Annette was furious, her anger fed by failure to have seen that Caroline might amount to anything until after the thing was paramount. But how could Annette, or anyone else, have foreseen that it would come to this? Alberto’s preoccupation with prostitutes, all his talk about their being goddesses, pure and awe-inspiring: it had always seemed a sort of craze that somehow served the creative act. Nothing to be carried over into real life. But here was this whore sitting in the studio, and Alberto looking at her as if she were seated on a throne. It was ridiculous. Worse, it was embarrassing. In the mise-en-scène of passion, Annette did not intend to relinquish the lead to a girl of the streets. There were violent scenes and recriminations.
It did not help matters to have Yanaihara on hand to console her. The Japanese professor had come once again to spend the summer—it was 1960—with his friends in Paris. Fancy his surprise when he found that they were three instead of two! His surprise was clearly a pleasant one, and that made it doubly disagreeable for Annette. The important flow of feeling did not take place in the bedroom but in the studio, where Yanaihara accepted and admired everything and everyone. Including Caroline. The philosopher from Osaka found himself fascinated by her. How far his fascination led to intimate appreciation of the new Giacomettian adventure is anybody’s guess.
Jealous, resentful, petulant, Annette was not neglected. The men whose attentions she claimed did not cease paying attention to her. They were present day and night. It was the integrity of their attention that worried her. She wanted it undivided. Yanaihara was, if anything, more often alone with her than formerly,
being no longer Giacometti’s only model. Caroline posed at night. Those hours were left free for Annette and Yanaihara to enjoy as they pleased. Little enjoyment was possible so long as Annette knew Alberto was face to face with the other woman. And she suspected that later Yanaihara would join them at some bar or nightclub, which, in fact, he frequently did.
She became increasingly irascible. She knew she was working herself into a state and that it would do no good to her or anybody else. But she couldn’t help it. The more she realized that she shouldn’t complain, the more she went on complaining. She smoked too much, drank too much, and took too many pills. She didn’t know what to do, and it was too late to undo anything.
The principal portrait of Yanaihara which Giacometti executed that summer was a sculpture. It, too, suggests a break with the past, a foreshadowing of things to come. The lofty head is shown in full, three-dimensional volume. The person, the personality of the model is present. No remoteness between what the eye has seen and the hand done. The outcome is a copy of a human head, nothing more but absolutely nothing less, into which the artist has compressed forty-five years’ experience of making works of art look like what he looked at. Still, he had no illusions about real results. “If I could actually make a head as it is,” he said, “that would mean one can dominate reality. It would be total knowledge. Life would stop.” But that was the direction he was taking. “It’s curious,” he added, “that I can’t manage to make what I see. To do that, one would have to die of it.”
When Yanaihara went back to Japan at the end of the summer, he left behind a situation altered as radically as the one which he himself had altered by his first appearance four years before. Nobody could say that that alteration was his doing, or his fault. A peculiar circumstance, however, attracts attention. Of the many portraits which Giacometti executed of the Japanese professor, whether in paint or in bronze (six or eight casts of the sculpture were made), not one was presented to the model as a remembrance of experiences shared. He received a quantity of drawings, some of which may have been likenesses of him. But he was offered none of the works which caused the artist so much
difficulty and changed his creative point of view. This seems to suggest that some aspect of the difficulty may have proceeded from the model’s person, and from his appearance in the artist’s life as well as in the artist’s eye. Alberto can never have doubted that Yanaihara would happily accept a portrait of himself. The gift would have seemed not only a handsome gesture but a welcome pledge to the greatness of their adventure. When Annette said as much, her husband brusquely dismissed the observation.
In 1960, Giacometti completed the large sculptures which he had conceived to decorate the Chase Manhattan Plaza. His concept had called for a larger-than-life-size woman, a monumental head, and a life-size walking man. Four versions of the female figure were executed; a single head, clearly a likeness of Diego; and two walking men. These last were the most impressive. Six feet tall, they possess a truly heroic dimension and represent the sculptor’s climactic expression of male dynamism. Craggy, spindly, but rugged, in their static stride they convey the potential power, elemental activeness, and physical stamina of masculinity. Some of the earlier figures of walking men, those in The City Square, for example, are evocative of uncertainty, of apprehension as to their goal. Not these two. They definitely know where they’re going, to what avail and what purpose. Though almost sexless and featureless, they are unmistakably male. They are men with a bold, positive look: in the fixity of their gaze seems to dwell a conviction that seeing is attaining.
The monumental head is just that: a head of massive proportions which needs to be seen from a distance in a grand spatial context, and which suffers thereby when compared to smaller, finer fellows. The likeness to Diego seems more an effect of habit than of intent, while the sculpture as a whole has an air of hurry. The best that could be said of this head is that Giacometti made it and that it is the largest one he ever made.
So also for the four figures of women. These are the largest sculptures of Giacometti’s career, and they are among the least accomplished of his creations. The problem is precisely in their size, which was determined not by the artist’s involvement with
an aim of his own but by the requirements of a site he had never seen and could not visualize. All he knew was that in order to stand up against the gigantic backdrop of the skyscraper his sculptures would have to be big. As he made them so, they got out of hand, because he subordinated his customary manner of seeing figures at a situated distance to a “nostalgia for the idea of having a large sculpture out of doors.” It is true that large sculpture ideally pleads for unlimited space in which to hold its own. No sense of such space entered Giacometti’s studio. It was barely large enough for him to work and breathe in, barely, that is to say, life-size. Clambering up and down his stepladder as he worked on these figures, the sculptor could not possibly have had the same physical relation to them that he had had with all his other works. So long as he had his feet on the ground, it seems he was able to keep his sculpture where he wanted it, but it got away from him when he had to get up in the air to come to grips with it. The four women are not possessed of the same remoteness or surrounded by the same numinous aura as the majority of their smaller sisters, of whom one might almost say that the tiniest are the greatest. These four are excessively present in their presence. The sculptor himself was aware of it. They suffered from a complete confusion of dimensions, he confessed, adding that it was impossible to do anything for a given space without first having seen that space.
Consequently, although the sculptures existed, having been cast in bronze so that the artist could see them with a definitive eye, he refused to submit them to the Chase Manhattan committee. He declared that he would prefer never to make another, single sculpture, rather than send these bronzes to New York. Time tempered his feelings. He never spoke highly of the four standing women but did not disown them, either. He was perfectly willing to see one or more of them henceforth in all important exhibitions, where their merits could be measured by observers less passionate than he.
That was the end, or as good as the end, of his concern with the Chase Manhattan Plaza. The nostalgia persisted, however, for the idea of large sculptures placed out of doors. It would come to
fruition a few years later in a site more suitable than the island of Manhattan: on a sunlit hilltop in southern France, at Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
While others pursued other aims, Aime Maeght had gone right along with his grandiose scheme to build a museum on his estate overlooking the Mediterranean. Plans had been drawn by an architect, Josep Lluis Sert. Land was being cleared. As the flamboyant dealer’s resolve shaped up, the attitude of his entourage did likewise. Most of Maeght’s associates praised their employer. Even Guiguite, constrained by conjugal self-interest, went along. Not Clayeux. He felt bound by no constraint. The prince pored over plans for his pantheon, and the courtier predicted it would be gimcrack. The rationale of Clayeux’s disapproval is perplexing, because Maeght’s glorification had been his business for a long time. Perhaps the mere proximity of power can be spoiling. If so, the eventuality of estrangement might tell, especially should it coincide with the apotheosis of the prince. Sad to say, it did.
Old and ugly, Alberto had said of himself, how could a girl young and beautiful like Caroline really care for him? He believed what he said. The mirror, negligible as it may have been, proved that he no longer resembled the radiant young man loved by Flora Mayo in 1927. He had spared himself neither hard times nor hard work, and it showed. But he knew what to make of appearances. People had been fascinated by him all his life, and he knew how to make himself fascinating. To that extent, which was great, he had never grown old. The real beauty of youth is the conviction of limitless possibility, and Alberto had that till the end.
Elusive, deceptive, ambiguous as she was—and she was all of that and more—yet Caroline was never in doubt concerning the sincerity of her feelings for Alberto. And he was far too cunning an appraiser of people not to see that she truly cared for him. What he was looking for in her, however, need not have been readily apparent to anyone. She didn’t know what to make of him. Being herself a matrix of cross-purposes, she could not conceive of a personal universe obeying laws and creating reality. Even less could she dream that she might contribute anything to
such a universe. Her understanding, however, was not required. What was wanted was her identity. But that, as luck would have it, was almost impossible to put one’s finger on. Alberto’s interest puzzled her and sometimes made her fretful. “You are much too screwed up,” she told him. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m very unhappy just the same. You’re too complicated. I don’t know what you want.”
No doubt the artist tried to reassure, to make himself uncomplicated and understandable. How much he could explain will always be debatable. They talked and talked. The semi-literate prostitute and the supremely cultivated artist found that they had great confidences to exchange while she posed night after night, seated on the cheap rattan chair in Giacometti’s studio, surrendering herself entirely to his scrutiny. She never complained or grew tired but seemed really to enjoy it. When he gasped and moaned over his inability to paint her as he saw her, she said to herself, “That’s his pleasure.”
His pleasure was also to give her money. They both had everything to gain by it, especially the assurance that they were pleasing to each other. Caroline’s American car got out of order, smashed, stolen, or what-have-you, requiring replacement. She asked for a Ferrari. Lengthy discussions, debates, proposals, counterproposals ensued. Finally, Alberto bought, not a Ferrari, but a scarlet MG convertible roadster, a vehicle perfectly adequate for breathtaking flights in shady places. He never learned to drive, but he liked to go fast, and with Caroline he had a speed demon at the wheel.
One day a couple of men came to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron and told Alberto that he would have to give them some money. It was owing, they said, due to Caroline’s excessive expenditure of time in his studio. The artist immediately understood the kind of expense involved, being far better qualified, in fact, to address the issue than his two visitors. He invited them to come along to the nearby cafe, where they could have it out at leisure. The business was simple. Caroline’s person represented capital, and she was expected to convert it into profit. Hours spent posing for a shabby artist in a dingy studio netted no cash. But a man who
could afford to give a girl an automobile should be able to pay for her time at the going rate. Peeved by diminished returns, the pimps made no bones about their grievance. They had come to the right man. He was both able and willing to pay. Nobody as yet knew how much, which was well. However, he realized that a bit of haggling over the price was the least he owed to Caroline’s commercial dignity as well as to her exalted status in his own mind. They argued for a while. When the sum had been set, all three parted with the conviction that a profitable arrangement had been concluded. Giacometti’s conviction was well deserved, since he considered Caroline’s time equal in value to his own. For value received, it certainly seemed right that he should give what most men prized most, and give, perhaps, till it hurt.
While in prison, Caroline had conceived a curious longing. She decided she would like to do something artistic. Her whim hit upon the piano. After her release, she asked Alberto to find her a teacher. He turned to Rene Leibowitz, of all people, the man for whom Isabel had left him, who was happy to take Alberto’s forgiveness for granted by doing him a favor. Leibowitz had a pupil named Lawrence Whiffin, an aspiring young composer from Australia, whom he recommended as a capable teacher.
Caroline began her lessons with Whiffin, two per week, and from the first was an exceptionally unsatisfactory student. She knew nothing about music, had barely heard of Chopin, and had neither aptitude nor the self-discipline needed to develop it. Her teacher considered her shrewd and sensitive but at the same time an intellectual nonentity, without any learning or the least desire for education. She often failed to appear for lessons, usually without bothering to call. Whiffin found it infuriating to be involved with anyone so capricious, undependable, and undistinguished. However, he needed money, and money was the only subject that engaged his pupil’s attention. She evidently had plenty of it, and insisted on paying for lessons whether she had received instruction or not. She enjoyed flaunting the large sums she carried in her purse and tempted Whiffin with offers of loans, which he was too proud to accept. She also enjoyed talking about her friendship with a famous artist named Alberto Giacometti. But she
frequently remained mute and aloof. Her supposed desire for musical skill seemed the strangest thing about her. Exasperating, maddening as she was, Whiffin gradually found that in spite of himself he had become fascinated by her.
After some months, though already married, he discovered to his chagrin and amazement that he had fallen in love with his improbable pupil. Knowing little about her, he went to call on Giacometti in expectation of learning more. Alberto received him with courtesy, and listened with sympathy to his story. When asked where a girl of humble origin obtained large amounts of money, the artist replied, “Men give it to her.” He added that he himself was one of them, and that the others were admirers of well-established priority. This information does not appear to have troubled Whiffin any more than it troubled Giacometti. Perhaps, indeed, the composer was no less enthralled than the sculptor by Caroline’s aura of undefiled purity.
One day she appeared for her lesson, sat down, and after a period of pensive silence abruptly blurted, “I want to be loved.” Emboldened, Whiffin declared his feelings and attempted to offer physical proof of them. But his pupil coldly informed him that she had given voice to an abstract ideal, not an invitation. Only once, with languid condescension, did Caroline allow the unhappy young man to try to make love to her. The attempt was unsuccessful, the favor not conferred again.
Unable to be Caroline’s lover, Whiffin only loved her more, while the absurdity and vulgarity of his passion magnified its intensity. Beside himself, he couldn’t get over what he couldn’t have. Caroline came and went with regal nonchalance, punctuated by disdain when Larry’s ardor grew too pressing. At length, the desperate Whiffin thought he had had all he could take. He swallowed a bottle of pills and lay down to await the end, taking care, however, at the last moment to telephone his wife to say goodbye. He woke up in the hospital. Forgetting her own flirt with death, Caroline considered the abortive suicide conclusive proof of inadequacy and did not deign to visit the hospital. That was the end of their relationship. Alberto went at once to the young man’s bedside. A few words of human sympathy were the least the
artist could offer by way of apology for having introduced the young musician to his nemesis.
After being portrayed by Bonnard and Matisse, Guiguite thought it would be pleasing to pose for Giacometti, too. Willing to oblige, Alberto painted three canvases in the early spring of 1961. All show signs of haste, if not impatience. But the artist, as usual, caught a vivid likeness, and we can see the sharp-eyed shrewdness of the woman who had once sold vegetables from a barrow but now rode about in a Rolls-Royce. She had known him a dozen years and assumed she knew him well, yet one day she had a surprise. The door to the studio suddenly burst open while the artist and model sat engaged in their work. Both turned to look and found Caroline standing in the doorway. Guiguite, though acquainted with the young woman, did not feel that it was up to her to speak and kept silent. After a perfunctory glance in her direction, morover, Caroline took no further notice of Madame Maeght. She fixed her attention upon Alberto, who sat turned toward her on his stool, palette and brushes in hand, gazing back at her. Caroline did not come any farther into the studio but stayed in the doorway, motionless, staring at Alberto. He returned her stare. Neither of them moved or made a sound. As it continued in utter silence, the look that they gave each other began to seem a physical contact between them, a mingling and merging of selves in the most intimate way possible. It excluded not only the participation but even the presence of any other person. To such a degree that Guiguite began to feel uncomfortable, as if she were intruding upon something that denied her existence. And this look went on and on, while neither moved or said a word. It lasted ten minutes. Then Caroline turned and departed, closing the door behind her. Alberto gazed after her for a moment before resuming his work. Not a word had been spoken. After a time, conversation resumed between the artist and his model. He said nothing of what had happened. She felt that she had by chance been witness to the most consummate kind of contact that human beings can have.
Seeing and being were so much the same thing for Giacometti
that it was natural that from an early age the visual and the sexual had been intimately related. The fact was evident in his early work, particularly in the sculptures of the Surrealist period. As the evidence became less apparent in the artist’s work, perhaps it grew more telling in his life, gaining in expressive power thereby. The act of looking, and of looking on, was an expression of the unity between the visual and the sexual. It was no secret to people who knew Alberto well that he sometimes liked a third person present at moments of physical intimacy. Another man or another woman. It didn’t seem to matter much which. However, it would be very mistaken to see Giacometti as a mere voyeur. There was, in the first place, nothing secretive about his liking for looking. On the contrary. It was as open as open can be. The man who seeks fulfillment by observing the enactment of others’ satisfaction is making a ceremony of his failure to act. But that ceremony can become the ritual required to celebrate a more sublime order of success, by which the individual transcends himself, his mortal functions and desires, in order to be joined with an ideal which is also the ultimate design of sexuality.
Between Alberto and Caroline the sexual relationship per se had from the first been perfunctory. She was always willing, which was understandable. Alberto had an extraordinary aura of sexuality. But he repeatedly told Caroline that he couldn’t touch her because she was too pure. A virgin, a goddess, she was meant to be adored, not defiled. What happened, however, when others were present was another matter. They often went to an obscure hotel in the rue Jules-Chaplain called the Villa Camellia, where Alberto was able to see whatever he needed to see.
In the domain of the imaginary, there is no frontier between the visible and the tangible. To see is already to touch. Each experience asks its own kind of affirmation. Giacometti knew about Caroline’s relations with other men. The evidence of his eyes told him a lot. Her descriptions told the rest. Though he made an issue of his freedom from jealousy, the facts were somewhat otherwise. Not at all clear, but otherwise. He must have been fairly free of the jealousy for which he criticized Annette, but old friends were occasionally astonished to see the artist skulking
behind trees and cars on the Boulevard du Montparnasse to spy on Caroline in the cafes. He never ceased quizzing Abel, the bartender Chez Adrien, to learn the details of her comings and goings, as if the thing about her that he couldn’t put his finger on was the most important thing.
He wanted to possess one part of her that would belong to him alone. The rest obviously belonged to the one with the most all-embracing imagination. He wanted to own one piece of her anatomy, this piece by mutual consent to be his sole and inalienable possession. He was prepared to pay. He was, in fact, determined to pay. Only by paying the price could he be sure of the possession, and both knew it. The piece of Caroline he wanted to own was a part of her right foot, a very specific part: just above the heel, where two hollows are formed by the Achilles tendon. Some mythological supposition about that part being the most vulnerable may have quickened the purchaser’s desire with a notion that his ownership might confer immortality. Who knows?
Caroline was willing to sell. But neither party was qualified to appraise the real value of the merchandise. Alberto probably sensed that it was priceless. If so, he would have realized that Caroline had best be protected from such a dangerous inkling. But she was only interested in assets that could be spent. So the potential for haggling was even more promising than with the two pimps. The artist and the model enjoyed it. The sum they finally settled on was five hundred thousand francs, a thousand dollars at that time, an amount neither too large nor too small for extravagant outlay of the imagination.
Giacometti said: “One day while I was drawing a young girl something struck me: that is to say, all of a sudden I noticed the only thing that remained alive was the gaze. The rest, the head made into a skull, became equivalent to a death’s-head. What made the difference between death and the individual was the gaze … In a living person there is no doubt that what makes him alive is his gaze. If the gaze, that is to say life itself, becomes essential, there is no doubt that what is essential is the head.” One of the works of art which Alberto most admired was the Resurrection
panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Grünewald. In that fantastic picture, it is the gaze of the Saviour which dominates all. The miraculous vitality of His gaze affirms not only His return to life but the promise of life everlasting. Grünewald had seen how to make that promise tangible. Giacometti aspired to do as much, and his aspiration fixed principally upon Caroline as an embodiment of the possibility.
Even as the province of the creative act became increasingly concentrated, however, its consummation became increasingly difficult. It always had been so, but now the difficulty seemed to have become almost the substance of the artistic endeavor, a help rather than a hindrance. And Caroline gave her presence, her gaze, her stories, and her self to the difficulty.
“It becomes always more painful,” Alberto said, “for me to finish my works. The older I grow, the more I find myself alone. I foresee that at the last I shall be entirely alone. Even if, after all, what I’ve done till now counts for nothing (and it is nothing by comparison with what I would like to create), fully aware of having failed till now, and knowing from experience that everything I undertake slips through my fingers, I enjoy my work more than ever. Is there any understanding that? Not for me, but that’s how it is. I see my sculptures there before me: each one—even the most finished in appearance—a fragment, each one a failure. Yes, a failure! But there is in each one a little of what I would like to create one day. This in one, that in another, and in the third something that’s missing in the first two. But the sculpture of which I dream incorporates everything that appears isolated and fragmentary in these various works. That gives me a longing, an irresistible longing to pursue my efforts—and perhaps in the end I will attain my goal.”