An Obsession with Seeing

By ROBERT HUGHES

When Alberto Giacometti died at 65 in his native Switzerland eight years ago, he was already a figure of legend. His seamed casque of a head (like that of a Renaissance condottiere) and his cramped, dust-floured studio in Paris, had become almost as famous as Picasso's simian mask and opulent villas. He was, it seemed, the existentialist answer to Mediterranean man. And as such he appeared to be one of the very few sculptors who, in the 20th century, had discovered a fresh convention for the human body -- spindly and eroded, impossibly vertical, a gobbet of clay stretched toward infinity. The idea that Giacometti's achievement was to have found a new stylization of the body has stuck to him in death, though it repelled him in life. "It is a monstrous misunderstanding!" he once exclaimed. "All the critics, all the writers spoke about the metaphysical content or the poetic message of my work. But for me it is nothing of the sort. It is a purely optical exercise. I try to represent a head as I see it."

In the current retrospective of more than 200 Giacometti sculptures, drawings and paintings at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, there is a painting that epitomizes what he meant. It is not a figure but a still life: one solitary apple on a small sideboard, painted in 1937. The color is hardly color at all -- a muddy brownish gray, smeared on the canvas with what seems to have been great effort, layer over in tractable layer. The fruit appeals to nothing but the sense of sight. It is inedible, untouchably distant, dense and gray as a little cannon ball, and so irreducible in its compactness that it could no longer be the object of appetite.

Yet it remains an apple, not an abstraction. The painting becomes an exemplary one in Giacometti's work because its real subject is the artist's lifelong obsession as a sculptor: the enormous difficulty of seeing anything clearly at all and the near impossibility of truthfully remaking what is seen into a lump of clay or a scribble on paper. Giacometti saw his own efforts as condemned to frustration. "There is no hope of achieving what I want, of expressing my vision of reality. I go on painting and sculpting because I am curious to know why I fail."

Proscenium Arch. Giacometti never ceased to be rebuked by reality and did not wish to be relieved of its castigation. That is why the figure sculptures -- so hallucinatory in their leanness, like knotty streaks of bronze in space -- nevertheless took months of work in the presence of a model (his brother Diego or his wife Annette) ruthlessly immobilized in the studio.

The result was strangely pictorial sculpture: freestanding but often flat as a relief, sometimes unintelligible when walked round. The figures are meant to be seen from the front, as if drawn up on their massive bases beneath an imaginary proscenium arch. From the back they are apt to disintegrate into a welter of craggy texture and bronze lumps. They insist always on a specific remoteness from the viewer's eye.

Like ancient Greek sculptors, Giacometti sometimes painted his pieces as well -- not in primary hues, but in a range of pinky grays and dirty skin colors that recall the primal dust of his own studio. This, too, makes them less approachable. One cannot easily imagine fondling a Giacometti. It would not feel good, and in any case the thing always seems too far away. It was the use of distance, both real and implied, to disclose meaning that gave Giacometti's work so much of its aloof, hieratic tension.

The effect of the work has nothing to do with expressionism. For all their thinness and scarred surfaces, Giacometti's bronzes are not about anguish or loss, loneliness or the post-Hiroshima terrors. They are emotionally quite ineloquent. This may be one reason for their survival into a time when most of the angst-pushing European sculpture of the 1940s and '50s has vanished down the historical drain. In his obsession with the difficulty of seeing, Giacometti wished to get beyond style. He partially succeeded because -- paradoxical as it may seem -- he was culturally saturated, an artist of enormous erudition who boasted without much exaggeration of having visited the Louvre 50,000 times. (By the same token, Giacometti's complaints about the difficulty of making any kind of a mark on paper only become intelligible when they are recognized as uttered by a man who was arguably the best living European draftsman in the 1960s, Picasso not excluded.)

Guild-Like Family. He was a fastidious inheritor who left no heirs, and this seems to have been as true in the sense of family as that of cultural choice. The Guggenheim's retrospective opens with a separate exhibition -- also funded by a grant from the Alcoa and Pro Helvetia Foundations -- entitled Three Swiss Painters. This is the first detailed look the U.S. public has had at the work of Giacometti's family circle of gifted painters, who surrounded him with protective confidence. They are his godfather Cuno Amiet (1868-1961), his cousin Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947), and his father Giovanni (1868-1933), a forceful colorist who in 1915 recorded the 14-year-old Alberto's intense features in a fluent idiom derived from Cezanne. There can be few other artists who had the luck to grow up in such a garden of visual talent.

The work of Amiet and Augusto Giacometti, in particular, comes as a revelation. Augusto Giacometti seems to be one of the claimants to the honor of having produced the first deliberately abstract works of art. His wavy-edged pastel, Abstraction After a Stained-Glass Window in the Cluny Museum, dates from 1900, fully a decade before the mutual creation of abstract art by Larionov, Kupka, Kandinsky and Arthur Dove. Amiet's work, though less aggressively avantgarde, is also of more than parochial quality. After his early apprenticeship with Gauguin's disciples in the Pont-Aven group, he never lost his interest in broad, ripe patternings of color. The colors -- as in Apple Harvest, 1907 -- could attain an ecstatic, ballooning lightness.

So these two shows constitute an instructive journey through the achievements of a guild-like family whose work traversed nearly all the reigning styles of European art, from symbolism through post-impressionism to cubism, and thence, in Alberto Giacometti's work, through surrealism and out the other side. It is a salutary lesson in what commitment to art as a discipline can mean and how it differs from the facile professionalism with which, all too often, we are stuck today.

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