Representative Men
The centennial Giacometti retrospective at MoMA.

By Emmy Chang, NR Associate Editor
November 17-18, 2001

iacometti is generally thought of as the kind of thing you'd get by enrolling Sartre in a pottery class. He did, after all, all the things existentialists are supposed to do. He strode chain-smoking all over Paris, and had the occasional visionary experience. He gave his Surrealist pieces names like Disagreeable Object, To Be Thrown Away (1931) — not to be confused with Disagreeable Object, same year. And he insisted unto death that his figures were not abstract, that he merely drew and made exactly what he saw.

Yet, for a supposed Sartreian, he had little patience with nausea and alienation. (When one critic too many read them into City Square — in which five figures walk in apparently all directions except toward one another — he assembled a new version forthwith, pointing one of the men at the woman.) And the attenuated walking men, standing women, and eerily gazing heads that to us mean "Giacometti" actually comprise only one phase of his career. With this landmark retrospective — on view through January 8, 2002, and featuring 90 sculptures, 40 paintings, and 60 drawings — MoMA is looking to restore a fuller and better portrait of the artist.

Giacometti's early piece, Torso (1925, pictured below), already reflects certain of his own preoccupations. Though the lines of the legs pull the eye upward, the sculpture as a whole is conceived as a stylized arrow, driving downward. Critics often speak of "dignity" in Giacometti's art; Torso enacts simultaneously the pull to earthward of our basest instincts, and our equally human, willed striving against it.

Visual puns are plentiful. The hips and belly of Spoon Woman (1926-27) suggest indulgence and fertility — yet, at once convex and concave, she bends at once away from and toward the viewer. Woman, in Giacometti, is elusive: Consider Figure in a Garden (1930-32), which makes its public debut in this show. The mottled burgundy stone seems to have stood up of itself, raised out of a dream. It's both strongly phallic and yet unequivocally female — possibly because wherever you stand, it's facing away from you. At every point of the compass but one she seems to be looking in one direction; stand there, and she as suddenly turns aside. I was reminded of a phrase out of Ian Fleming: "the kind of woman who is on her way to make love to somebody else." At night at MoMA, the Figure doubles in the mirrorlike glass of the wall, leaving you with two women who will have nothing to do with you.

Though he was later excommunicated from their ranks, Breton's Surrealists initially thrilled to all things Giacometti, from his riddling gameboards and ciphers (Family Portrait, 1930) to the sadomasochistic Caught Hand (1932). His best work of this time, the dream-dollhouse Palace at 4 A.M. (1932, below), seems as precarious and tyrannical as love.

A very few of his paintings are as strong as his figural work — in particular, the renderings of his mistress Caroline(portrait below). Giacometti was obsessed with the act of seeing, and in multiple tableaux, one figure will watch the rest. In the paintings, lines trace the paths our eyes take over their surface; the result seems to vibrate, rattled into being. In his landscapes, even the trees look like they're fighting.

In Switzerland in the late 1930s, Giacometti began the tiny sculptures that would crescendo into his "classical" period. "[T]o my horror… the sculptures became smaller and smaller, they seemed like children…" He finally took four years' worth of work back to Paris — in six matchboxes. There, intrigued by the effect of human shapes as seen from a distance, he realized it figurally by elongating his sculptures. And the "whole new tribe of people" was born.

"Tribe" is the best term, too, for they tend to be less effective singly than taken together. They are inch-high, menorah-like groups, or solitary giants — all with immense pedestal-feet, fissured bodies and faces, mittened hands. Their patina, like chewed chewing gum, seems unable to detract from their weird gallantry. When one of this tribe walks (see below), his elbows are back; he's strong, if tense; and though his shoulders may be stooped, he holds his head erect. In this cosmology, what limits us isn't lack of strength. It's that human strength — however admirable — can neither alter nor surmount decay and death.

Giacometti called one 1950 group The Forest. Probably no allusion was intended, but it's hard not to recall the wood of the suicides in Inferno XIII — for like Dante's, the world of late Giacometti is one of moral hemophilia. His ideas of "Man Walking" differ vastly from, for instance, Rodin's. His gouged surfaces suggest a world without healing, and how human souls must look in a world after God. If cure is unavailable, if the wounds we sustain (and inflict) can never, in some primordial way, be redeemed, then we really do more resemble his vision than Rodin's — and Giacometti really was making and drawing exactly what he saw. Existentialists profess a self-serve, merely human form of transcendence. Giacometti's art is more honest, more extreme — and wiser.