Staring at women and things
Peter Levi
GIACOMETTI: A BIOGRAPHY by James Lord
Faber & Faber, £25
iacometti's sculpture has something in common with prehistoric art, particular- ly the Sardinians, but it is also completely original and modern. It is so masterly that few other 20th-century artists did work that can stand in the same room without appearing insignificant. No doubt these are subjective praises, but I state them as an honest record of experience. Two figures by Giacometti and one painting by Balthus dominated a recent exhibition at the Tate Gallery. How else can one begin to write about an artist so individual and so haunt- ing? There is a photograph of him trying to cross a road by Cartier-Bresson, in which he looks like one of his own creations. But if one turns to biography for an explana- tion of his kind of anguish or of his kind of genius, one will be disappointed. All the same, it is interesting to know the facts.
As a child he was obsessed with a cave, and every winter he wanted to dig himself a hole in the snow and go and live in it. Every night he went through a fantasy of murdering two men, raping and slowly murdering two women, and burning down a castle, then he slept happily. As an adolescent he got mumps which left him sterile; he was capable of sexual pleasure but preferred it with whores because they never minded if he was impotent, and they were not clinging. His first good drawing, years before Disney, was Snow White in her crystal coffin with the seven dwarves weeping around her. He looked rather like Harpo Marx and he was, as they say, as nutty as a fruit cake. His father was a minor Swiss painter, and Alberto turned to sculpture largely because he found it so difficult. An elderly Dutchman took him up at 19, caught a cold in a remote village and died there with him of a heart attack. Giacometti began to get terrifying attacks
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of panic. He had to sleep with the light on, and ended up smoking four packets of cigarettes a day, haunting the night-time cafes and bars of Paris for most of the hours of darkness. He was what people imagined in the Forties and Fifties that a great artist might be like, and the oddest thing about this story is that he really was one. He followed his nature as one might follow a grain in wood.
James Lord's biography is intolerably chatty in style, and idolatrous of genius. It is also too long, with a text of 520 pages, with interesting photographs of people but almost none of the works of art which alone make sense of Giacometti's life. Under English conditions, one feels he might have ended up in Broadmoor, but in Paris he became the individual artist that only he could become. He had the Swiss work ethic, and he was deadly serious. At 23 he was mature and at 30 famous. He went through surrealism and communism as one might catch influenza and malaria, but it is important to notice that his closest friend among artists was Balthus, and he detested and resented Picasso, who teased and resented him in turn, though super- ficially they were friends. Balthus and Giacometti have in common a rock-like genuineness; Picasso was I suppose a con- juror even with his own identity. Giacometti was a starer, both at women and at things: he believed in and achieved a freshness and purity of vision and of representation which are rare. He cared as only an obsessive can do about the smallest technical details. The patina of his bronzes was to him a matter of life and death.
The reader will guess without being told that personal disasters and gruesome ex- periences continued to dog Giacometti. Nor will anyone be surprised if his love life had its difficulties. What is always interest- ing about him is his seriousness. He never stopped drawing, and a vast proportion of that third of his surviving drawings which are copies of works of art are sculptural drawings. Sculptors draw in ways unlike those of other artists; in Giacometti's drawings one can sense something of that obsessive devotion to his art and to nature which was somehow impervious to catas- trophes. During the war he had a nasty few weeks while France fell, but as a Swiss citizen he then settled down in Geneva to a profound study of Cezanne. I cannot think of any more sensible way for an artist to spend a war. His sculptures at the time were tiny. The cavern was as it were in bud, but the great stalagmites were to come. The only exception was an enor- mous figure of a woman in a chariot, which goes back to an early Egyptian piece in Florence that impressed him as a very young man. The woman balances on wheels like a Leger circus performer, but less solidly, more like the goddess of Fortune balanced on the Wheel of For- tune.
At moments of personal crisis when 'the ground of the Giacometti menage was shifting beneath everybody's feet', James Lord is irritatingly knowing. In some cases one does not quite trust his analysis, and in a few one has heard other versions. Mr Lord was a close acquaintance, never a close friend, but it looks as if in the course of his 15 years of research he has got the story essentially right. His worst para- graphs are about history, which enters from time to time like a demon king with a melodramatic banging of drums. These paragraphs read like a distillation of news- paper headlines. 'A new era of human history began. . . The Space Age had begun.' We know of Giacometti's obses- sive staring. As a boy he was neurotic over the arrangement of shoes and socks beside his bed. What he needed of his early girl friend was to draw her feet again and again, all night. In 1947 he produced The Nose, The Hand, and Head on a Rod, and in 1958 The Leg. Mr Lord makes an attempt to place this piece in relation to the Space Age, which I do not understand. I wish he had reproduced the 1958 collection of Giacometti's writings, Yesterday, Quick-
To Hell with it! I'm going topless.' sand,which as he says is 'small in size but great in significance'. Wherever Mr Lord draws from that, his writing comes to life.
The last years are sad. He thought 'what we call great painting is finished' and was highly suspicious of abstractionism, which seemed in those days to have achieved a permanent victory. When he won the Venice sculpture prize he was enraged at the prospect of not winning the painting prize as well. It went to an abstractionist. `The artists of today,' he said, 'want only to express their own subjective feelings instead of copying nature faithfully. Seeking for originality, they lose it.' He worked for a lifetime, extremely hard, and it made him very tired indeed. There was a certain simplicity about him; I particularly like him on the subject of a great oration by Malraux, 'He talks like a bull.' Giacometti's photographs show him as more and more touching, more and more beautiful. He looked in the end as his mother had done in her old age.
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