Space Without Fat

If modern art had been capable of scaring Henry McBride, he would have been a gibbering maniac long ago. As critic for the New York Sun, he had exposed himself to all of it, and had vehemently defended most of it. But last week even Henry McBride was baffled. "These sculptures," he wrote, "are the queerest that have ever come to us from abroad with such high recommendations."

Along the walls and in the corners of a Manhattan gallery, eerie creatures of wrinkled plaster and bronze stalked or stood like forlorn little Whiffenpoofs that had somehow lost their way. Slender as spindles, they vaguely resembled men & women emaciated and stretched to the snapping point. They bore themselves with a fragile grace; but their flesh was pitted and pocked, as if the crusted plaster had been dabbed on in a single feverish instant.

Alberto Giacometti, their creator, a gentle golliwigged man now living in Switzerland, had spent a lifetime to achieve them. Born in 1901, Giacometti has passed from impressionism to cubism to surrealism and was dissatisfied with them all. The son of Switzerland's first great impressionist, he began drawing at five. He laughed at his father's landscapes ("Why do you paint this tree? You don't have to. Don't you see that it is already there?"). His father let the boy paint pretty much as he pleased, gently correcting him whenever he could.

Years later in Paris, putting aside the things his father taught him, he experimented with paint, bronze, wooden cages, plaster balls, and a model of a nose. He once built a cage-like wooden house, placed the skeleton of a flapping bird in the attic, and a spinal column dangling downstairs, and called the whole thing "The palace at 4 A.M."

When he took up sculpture, the plaster dust was soon ankle-deep on his studio floor, for Giacometti smashed almost everything he did. (He explained: "They were made to last only a few hours.") Sometimes his friends rescued a head or a torso or an arm. These won praise among the forward fringe in Paris and London, but not in his native Switzerland.

Restless Artist Giacometti was troubled by the fact that he couldn't do all his job at once. If he started on the tip of the nose, the rest of the face would lose shape and perspective. "The distance between one side of the nose and the other," he wrote, "is like the Sahara." Later, in an effort to grasp the whole, his sculptures began to shrink until they became so small that they would fall apart at the touch of his knife. Finally, his figures began to seem real to him only when they were long and slender. "And it is almost there," says Giacometti, "where I am today."

:'For him," wrote Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in a catalogue introduction which sometimes made sense and sometimes didn't, "to sculpt is to take the fat off space."

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