The Desperate Man

As if stripped to the bone by the howling winds of life, a man strides past another on a barren pedestal. Both figures are skeletal, their contours a last frontier against nothingness. Both, despite their perilous proximity, seem abandoned in a void. But they exist. This is the main and master image in the art of Alberto Giacometti. It is his desperate, yet defiant picture of mankind, a symbol of the mid-20th century crisis of humanism--and the likeness of Giacometti himself.

Son of a Swiss impressionist painter, Giacometti went to Paris in 1922 to study with Rodin's pupil Bourdelle, and settled in the tiny Montparnasse studio where he worked the rest of his life.

He allied with the surrealists, until he wearied of creating what he called "these mental reconstructions." He returned to sculpting from life, paring the figure down to its bare armatures. He became the last of those School of Paris sculptors who, since Rodin, have tried to probe beneath the skin to the essence of life.

Slave of Perception. Giacometti was never satisfied by the search. He considered none of his sculptures complete, often in a frenzy of frustration ended up smashing them by the dozen. Only about 200 originals exist today. Said the sculptor: "If I work from life, I see a little bit at a time. And it is al ways changing. Try as I may, it never looks the same to me. So how can I finish?" He became the slave of his own changing perceptions. At times, in pursuit of a likeness, he carved the plaster until it disintegrated into dust between his fingers; at other times he focused only on a foot until it grew to monumental proportions.

One of the great bohemians, Giacometti loved to haunt cafes until late at night. His stingy 12-ft. by 15-ft. studio, lit by a dusty studio window and bare light bulbs, heated by a potbellied stove, was strewn with butts of cigarettes that he chimneyed at the rate of three or four packs a day. Its grimy floor was for Giacometti a battlefield. He once made a model sit in the same pose for years in a vain attempt to capture her likeness. He traveled little except for trips to Stampa, Switzerland, at Christmas and New Year's.

Immortal Failure. When he finally got to the U.S. several months ago, it was to celebrate only one of his recent honors. A show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art drew 400,000 visitors in 20 weeks. Elsewhere last year, he had retrospectives in Paris, Copenhagen and London. He won first prizes at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition in 1961, the Venice Biennale in 1962, and was awarded the $10,000 Guggenheim International in 1964 and France's coveted Grand Prix National des Arts in 1965. But Giacometti cared more for life than honors. Said he, "I prefer the sight of a bird living in the sky to any masterpiece of art."

Giacometti continued to work be cause, said he, "I am curious to know why I fail." None of his human figures, he felt, captured what he saw. None could--for what he saw was the fleeting essence of man. It is no surprise that Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated him as the ideal existentialist artist. Somewhere be hind the plaster contours of his stick figures lay the truth of man's mortality. "I know," said Giacometti, "with absolute, unshakable certainty that I can never succeed in reproducing what I see, even if I live to be a thousand." At his death last week, of a heart attack, he was only 64. He had succeeded in reproducing what he felt--and in the act of creating it, he triumphed over loneliness, existential despair and oblivion.

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