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| Alberto Giacometti in his studio |
With very few exhibitions in the summer months, as I often do in August, I visited a permanent collection that I didn't previously know. The Fondation Giacometti opened in 2018, following the transposition of Giacometti's studio to a newly renovated building, two down from Simone de Beauvoir's residence on the periphery of the Cimitère de Montparnasse.
The small space is beautifully laid out with Giacometti's tiny reconstructed studio - including the walls themselves - just inside the door on the ground floor. Visitors to the 2009 exhibition at the Pompidou Center will recognize the grafittied walls and messy space. The studio is interesting not just for what it shows us about Giacometti and his way of working, but also for its peek into postwar Paris. The tiny, windowless studio reminds us of a time when Paris was populated by people of all different classes, not as it is today, overrun with the urban well-to-do. Giacometti worked in a 20 square meter space with no running water, electricity, or other creature comforts. It was at a time when artists and writers sat in restaurants, brasseries, cafes with friends. For Giacometti, these included his brother Diego, philosophers such as Sartre, and of course, all the girlfriends. There is so little space in the studio that Alberto would have done little other than sculpt, paint, draw and think. Even though there was a bed in the corner, the rickety old frame with a thin mattress could not have been conducive to long, restful sleep.
As I have written elsewhere, this is a body of work that is all about being trapped - by the body, by the Giacometti cage, the stages on which the figures are standing, sitting, the frames of the paintings. This sense of being enclosed and incarcerated is encapsulated by the minimal space of the studio, leaving cramped and cluttered working spaces. Looking at the studio and accompanying photos, it's easy to imagine how difficult it was to pass between the stool and the table as both were permanently covered with tools, plaster remnants, bits of wire and other treasures. Just like the figures who are are stuck to their plinths, going nowhere, Giacometti must have been wedged in place as he created.
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| Alberto Giacometti, Interior, 1954-57 |
And yet, as we reflect on the art, and particularly, the drawings on the upper floor, we see the dynamism and motion that continues to propel the artist's mind and his art. The sketches reveal a man who was always thinking, drawing, doodling, going over and over again, scraping away, erasing through adding another layer. In addition, the unfinished-ness of so many of the works, Giacometti's inability to let the works go off into a life of their own, contributes to the image of an artist whose mind was in constant motion.
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| Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man I, Walking Man II, Walking Man III Installation View |
I have always been awed by Giacometti's work because it is so wildly different from what everyone else was doing around him in his postwar moment. Giacometti was engaged in a process of taking away, always removing, whittling the body down to its most fundamental shape, emphasized by the curvature of the spine, the form of the figure, no flesh, just form. In a realization of the very opposite, I saw at the Fondation how committed he was to Egyptian and Greek sculptural form. For example, in the three Walking Man sculptures, we see the ultimate expressions and explorations of form as they move from erect to bending forward at the hips. Yes, seeing the three in a series, we appreciate the bronze figure propelled into walking motion, but most radically, the figures represent a striding away from the principles of classical sculptural form into a walking figure of experimentation whose body is less than perfect, unsure of itself, unfinished, and yet, still stuck on its plinth,
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