or four rooms and a bit of garden came up for sale directly on the other side of the street. Annette begged her husband to buy it. He refused. She pleaded and insisted. He was adamant.
Annette would also have liked fine clothes. Though no longer constrained to wear hand-me-downs from Patricia Matisse or Simone de Beauvoir, she dressed inexpensively and simply, while Patricia wore exquisite Chanel suits and even the once-dowdy Beaver was to be seen in elegant frocks and fur coats. It is possible that Annette’s personality might have shown to less advantage had she been able to appear as a woman of fashion. The American industrialist and collector, G. David Thompson, assiduously cultivating the artist while amassing his works, once gave Annette a bolt of costly brocade to make a gown. Alberto took it and nailed
it to the wall of their bedroom. He was determined that his wife should be modestly attired, although he cannot have expected her to dress with an indifference to comeliness as absolute as his.
Alberto’s apparel was so much a part of his personality as to seem almost a state of mind rather than an outfit of clothes. It was always the same: a tweed sports jacket, gray or brown in color, with a pair of gray flannel trousers, the latter usually too long and always baggy, held up by a worn leather belt. Never, or almost never, was he to be seen without a necktie. Whether he was in the studio or out, the necktie was at his collar. When the weather turned chilly or rainy, he wore a gabardine raincoat. He did not own a hat, but sometimes in the rain he would pull up the back of the coat to cover his head. Painting or sculpting, eating hard-boiled eggs in the café, or dining at expensive restaurants with Pierre Matisse or Dave Thompson, Alberto always wore the same clothes. They usually looked as if he’d slept in them on a park bench the night before. Still, he made efforts to be neat. Before going out of an evening, whether to the Coupole or to Lasserre, he would brush his clothes, give attention to his shoes, and at the sink in the corner of the bedroom scrub hands and face. The efforts were in vain because unmotivated by genuine care for the outcome.
Annette complained. With little money to spend on her wardrobe, she was neat, clean, and becomingly, if simply, attired. Alberto was hopelessly untidy, and his finances no longer excused it. She scolded. It was another issue of contention. When his hair grew too long, she cut it. To do anything about the clothes was less easy. Still, every now and then, once a year on average, Alberto would reluctantly get into a taxi and drive to the Boulevard des Capucines near the Opéra to a shop called Old England. After half an hour he would come out wearing a brand-new outfit —jacket, trousers, raincoat, necktie, scarf, all identical to the cast-off things left behind. A few weeks later, only the most diligent observer could see the change.
Monsieur and Madame Arm had continued for some time to disapprove of Alberto, and of their daughter’s relationship with him, despite the accommodation of marriage. They had felt that
no good was likely to come of it and deplored the artist’s failure to father children. What altered their point of view, and radically reversed their displeasure, was fame. When they began to read about Alberto Giacometti in the newspapers, when the neighbors started making inquiries about the celebrated artist, when it became evident that their little girl was the wife of a great man, the parental attitude was altered as if by magic. The shabby, dusty good-for-nothing who had been Annette’s undesirable lover was transformed by fame into an admirable and enviable son-in-law. The Arms began to feel properly proud of their daughter’s marriage, and the prosaic irony was that their pride coincided with much of what had begun to trouble it.
Even in a position of financial, professional, and artistic success, Alberto obstinately persisted in the posture of failure. Maeght, Skira, and others wanted to publish books about his work. He put them off. When admirers grew persistent, he became evasive. Proposals for exhibitions went unanswered. Diego turned away would-be interviewers and photographers. Annette could not understand why success should be spurned. Other artists weren’t so contrary. Picasso lived in luxury on the Riviera, and was driven about by his son Paulo in a Hispano-Suiza the size of two taxis. Braque had a mansion in Paris, a country estate, and rode in a Rolls-Royce. Max Ernst owned a large establishment in the Loire Valley. Likewise, Calder. André Masson had a fine apartment in Paris and an attractive summer home at Aix-en-Provence. Balthus had his chateau. Why should Alberto Giacometti—and his wife—have to live in seeming penury and genuine discomfort? She could not understand. She could only criticize and complain. What Annette failed to see was that Alberto’s self-denial was a quest for affirmation. His preference for privation was a resolve to enjoy life’s greatest luxury: spiritual freedom. To Annette, the quest looked like self-indulgence, the resolve like pride. They were looking at different objectives from different points of view. Conflict ensued.
The relationship between husband and wife began to seem entirely polemical. Alberto’s hostility toward women—long since incorporated into memorable works of art—showed itself in violent
denunciations of Annette’s foolishness, pettiness, and blindness. She retaliated as best she could, which was by rage or tears. There were loud, painful scenes, often in public. When beside himself with vexation, Alberto forgot his whereabouts and remained unaware of startled glances from neighboring tables. This only made his harsh criticism more wounding and embarrassing. Annette cried often. But she held her own. If she sensed that there might be something irrational in her husband’s antagonism, that it might even in some obscure way be directed against himself, she was able to turn such awareness to advantage. In their altercations there was no sign of indifference.
Annette, however, was not the only one who wept. Despite his ruthless lucidity, Alberto was neither a blackguard nor a fool. Though he saw women as creatures to be feared even as they were worshipped—preferably from afar—he recognized each one as a human being whose integrity deserved to be kept inviolate. Then, perhaps, he hated them, and himself, even more because he had accepted the compromise of marriage to one of them. There, however, he was. He could not blind himself to what he had done. He knew Annette had been used by him, by his work, by his ambition. Even more ruthless than his lucidity was his remorse at having been used himself in his willingness to use her. Forgiveness did not come with knowledge. He shed real tears, and as he wept he would murmur over and over again, “I’ve destroyed her, I’ve destroyed her, I’ve destroyed her.” Maybe that assumption made him less forgiving toward them both. He accepted the entire responsibility for what had happened. Upon occasion, his acceptance could be almost unbearable. For both.
One day Alberto and Annette and a couple of their friends were sitting in the cafe at the corner of the rue Didot, chatting, when the conversation brought forth the self-evident notion that an artist is a person condemned to be alone in the world.
“Like me,” said Alberto.
“What about me?” Annette protested.
“Oh, you,” Alberto said. “I only married you because you’re named Annette like my mother.”
A terrible thing to say. And to hear. But it was more terrible
still to have, and be able, to say it. It took for granted a burden of awareness that few men can bear. But Annette had never been made for that burden. Alberto lived for his art. He had no choice. Annette had chosen. She, too, lived for his art, if only because that was the way to live for him, and so the day of reckoning had to be even more thankless for her than for the artist.
She also complained about being indispensable to her husband’s work. She had reason. For more than a decade, she had been posing for him incessantly, a cruelly punishing routine. He insisted on the immobility of the model, who sometimes had to stand naked for hours in the drafty studio, where it was in addition her duty to tend the stove. Indispensable, however, she was. She not only provided him with a model always at hand, patient and submissive, but offered the complete, uninterrupted familiarity with a naked body which is essential to true originality in its representation. Still, the work was exhausting. The model could confuse her person with the picture or sculpture as a cause of the artist’s frustration and rage when he found himself unable to reproduce the figure before him exactly as he saw her. Sometimes he would scream in fury or groan in despair. But even as the model was essential to the effort, she was expendable. The figure and features of another person could do as well, producing the same frustration and rage, presenting the same problems. The model was everything and nothing, an appearance rather than a person, required on both counts to accept with composure the outcome of the artist’s pursuit. It was a predicament made to test the self-possession of strong personalities, and one to which Alberto sometimes added peculiar twists.
He disliked hair. “Hair is a lie,” he used to say. It distracted one’s attention from the essential, the head, the expression, the gaze. One day he declared that he could no longer endure seeing Annette with hair. She would be obliged to shave her head. Dismissing the suggestion as absurd, she exclaimed, “Oh, Alberto!” with a mixture of girlish amusement and feminine annoyance. Just that reaction was needed to pique Alberto’s tenacity. He set about insisting that Annette shave her head to please him, advancing reason after reason to show that it was normal and imperative
for her to agree, ridiculous and wrong for her to refuse. He promised to buy the most sumptuous and expensive wigs. He enumerated other alluring inducements. She resisted. The more she resisted, the more he insisted. It was no fair match, and as it went on, the weaker of the two seemed to be physically wilting away. “All right, Alberto, all right,” she said wearily at last. “If you want me to, I’ll have my head shaved.” She seemed utterly spent. But Alberto did not hold her to her word.
Their marriage had become like a sea of ambivalence, with deeps and shallows, uncharted currents, whirlpools, and tides, upon which arose sudden tempests, where squalls could come and go in a minute. It offered fair winds, too, zones of sunlit calm, and occasional isles that looked like paradise to passersby. In short, it was like many a marriage. It would have been, that is, if Alberto had not been Alberto Giacometti.
Diego watched what was happening between his brother and sister-in-law with concern, though for the time being with equanimity. Annette seemed a tolerable wife for Alberto. When there were storms, he did not ask anybody else to endure the inclemency of the weather. Occasionally the three Giacomettis still went to a nearby restaurant to talk and eat and joke and smoke, while Alberto made marvelous drawings all over the paper table covering. Then it could still seem like old times.
Change, however, had come, was irreversible, and would grow greater as they grew older. One of its principal agents was a newcomer to their lives, and as if to demonstrate the far-reaching extent of his role, he came from the other side of the world.