Alberto Giacometti, L'Homme qui Marche, Fondation Giacometti @ 5, Rue Victor Schoelcher

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.

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. 

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,

Ellsworth Kelly, Fenêtres, Centre Pompidou

Ellsworth Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, November 1949

Although Ellsworth Kelly lived in France for six years as a young man, I don't think of his work as being particularly influenced by or of interest to the French. And yet, there it is, in pride of place on the 4^th floor of the Pompidou Centre. As I spent more time with the paintings, I began to see why Fenêtres/Windows would gets its own exhibition at the Pompidou. Kelly’s window paintings are both inspired by and representations of Parisian windows. This small exhibition is delightful and will be an inspiration to people interested in both representational and abstract painting.

Ellsworth Kelly, Window II, 1949

The Parisian window is something to look at, not through or inside. Kelly shows us the window frame as an aesthetic, complete with a formal geometry and a potential to cast shadows that skew that form. The small series of Kelly’s Window paintings, together with studies and preparatory sketches invite us look at Paris’s windows differently. In the earliest examples from 1949, Kelly paints and draws the wooden frames in black, filling the glass and what would be the surrounding building façade in a thick, matte white oil paint. In Window II (1949) Kelly’s hesitant thinking is revealed in the white painting over black lines on a linen support. The unevenness of the white field that represents glass is not something that we associate with Kelly. The painting becomes an off-white, cracked surface, making it more sensuous. The paint in Window II reveals traces of time inscribed as grains of dirt might tell of a shower of rain on a window. In these early examples, Kelly is not yet fully equating the window with painting, but rather, sees the window as an object to be painted, a surface to be looked at, and represented.

In these early examples, Kelly translates what he sees into painting, from one medium (reality) into another (painting). However, the one equation he begins to make between window and painting is in the use of wooden frame of the stretcher to “represent” the frame of the window.

Ellsworth Kelly, Window VI, 1950

As the exhibition continues, Kelly starts to broaden his perspective on the window. Windows are opened and closed, they are broken, come in all different forms; with shutters, looking like doors, with curtains, sash windows. He even finds windows where they are not, for example, in a construction belonging to the International University campus in Window VI (1950). At the centre of the exhibition is the Window. Museum of Modern Art Paris (November 1949). The window itself is shown in an accompanying photograph; covered in graffiti, painted over, cracked. Kelly’s representation removes the detail and in a frame that replicates the form of the window itself, he places a white and a grey canvas beneath. In this work, the wooden representation of the window frame is brought to the fore by the placement of the grey canvas behind it the frame. As a result, the painting as glass is also emphasized, rendering the canvas an optical field.

 

Ellsworth Kelly, White Square, 1953

There is mention in the flyer about Kelly’s attraction to the “anonymity of Egyptian art.” I am not sure what this means, but as he continues to paint and draw windows, the object of the window loses its identity; it starts to lack objecthood, and like glass, becomes an abstract shape. This could, of course, be called anonymous. Kelly also claims the “painting is a fragment of the visual world, where the third dimension is removed.” We might conclude that as windows become painting with the third dimension removed, the canvas represents glass and we are left looking at or through nothing. Then, we see the painting as object thanks to the markings (like paint on a canvas) such as dirt left by rain, cracks made by a stone, or reflections of something or someone that happen to find it as mirror. Accordingly, when the window becomes a wall for graffiti or a mirror for a person’s image, two dimensions return to three dimensions, the glass window to a thing.

Ellsworth Kelly, White over Black III, 2015

While I see the connection being made between the two halves of the exhibition, I am not convinced. In the second half, we see Kelly’s black and white paintings. Unlike the windows, works such as Black. Two Whites, 1953  are about looking with the object of the window (and the painting) removed. The question of what we are seeing shifts from “Am I looking at a window, a picture of a window, a painting, or an abstract work?” to “What is the relationship of the white field to the black?” or in a works such as the adjacent, White Square (1953) and Black Square (1953), “are they the same size? Or does my vision deceive me?” This uncertainty comes because the placement of each color changes our perception of the canvas. Similarly, in the most recent work on display, I am reminded that the emptiness and nothingness of white is never empty and nothing on the canvas. When I stand before White Over Black III, 2015, my shadow intrudes into the painting if it is lit from behind me and the slick white surface becomes a mirror. As a result the object and surface shifts, yet again, to a whole new phenomenon.

Picasso: Bleu et Rose @ Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Pablo Picasso, Autoportrait, 1906

Picasso is like Mozart; we think we know his work inside out. But in reality, we have seen a handful of paintings and drawings reprinted ad infinitum, quoted by other artists, bandied about, and then, often given a bad rap – even by me. For this reason, I resisted going to the Picasso: Bleu et Rose exhibition, currently on at the Musée d’Orsay for months. And now, I am dismayed at having taken so long to get there. The exhibition is magnificent, challenging all of the platitudes and assumptions that have circulated for years about Picasso's work. Even though the exhibition's focus is narrow—1900 – 1906—the period when Picasso was looking for his identity as a painter, these years tells us so much more about his prolific career as a painter who changed the way we see the world. In the huge display of works from all over the world at the Musée d'Orsay, we see the twentieth century master’s thinking evolve, from painting to painting, from idea to idea, across these productive and creative six years.

Pablo Picasso, Arlequin et sa compagne,  1901 

Pablo Picasso, La Buveuse d’absinthe, 1901 

These years, 1900 – 1906, when he came to Paris for the first time, were a period of experimentation and exploration for Picasso. Intriguingly, he actually visualizes his own search for identity as a painter in the works. He is repeatedly present in the form of a hand, a paintbrush, a palette or as we often see in his photographs of people visiting his studio, in the form of one his own paintings in the background. Alternatively, paintings such as Femme en chemise (Madeleine), 1905 show Picasso thinking on canvas. If we are to see the ambiguous shape of the woman's left arm indicates a change of mind as Picasso covers over and starts again. The many drawings, inks and drypoint sketches from the period also show Picasso thinking, preparing, resolving, putting not yet fully formed ideas on paper. 

Pablo Picasso, Femme en chemise (Madeleine), 1905

Because I am a guilty feminist, I have always believed that Picasso’s obsessive and often objectifying focus on the female body was somehow derogatory to women. Certainly, many of his portraits are of women, and he doesn't hold back from revealing their intimate body parts. However, again and again in this exhibition we see an artist obsessed with form and shape and their technical composition. The body as an erotically or sexually charged object seems to be secondary to his thinking. This reaches a crescendo in works such as Arlequin et sa compagne (1901) or the Hermitage Museum’s La Buveuse d’absinthe (1901) in which the length of the arms, the pose of the contemplative sitter and the otherwise grotesque hands are rendered in the interests of an enclosed sculptural form. In addition, the work's colour palettes are often determined, not by an emotional theme, but as a way to bring the modernist play on surface and perspective to the fore.

Pablo Picasso, Pierreuses au bar, 1902

This enclosure of the body by the hands out of proportion in La Buveuse d’absinthe is also a characteristic that we see from the beginning to the end of Picasso’s career. In such works, the elongated arms, bodies with sallow faces and meditative eyes are clearly indebted to El Greco. Certainly, the blue palette, the withdrawn figures and the resultant sense of transcendence that pervades these figures can only be explained through reference to El Greco. However, whereas El Greco distorts the body for religious or fantastical purposes, for Picasso the same figures are realist expressions of their contemporary isolation. 

Pablo Picasso, La Célestine, Barcelone, 1904

El Greco is not the only artist who influences Picasso’s work. In fact, in his search for a style he looks everywhere. In his paintings, visitors will see Cezanne’s uses of perspective and thick impasto brush strokes, van Gogh’s crazy lines, Toulouse Lautrec’s cartoonish caricatures of women he finds in the bars and clubs of Paris, the introspection of Manet, and the style of Monet. In the later works in the exhibition, we also recognize Ingres and his fascination for women, particularly seen from behind, in the bath houses. Similarly, in Picasso's paintings of women on the street, the impoverished, and imprisoned, we see Daumier’s social realist cartoons. Indeed, Picasso doesn't leave all this behind until he begins his cubist work from 1907 onwards.

Pablo Picasso, Toits de Barcelone, 1903

I haven’t yet said anything about blue. It is true that after the death of his dear friend Casagemas, the blue takes over his canvas entirely. The blue palette is often said to be indicative of Picasso’s depression in the wake of his friend’s death. Similarly, critics claim that blue is the colour of melancholy and grief on Picasso’s canvases at this time. However, the exhibition also demonstrates that Picasso turned to the blue-green shades even before his friend took his life. When he arrives in Paris and is excited and inspired by the artistic energy and experimentation all around him, Picasso picks up a blue paintbrush. The historical trajectory here, therefore, strongly suggests that we need to expand our interpretations of Picasso’s blue. I am not a Picasso scholar, and any ideas I have about this are pure conjecture. But, judging from Picasso: Bleu et Rose, it does seem that he chooses blue, and later rose, as a way to pursue his painterly concerns without the distraction of the impressionist (and later Fauvist) colours that are all around him at the time. Viewers will also note that Picasso’s blue remains a dusty greeny-bluish hue. It never takes on the brilliance or richness of the lapis lazuli that had been used so prolifically throughout the history of art. It is indeed an El Greco blue. However, it can’t be equated with El Greco’s use of the color because Picasso uses blue in so many  more different ways: in portraits, street people, for city scapes, lovers and jesters. And, as I say, Picasso brings all of this subject matter into his contemporaneous moment.

Pablo Picasso,  Acrobate à la boule, 1905

There is much more I could say about this exhibition—I haven't even mentioned his use of thick impasto paint in a challenge to the two-dimensionality of painting from the very beginning of his career, his exquisite manipulation of light, the omnipresent divisions in walls, cafes, indeed all the background spaces. And then there are all the possibilities for exploration that Picasso finds in the circus—his attraction to performance, but not on a stage, rather, in the backstage moments of reflection when the jester shows his humanity. To say nothing of Picasso's radicalization of the portrait. And there are many other extraordinary revelations to be had at Picasso: Bleu et Rose.  This exhibition is a must for anyone who thinks they have seen enough of Picasso's painting. Like me, you will come away with renewed excitement about the magic of this twentieth-century master's work.