3. THE PAINTINGS OF GIACOMETTI*
From the back of the room where I was sitting at the Sphinx, I could see several nude women. The distance that separated us (the glossy wood floor seemed insuperable even though I wanted to walk across it) impressed me as much as did the women.1
THE RESULT: four inaccessible figurines balanced on the edge of a vertical background formed by the floor. Giacometti painted them as he saw them—from a distance. Still, the four women have an arresting presence. They seem to be poised on the floor, ready at any moment to drop down upon him like the lid on a box.
I have often seen them, especially in the evening, in a little place on the Rue de l’Echaudé, very close and menacing.
Distance, far from being an accident, is in his eyes part and parcel of every object. These whores, twenty steps away—twenty impossible steps away—are forever outlined in the light of his hopeless desire. His studio is an archipelago, a conglomeration of irregular distances. The Mother Goddess against the wall retains all the nearness of an obsession. When I retreat, she advances; when I am farthest away, she is closest. The small statue at my feet is a man seen in the rear-view mirror of an automobile—in the act of disappearing; moving closer to the statue is to no avail, for the distance cannot be traversed. These solitudes repel the visitor with all the insuperable length of a room, a lawn, or a glade that none would dare to cross. They stand as proof of the paralysis that grips Giacometti at the sight of his equal.
It does not follow, however, that he is a misanthropist. His aloofness is mixed with fear, often with admiration, sometimes with respect. He is distant, of course, but man creates distance while distance has no meaning outside human space. Distance separates Hero from Leander and Marathon from Athens but not one pebble from another.
I first understood what distance is one evening in April, 1941. I had spent two months in a prison camp, which was like being in a can of sardines, and had experienced absolute proximity; the boundary of my living space was my skin; night and day I felt against my body the warmth of a shoulder or a bosom. This was not incommodious, for the others were me.
That first evening, a stranger in my home town, having not yet found my old friends, I opened the door of a café. Suddenly I was frightened—or almost; I could not understand how these squat, corpulent buildings could conceal such deserts. I was lost; the scattered patrons seemed to me more distant than the stars. Each of them could claim a vast seating area, a whole marble table while I, to touch them, would have had to cross over the “glossy floor” that separated us.
If they seemed inaccessible to me, these men who were scintillating comfortably in their bulbs of rarefied gas, it was because I no longer had the right to place my hand on their shoulders and thighs or to call one of them “knucklehead.” I had re-entered middle-class society and would have to learn once again to live “at a respectable distance.” My attack of agoraphobia had betrayed my vague feeling of regret for the collective life from which I had been forever severed.
The same applies to Giacometti. For him distance is not a voluntary isolation, nor even a withdrawal. It is something required by circumstances, a ceremony, a recognition of difficulties. It is the product—as he himself said1—of forces of attraction and forces of repulsion. He cannot walk a few steps across the glossy floor that separates him from the nude women because he is nailed to his chair by timidity or by poverty; and he feels at this point that the distance is insuperable because he wants to touch their lush flesh. He rejects promiscuity, the fruit of close proximity, because he wants friendship, love. He dares not take for fear of being taken.
His figurines are solitary, but when placed together, no matter how, they are united by their solitude and transformed into a small magical society:
On observing the figures which, to clear away the table, had been set at random on the floor, I discovered that they formed two groups which seemed to correspond to what I was looking for. I mounted the two groups on bases without the slightest change….
One of Giacometti’s scenes is a crowd. He has sculptured men crossing a public square without seeing each other; they pass, hopelessly alone and yet together; they will be forever lost from each other, yet would never lose each other if they had not sought each other. He defined his universe better than I possibly could when he wrote, concerning one of his groups, that it reminded him of
a part of a forest observed during the course of many years … a forest in which trees with barren, slender trunks seemed like people who had stopped in their tracks and were speaking to each other.
What is this circular distance—which only words can bridge—if not negation in the form of a vacuum? Ironic, defiant, ceremonious and tender, Giacometti sees space everywhere. “Not everywhere,” you will say, “for some objects are in contact.” But Giacometti is sure of nothing, not even that. Week after week he was captivated by the legs of a chair: they were not touching the floor. Between things, between men lie broken bridges; the vacuum infiltrates everything, each creature creates its own vacuum.
Giacometti became a sculptor because of his obsession with emptiness. About one statuette he wrote: “Me, rushing down a street in the rain.” Sculptors rarely fashion their own busts. Those who do attempt “self-portraits” study themselves from without, in a looking glass. They are the true prophets of objectivity. But imagine a lyrical sculptor: what he tries to reproduce is his inner feeling, the boundless vacuum that surrounds him, leaving him defenseless and exposing him to the storm. Giacometti is a sculptor because he wears his vacuum as a snail its shell, because he wants to explain all its facets and dimensions. And sometimes he finds compatible the modicum of exile that he carries everywhere—and sometimes he finds it horrifying.
A friend once moved in with him. Pleased at first, Giacometti soon became upset: “I opened my eyes one morning and found his trousers and his jacket in my space.” At other times, however, he grazes walls and skirts ramparts; the vacuum all around him portends a catastrophe, untoward events, avalanches. In any case he must bear witness to its presence.
* * *
Can he do this through sculpture? By kneading plaster, he creates a vacuum from a plenum. The figure when it leaves his fingers is “ten steps away,” and no matter what we do, it remains there. The statue itself determines the distance from which it must be viewed, just as courtly manners determine the distance from which the king must be addressed. The situation engenders the surrounding no man’s land. Each of his figures is Giacometti himself producing his little local vacuum. Yet all these slight absences that are as much a part of us as our names, as our shadows, are not enough to make a world. There is also the Void, the universal distance between all things. The street is empty, drinking in the sun; suddenly, in this empty space a human being appears.
Sculpture can create a vacuum from a plenum, but can it show the plenum arising from what was previously a vacuum? Giacometti has tried a hundred times to answer this question. His composition La Cage represents his “desire to abolish the socle and have a limited space for creating a head and face.” That is the crux of his problem, for a vacuum will forever antedate the beings that inhabit it unless it is first surrounded by walls. The “Cage” is “a room that I have seen. I have even seen curtains behind the woman…” On another occasion he made “a figurine in a box between two boxes which are houses.” In short, he builds a frame for his figures, with the result that they remain at a certain distance away from us but live in the closed space imposed on them by their individual distances, in the prefabricated vacuum which they cannot manage to fill and which they endure rather than create.
And what is this framed and populated vacuum if not a painting? Lyrical when he sculptures, Giacometti becomes objective when he paints. He tries to capture the features of Annette or of Diego just as they appear in an empty room or in his deserted studio. I have tried elsewhere to show that he approaches sculpture as a painter since he treats a plaster figurine as if it were a person in a painting. He confers on his statuettes a fixed, imaginary distance. Inversely, I can say that he approached painting as a sculptor since he would like to have us assume that the imaginary space enclosed by a frame is a true void. He would like to have us perceive through thick layers of space the woman that he has just painted in a sitting position; he would like for his canvas to be like still water and for us to see the figures in the painting as Rimbaud saw a room in a lake—as a transparency.
Sculpturing as others paint, painting as others sculpture, is he a painter? Is he a sculptor? Neither, both. Painter and sculptor because his era does not allow him to be both sculptor and architect; sculptor in order to restore to each his circular solitude and painter in order to replace men and things in the world—that is, in the great universal void—he finds it convenient to model what he had at first hoped to paint.1 At times, however, he knows that only sculpture (or in other instances only painting) will allow him to “realize his impressions.” In any case two activities are inseparable and complementary. They allow him to treat from every aspect the problem of his relations with others, whether distance has its origin in them, in him, or in the universe.
* * *
How can one paint a vacuum? Before Giacometti it seems that no one had made the attempt. For five hundred years painters had been filling their canvases to the bursting point, forcing into them the whole universe. Giacometti begins by expelling the world from his canvases. For example, he paints his brother Diego all alone, lost in a hangar, and that is sufficient.
A person must also be separated from everything around him. This is ordinarily achieved by emphasizing his contours. But a line is produced by the intersection of two surfaces, and an empty space cannot pass for a surface. Certainly not for a volume. A line is used to separate the container from the content; a vacuum, however, is not a container.
Is Diego “outlined” against the partition behind him? No, the “foreground-background” relation exists only when surfaces are relatively flat. Unless he leans back against it, the distant partition cannot “serve as a background” for Diego; in short, he is in no way connected with it. Or rather he is only because man and object are in the same painting and must therefore maintain appropriate relations (hues, values, proportions) for conferring on the canvas its unity. But these correspondences are at the same time erased by the vacuum that interposes itself between them.
No, Diego is not outlined against the gray background of a wall. He is there, the wall is there, that is all. Nothing encloses him, nothing supports him, nothing contains him; he appears all alone within the vast frame of empty space.
With each of his paintings Giacometti takes us back to the moment of creation ex nihilo. Each painting restates the old metaphysical question: Why is there something rather than nothing? And yet there is something: this stubborn, unjustifiable, superfluous apparition. The painted person is hallucinatory because presented in the form of an interrogative apparition.
* * *
But how can the artist place a figure on his canvas without confining it? Will it not explode in empty space like a fish from the depths on the surface of the water? Not at all. A line represents arrested flight, a balance between the external and the internal; it fastens itself around the shape adopted by an object under the pressure of outside forces; it is a symbol of inertia, of passivity.
Giacometti does not think of finitude as an arbitrary limitation, however. For him the cohesion of an object, its determination are but one and the same effect of its inner power of affirmation. “Apparitions” affirm and confine themselves while defining themselves. Somewhat as the strange curves studied by mathematicians are both encompassing and encompassed, the object encompasses itself.
One day when he had undertaken to sketch me, Giacometti expressed surprise: “What density,” he said, “what lines of force!” And I was even more surprised than he since I believe my features to be weak and ordinary. But the reason is that he saw each feature as a centripetal force. A face is forever changing, like a spiral. Turn around: you will never find a contour—only a plenum. The line is the beginning of negation, the passage from being to non-being. But Giacometti holds that reality is pure positivity, that there is being and then suddenly there no longer is any, but that there is no conceivable transition from being to nothingness.
Notice how the multiple lines that he draws are inside the form depicted. See how they represent intimate relations between being and itself; the fold in a garment, the wrinkle in a face, the protruding of a muscle, the direction of a movement—all these lines are centripetal. They tend to confine by forcing the eye to follow them and leading it always to the center of the figure. The face seems to be contracting under the influence of an astringent substance, giving the impression that in five minutes it will be the size of your fist, like a shrunken head. Still, demarcation of the body is missing. At times the heavy mass of flesh is demarcated vaguely, slyly by a blurred brown nimbus somewhere under the tangly lines of force—and sometimes it is literally unbounded, the contour of an arm or a hip being lost in a dazzling play of light.
We are shown without warning an abrupt dematerialization. For example, a man is shown crossing his legs; as long as I looked only at his head and bust, I was convinced that he had feet. I even thought that I could see them. If I look at them, however, they disintegrate, disappear in a luminous haze, and I no longer know where the void begins and where the body ends. And do not think that this is the same as one of Masson’s attempts to disintegrate objects and give them a semblance of ubiquity by scattering them over the whole canvas. If Giacometti fails to demarcate a shoe, the reason is not that he believes it to be unbounded but that he counts on us to add its bounds. They are actually there, these shoes, heavy and dense. To see them, we need only refrain from viewing them in their entirety.
To understand this procedure we need only examine the sketches that Giacometti sometimes makes for his sculptures. Four women on a socle—fine. But let us examine the drawing. First we see the head and neck sketched in bold strokes, then nothing, then an open curve encircling a fixed point—the belly and navel; we also see the stump of a thigh, then nothing, and then two vertical lines and, further down, two others. That is the whole thing. A whole woman. What did we do? We used our knowledge to re-establish continuity, our eyes to join together these disjecta membra. We saw shoulders and arms on a white paper; we saw them because we had recognized a head and torso.
The members were indeed there, though not represented by lines. In the same way we sometimes apprehend lucid, complete ideas that are not represented by words. The body is a current flowing between its two extremities. We are face to face with the absolute reality, the invisible tension of blank paper. But does not the blankness of the paper also represent empty space? Certainly, for Giacometti rejects both the inertia of matter and the inertia of absolute nothingness. A vacuum is a distended plenum, a plenum and oriented vacuum. Reality fulgurates.
* * *
Have you noticed the superabundance of light strokes that striate his torsos and faces? Diego is not solidly stitched but merely basted, in the language of dressmakers. Or could it be that Giacometti wishes “to write luminously on a dark background”? Almost. The emphasis is no longer on separating a plenum from a vacuum but on painting plenitude itself. And since it is at once unity and diversity, how can it be differentiated unless divided? Dark strokes are dangerous, for they risk effacing being, marring it with fissures. If used to outline an eye or encircle a mouth they may create the impression that there are fistules of empty space at the heart of reality. The white striae are there to serve as unseen guides. They guide the eye, determine its movements, dissolve beneath its gaze. But the real danger lies elsewhere.
We are aware of the success of Arcimboldo—his jumbled vegetables and cluttered fish. Why do we find his artifice so appealing? Is it perhaps because the procedure has long been familiar to us? In their own way, have all painters been Arcimboldos? Have they not fashioned, day after day, face after face, each with a pair of eyes, a nose, two ears and thirty-two teeth? Wherein lies the difference? He takes a round cut of red meat, makes two holes in it, sets in each of them a white marble, carves out a nasal appendage, inserts it like a false nose under the ocular spheres, bores a third hole and provides it with white pebbles. Is he not substituting for the indissoluble unity of a face an assortment of heterogeneous objects? Emptiness insinuates itself everywhere: between the eyes and eyelids, between the lips, into the nostrils. A head in its turn becomes an archipelago.
You say that this strange assemblage conforms to reality, that the oculist can remove the eye from its orbit or the dentist extract the teeth? Perhaps. But what is the painter to paint? Whatever is? Whatever we see? And what do we see?
Take the chestnut-tree under my window. Some have depicted it as a huge ball, a trembling unity; others have painted its leaves individually, showing their veins. Do I see a leafy mass or a multitude of leaves? I must say that I see both, but neither in its entirety, with the result that I am constantly shifting from one to the other. Consider the leaves: I fail to see them in their entirety, for just as I am about to apprehend them they vanish. Or the leafy mass: just as I am about to apprehend it, it disintegrates. In short I see a swarming cohesion, a writhing dispersion. Let the painter paint that.
And yet Giacometti wants to paint what he sees just as he sees it. He wants the figures at the heart of their original vacuum on his motionless canvas forever to fluctuate between continuity and the discontinuity. He wants the head to be at once isolated because sovereign and reclaimed by the body to serve as a mere periscope of the belly in the sense that Europe is said to be a peninsula of Asia. The eyes, the nose, the mouth—these he wants to make into the leaves of a leafy mass, isolated from each other and blended all together. He succeeds, and this is his supreme triumph.
How does he succeed? By refusing to be more precise than perception. He is not vague; he manages rather to suggest through the lack of precision of perception the absolute precision of being. In themselves or for others with a better view, for angles, his faces conform rigidly to the principle of individuation. A glance reveals that they are precise down to the most minute detail; furthermore, we immediately recognize Diego or Annette. That in itself would be sufficient, if required, to cleanse Giacometti of any taint of subjectivism.
At the same time, however, we cannot look at the canvas without uneasiness. We have an irrepressible urge to call for a flashlight or at least a candle. Is it a haze, the fading light of day, or our tired eyes? Is Diego lowering or raising his eyelids? Is he dozing? Is he dreaming? Is he spying? It happens of course that the same questions are asked at popular exhibitions, in front of portraits so bland that any answer is equally appropriate and none mandatory.
The awkward indetermination of popular painters has nothing in common with the calculated indetermination of Giacometti, which might more appropriately be termed overdetermination. I turn back toward Diego and see him alternately asleep and awake, looking at the sky, gazing at me. Everything is true, everything is obvious; but if I bend my head slightly, altering my viewpoint, this truth vanishes and another replaces it. If after a long struggle I wish to adopt one opinion, my only recourse is to leave as quickly as possible. Even then my opinion will remain fragile and probable.
When I discover a face in the fire, for example, or in an inkblot, or in the design of a curtain, the shape that has abruptly appeared becomes rigid and forces itself upon me. Even though I can see it in no other way than this, I know that others will see it differently. But the face in the fire has no truth while in Giacometti’s paintings we are provoked and at the same time bewitched by the fact that there is a truth and that we are certain of it. It is there, right under my nose, whether I look for it or not. But my vision blurs, my eyes tire, I give up. Then I begin to understand that Giacometti overpowers us because he has reversed the facts in stating the problem.
A painting by Ingres is also instructive. If I look at the tip of the odalisk’s nose, the rest of the face is light and soft, like pinkish butter interrupted by the delicate red of the lips; and if I shift my attention to the lips, they emerge from the shadows, moist and slightly parted, and the nose disappears, devoured by the absence of differentiation in the background. I am not bothered by its disappearance, however, for I am secure in the knowledge that I can always recreate it at will.
The reverse holds true in the case of Giacometti. To make a detail seem clear and reassuring all I need do is refrain from centering my attention on it. My confidence is reinforced by what I see through the corner of my eye. The more I look at Diego’s eyes the less they communicate to me; but I notice slightly sunken cheeks, a peculiar smile at the corners of the mouth. If my obsession with truth draws my attention down to his mouth, everything immediately escapes me. What is his mouth like? Hard? Bitter? Ironical? Wide-open? Sealed? Against this, I know that his eyes, which are almost beyond my range of vision, are half-closed. And nothing prevents me from continuing to turn, obsessed by the phantom face that is constantly being formed, deformed and reformed behind me. The remarkable part is its credibility. Hallucinations also make their appearance on the periphery only to disappear when viewed directly. But on the other hand, of course….
* * *
These extraordinary figures, so perfectly immaterial that they often become transparent and so totally, so fully real that they can be as positive and unforgettable as a physical blow, are they appearing or disappearing? Both. They seem so diaphanous at times that we do not even dream of questioning their features; we have to pinch ourselves to learn whether they really exist. If we insist on examining them, the whole canvas becomes alive; a somber sea rolls over them, leaving only an oil-splotched surface; and then the waves roll back and we see them glistening under the water, white and naked. But their reappearance is marked by a violent affirmation. They are like muffled shouts rising to the top of a mountain and informing the hearer that somewhere someone is grieving or calling for help.
The alternation of appearance and disappearance, of flight and provocation, lends to Giacometti’s figures a certain air of coquetry. They remind me of Galatea, who fled from her lover under the willows and desired at the same time that he should see her. Coquettish, yes, and graceful because they are pure action, and sinister because of the emptiness that surrounds them, these creatures of nothingness achieve a plenum of existence by eluding and mystifying us.
Every evening an illusionist has three hundred accomplices: his audience and their second natures. He attaches to his shoulder a wooden arm in a bright red sleeve. His viewers expect him to have two arms in identical sleeves; they see two arms, two sleeves, and are satisfied. Meantime a real arm, clothed in black and invisible, produces a rabbit, a card, an explosive cigarette.
Giacometti’s art is similar to that of the illusionist. We are his dupes and his accomplices. Without our avidity, our gullibility, the traditional deceitfulness of the senses and contradictions in perception, he could never make his portraits live. He is inspired not only by what he sees but also, and especially, by what he thinks we will see. His intent is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretense at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men.
At the Grévin Museum one may feel irritated or frightened by the presence of a wax guardian. Nothing would be easier than to construct elaborate farces by capitalizing on that fact. But Giacometti is not particularly fond of farces. With one exception. A single exception to which he has consecrated his life. He has long understood that artists work in the realm of the imaginary, creating illusions, and he knows that “faked monsters” will never produce in spectators anything other than factitious fears.*
In spite of his knowledge, however, he has not lost hope. One day he will show us a portrait of Diego just like all others in appearance. We shall be forewarned and know that it is but a phantom, a vain illusion, a prisoner in its frame. And yet on that day, before the mute canvas we shall feel a shock, a very small shock. The very same shock that we feel on returning late and seeing a stranger walking toward us in the dark.
Then Giacometti will know that through his paintings he has brought to birth a real emotion and that his likenesses, without ever ceasing to be illusory, were invested for a few instants with true powers. I hope that he will soon achieve this memorable farce. If he does not succeed, no one can. In any case, no one can surpass him.
* Alberto Giacometti (1901- ) belongs to an artistic Swiss family. Unchanged by success, he has worked since 1927 in a two-room studio in the industrial section of Paris. His paintings are for the most part studies of himself, his wife Annette and his brother Diego. His best known sculptures are probably Three Men Walking (1949), Walking Quickly Under the Rain (1949), and Man Crossing a Square on a Sunny Morning (1950). Known primarily as a surrealist in the early 1930’s, he went through a long period of experimentation and emerged in the 1940’s as one of the world’s most controversial sculptors. Defining art as “an absurd activity,” he has evolved elongated figures expressing nihilism and despair, terror and doom.
1 Letter to Matisse (November, 1950).
1 Letter to Matisse (1950).
1 For example, his Nine Figures (1950): “I had wanted very much to paint them last spring.”
* Sartre’s first philosophical work was a study of the imagination, published in France in 1936.