Figuring it out
Stephen Gardiner
LOOKING AT GIACOMETTI by David Sylvester Chatto, £25, pp. 280 In his preface, David Sylvester describes some of the difficulties he has had in giving shape to a book upon which he has worked intermittently over the phenomenally long time of 40 years. This, it emerges, was because the material was prompted by encounters with Giacometti at intervals of lengthy periods. On two occasions, for example, Sylvester acted as curator for London exhibitions of the sculptor's work, at the Arts Council in 1955 and at the Tate ten years later: his catalogue for this, the retrospective, is reprinted as a chapter here. Then again, another very important source of information was derived from the 20 sittings (each of several hours' duration) he gave Giacometti when having his por- trait painted. He had, therefore, a collec- tion of disjointed experience before him from which to try to find some central theme that would act as a frame for the book. And with this, it seems to me, he was up against a task that is normally best avoided: for instance, James Lord, the American writer, avoided any such prob- lem in A Giacometti Portrait, a riveting, straight record of his 18 days of sittings back in 1964 that presented a vivid picture of the agitated, obsessional artist on the job.
If he had followed Giacometti's exam- ples of putting a firm outline round some of his random arrangements of figures in a group, and had put his own various experi- ences into the context of the artist's life, this in many ways interesting study would have been given a coherent chronological order that would, at the same time, have pushed the narrative along. As it is, only certain explicitly relevant details of his per- sonal story are allowed to trickle in at appropriate moments during Sylvester's somewhat laborious aesthetic diagnosis of Giacometti's art. And this has difficulties too — having a language of its own, art lies outside the limits which words chart, and for this reason as much as any other the words can lead to a foggy murkiness that has the unfortunate effect of slowing the action as well.
With the entry, so to speak, of the sculp- tor on the scene, and hearing what he has to say, the fog lifts, the book becomes immediately interesting and the attention is drawn to two aspects of his work which, above all else, are unique. One of these concerns his portraits (most important in this case, since his likeness of the author appears on the front and back of the jacket and three times inside the book); the other, the often tiny and almost always tenuous sculptures of figures. The subjects of his paintings seem to be in limbo, afloat in space. He said (to James Lord) of the idea of reaching a conclusion: 'That's the terri- ble thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.' With the supreme intensity of concentrated effort directed at the head, the body may partially dissolve: as an explanation for this (given to Sylvester), he said that 'the sense of space-atmosphere which immediately surrounds these beings, penetrates them, is already the being itself. He said he felt this in front of human heads particularly and one wonders whether his determination to leave the figure unfinished was due to the need to keep the door open for continuing experimentation, as much as for anything else.
Yet it is of course his strange sculptures of the figure which are the most telling fea- tures of his entire output. Whether small or life-size, on a platform (as in a street situa- tion) or in a carefully constructed cage (a room), the figure, alone or part of a group, communicates a sense of terrible isolation. The phase, after a brief flirtation with sur- realism, began in the late Thirties and con- tinued until his death in 1966. So what sparked off this singular departure? There's the temptation to believe he might — in his student days in Italy — have wan- dered into the Museo Guarnacci and seen the second-century BC Etruscan figure there, of which a Giacometti could be a facsimile. Not so, apparently: his source of inspiration probably had most to do with his model, Isabel Nicholas (formerly Epstein's), from whom he had made a head, which, speaking from my knowledge of her, was not so much a likeness as an idealised picture of a young woman with whom he was in love. While he had, ever since he was a child, always had a tendency to see subjects as smaller than they were, he said, it was a glimpse of Isabel 'a very long time ago, standing in the Boulevard Saint-Michel one evening, not moving' which started him off with tiny figures: 'I tended to make her the size she looked when she was at that distance,' he said in an interview in 1963. Adding that he could see the enormous expanse of darkness above her, he went on to say, 'I ought to have made an enormous base so that the ensemble would correspond to the vision.'
And so he began to see figures every- where in this fashion — in the street, in public buildings, out of cafe windows, in the enclosure of a brothel; all this, Sylvester relates. There is much to learn about Giacometti from what the artist has to say about such experiences. And if the book comes alive when he speaks, it is through his letters to Isabel that one is, for the first time, moved by the true, human warmth of his feelings. There is indeed something to learn in general from this curious work, the formlessness of which might have been influenced by the indecisiveness of Giacometti's portrait of him. Sylvester could, however, have made it easier for the reader by including an index: the lack of this is most reprehen- sible.
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