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Theory, Culture & Society
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095214
2008; 25; 20 Theory Culture Society
Roy Boyne
A Brief Note on Giacometti
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A Brief Note on Giacometti
Roy Boyne
Abstract
Giacomettis work is not comforting. Whether it is seen as driven by
abandonment of faith in history, or the surrealist recognition that every-
thing is part of pitiless connection and transmutation, the role of
Giacomettis self-understanding in the critical and popular reception of his
work is highly signicant, and perhaps not sufciently challenged. Through
short discussions of the commentaries on Giacomettis work, by Krauss,
Sartre, Sylvester and Danto, and using contrasts with other 20th-century art,
it is suggested that the search for the meaning and explanation of the
specic creative works in the artists subjectivity, while very often providing
fascinating and invaluable narratives, cannot be taken as an adequate
foundation for aesthetic understanding.
Key words
elongation Giacometti Lehmbruck methodological scepticism
subjectivity
A
RT IS more than shadows, so it makes little difference that
Giacomettis gures provide minimal shade (Figure 1). There is no
respite from the sun for the sheltering child, nor delight for the
spectator of this concentrated scene. It matters not which woman is standing
there,
1
it was never a family:
I felt small beside those thread-like creatures who occupied the minimum of
space for an intimidating presence. (Giacometti and Jelloun, 1991: 8)
David Sylvester asserts that the question of gender is crucial: the
woman is stationary, the man is usually on the move (Sylvester, 1994: 11,
161). This division is something of an anthropo-aesthetic given in
Giacometti commentary. Giacometti wrote to Pierre Matisse in 1947
suggesting that his inclination as a sculptor was always toward stasis. His

Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 25(5): 2029
DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095214
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1932 bronze, Walking Woman (Figure 2), betrays the most tentative
movement: It was impossible for me to endure a sculpture which gave an
illusion of movement (Stooss and Elliot, 1996: 149). Making the men move
was easier, already a disappointingly reactive response to the personal chal-
lenge which Sartre (1996: 186) saw that he had set himself: Giacometti has
to make a man; he has to write movement into total immobility. Sartre
thought that his friend was trying, with each separate fashioning, to create
the sculptors art ab initio: one of the existential symbols the Cartesian
sculptor, with his disciplined sensory apparatus, seeing what there is, and
trying so hard to add nothing more.
A change took place in the mid-1930s. Giacometti began to work from
live models. Rosalind Krauss speaks of a bipartite division of his work. Up
to 1935 there is the surrealist, and thereafter there is the existentialist. The
division is curatorially reinforced by the 2001 exhibition at MOMA, with
the surrealist period on one oor and the later work on another oor. Yet,
as Krauss shows, a different view of the contrast between walking men and
Boyne A Brief Note on Giacometti 21
Figure 1 Giacometti, The Glade (1950)
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standing women, between movement and stasis, at the very centre of his
work in the 1940s, can be taken by considering whether the legacy of
surrealism was really quite so powerful in the later period:
The Sartrean Giacometti is obsessed with vision as it encounters the spatial
divide that separates viewer and viewed, producing effects of isolation and
alienation. The Surrealist Giacometti is concerned, on the other hand, with
the sculptors withdrawal from the frame of vision, which means no longer
being dominated by the verticality of both the image seen and the upright-
ness of the viewing subject. . . . The horizontal eld assumed by Giacomettis
work in the 30s organizes these objects more in the kinetic than the optical
axis. (Krauss, 2001)
Stalled movement, a forced halt even through violence: Krauss makes the
historian of arts point that such a perspective could connect Giacometti
to the work of sculptors like Richard Serra and Carl Andre. It is also
possible to feel a connection between the surrealist Woman with Her Throat
22 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)
Figure 2 Giacometti, Walking Woman (1932)
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Cut (Figure 3)
2
and the peristasis of the assertedly unfamilial groups in
Forest, City Square or Glade. And how does the use of the same models,
over and over again, link to this mirroring of sculpting stone and frozen
movement? Diego and Annette, brother and wife: sculpting stone and frozen
movement.
If we are to answer convincingly the questions of stasis and movement,
of brother and wife, of existentialism and the alternative forensic chemistries
of surrealism, and see how they hold together as strange attractors, we must
Boyne A Brief Note on Giacometti 23
Figure 3 Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932)
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begin with elongation. The explanation of combined diminution and elon-
gation in Giacomettis sculpture is given largely by the artist himself, and
asserts that these wasted, corrugated forms arise out of the obsessive desire
to see, to grasp completely what is right before the eyes. Giacometti tells us
that the eroded, stretched, granulated human forms that he sculpts and
draws are the direct and unmediated result of straining to recognize
without subjective engagement his brother, his wife, his critic, and others
who sit, stand or lie for him although he sculpted mostly from memory,
and knew that sculpting from memory tended to produce narrower gures
(Giacometti in Sylvester, 1994: 226).
A certain scepticism is, in the face of this self-examination, most
appropriate: methodological distrust is required, and it is extraordinary that
it is so rarely invoked. In consequence of which we have no compelling
account of Giacomettis sculpture that does not begin and end with the
authors own version. This is, quite plainly, inadequate. Giacometti tells us:
I wanted to hold on to a certain height, and they became narrow. But this was
despite myself, even if I fought against it. And I did ght against it; I tried
to make them broader. The more I tried to make them broader, the narrower
they got. But the real explanation is something I dont know, I dont know yet.
(Giacometti in Sylvester, 1994: 215)
It is where we should begin: that the artist does not know.
We should certainly know what it is that we are going to mistrust, and
sharp focus is attained by Arthur Danto, for whom Giacomettis sculptures
do not invite our hands to stroke their surfaces. Whether standing or
walking, the sculptures are, as Sartre noted, always the same distance away,
no matter how close you are, and also, as soon as an example of Femme
debout or Homme qui marche comes into view they are immediately seen as
already close yet forbidding of touch. As Danto says: we see the gures . . .
the way we see gures in paintings (2001). They reveal everything from the
intense view entailed by a reduced and concentrated immersion in two-
dimensionality: stretched height and anorexic breadth. Sartre might have
suggested that looking at a sculpted Giacometti gure is like examining an
idea, but he did not really elaborate on that thought. The concept of stand-
point, however, appears to be present in Giacomettis self-understanding.
Danto reports:
Giacometti, whom I knew somewhat when I was a student in Paris, once told
me that he thought of himself primarily as a painter, and indeed that even in
his sculptures he tried to represent the world in a purely visual way, which
he claried as follows: He wanted to show the world as it would be experi-
enced by someone who had no hands, and whose visual eld was not inected
by other modalities of sense, such as touch. (2001)
In what sense should we mistrust such a view? There is no need to
doubt its subjective authenticity, nor to doubt that knowing the artists view
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that he wished to reduce the dimensionality of sculpture is of the utmost
interest in getting to know his work. It is comparable to Baselitzs move to
resist the twin aesthetic drives to renement and control by using a chainsaw
for his sculpture. Both artists may hope to release more by surrendering
some of their potential artfulness. The contrast is also signicant, however,
since while Baselitz gave up a substantial amount of control (as could be
testied by anyone who has used a chainsaw), Giacometti sought to repudi-
ate the three-dimensionality of sculpture, not in relation to increase or
decrease of control, but apparently for reassurance, for coping with his own
uncertainty and distrust of the work he achieved he was noted for destroy-
ing work (as many as 40 examples of Homme qui marche, for example) at
the end of the day and beginning again, and again. He said to David
Sylvester:
Maybe no better than the rst time. Its rather that in realizing something very
quickly and in a way successfully, I mistrust the very speed. Thats to say, I
want to begin again to see if it will succeed as well the second time. The
second time, it never succeeds as well; it begins to fall apart. So the original
one is the best. But as I dont feel like leaving it, I go back to it. And when
I stop, its not at all that I consider it more complete or better; its because
that work is no longer necessary to me for the moment. (in Sylvester, 1994:
225)
Mistrusting that means suspecting that it does not help very much in
accounting for the sculpture itself. He could have said and believed all those
things and his work could have been quite different. At least the possibility
of that is not so easy to deny. In some ways, Giacometti makes it easy for
the analyst to decide that, yet again, the artist does not have the key to their
own work. His continual reversion to himself (no longer necessary to me
for the moment), appearing to consist of summary judgements arising from
the kind of obsession which allows itself to be ruled by the rhythms of avant-
garde Paris, rather than by something approaching the romantic ideal of the
complete immersion of the artist in the work being created, seems unlikely
to provide the basis for decisive analytic judgement. It certainly requires
supplementation, as increment if not outright displacement. But where
would one look for such accretion?
Expressionism and mannerism are both possible categories that might
be invoked, in order to enable comparison to be made with other work. Both
link to historical change, perceptual distortion, subjective trauma. Giving
form to the changing shape of the time is what artists do or refuse to do, and
elongation, scarication, distorting body shapes and experiments with scale
are powerful modes of aesthetic expression, to be used or not, wilfully or
not, whatever the artists subjective disposition. We can see this throughout
the history of art, and certainly in the 20th century. Wilhelm Lehmbruck,
3
an aesthetic precursor to Giacometti and the only German sculptor
represented at the epochal 1913 Armory show in New York, was driven by
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different forces in the last years of his life by the experience of war (Figure
4). While Dieter Honisch writes that Giacometti expressed:
. . . an awareness of life that was attuned to post-war sensibilities . . . personal
exposure; the meaninglessness of individual existence and, in spite of that,
its dignity; the unrelatedness of human beings, their isolation
4
and their
aimlessness; the inability to believe and to accept ideals; the desire to
survive, to nd ones place . . . (1994: 68)
Fritz von Unruh, a Goethe prize-winning German dramatist, who was, as a
young man, friendly with Lehmbruck in Zurich, noted:
. . . the basis of our relationship was that we both recognized the necessity of
rising above the war and building up a new concept of life . . . already he was
living wholly for spiritual things and for the spiritualization of his art. (1957:
275)
26 Theory, Culture & Society 25(5)
Figure 4 Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Standing Youth (1913)
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Lehmbruck, then, may well have been more hopeful, more of an idealist,
and that quality is seen to suffuse his art, which in its most expressionist
examples spins into and away from Giacomettis gures, no matter whether
these are placed in the problematic of surrealism or alienation.
Lehmbruck is not the only artist one might mention as capable of being
connected to Alberto Giacometti in some meaningful way. While the work
of Karl Bobek is a derivation of Giacomettis later work, that of Merino
Marini might be seen to connect to the earlier surrealist output, and even
if Modiglianis faces seemed not to be under quite the same pressure to
become increasingly narrow that Giacometti described, there are deeper
links to 20th-century aesthetic trends. Architecture is one example, and
Georgia OKeeffes depiction of the elongation inherent in the skyscraper
(Figure 5) circles obliquely, if neatly, back to Lehmbruck, since one of
his sculptures was installed as a key element in the Mies van der Rohe
Tugendhat house. Other examples of generic connection can surely be found
in fashion and performance art, as opening ceremonies for events like the
World Cup now nd elongation to be a standard trope, and the body shape
Boyne A Brief Note on Giacometti 27
Figure 5 Georgia OKeeffe, Street, New York, No. 1 (1926)
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promoted in high fashion might be seen as parodied avant la lettre by
Giacomettis standing women.
In the nal analysis, the search for precise causal links between
artistic subjectivity and realized creativity is chimerical. Although very
often its results are intensely interesting, the methodology is most closely
akin to fortune-telling after the fact. In the history of art, the rigorous
disciplines are biography, history (including the histories of ethics and
aesthetics), technology and biology (both broadly understood), and structural-
functionalist sociology. The remaining discourses may be part of the arts,
moving with the ows of time and circumstance.
Notes
1. Giacometti did several drawings, lithographs and sculptures which he titled
Femme debout. Some are quite small 53.5 cm., like his 1946 graphite drawing;
others are taller, such as the 168 cm tall bronze, rst seen at Pierre Matisses New
York gallery in 1950.
2. But see the excellent discussion in Markus (2000)
3. Lehmbruck (his Standing Youth from 1913 is pictured here) attended the
Dsseldorf Kunstgewerbeschule and Kunstakademie between 1895 and 1901,
working with Karl Janssen and undergoing more or less classical training as a
sculptor and pictorial artist. He went to Paris in 1910 and Amadeo Modigliani
inspired his move towards Expressionist sculpture. He moved to Berlin in 1914 and
worked as a medical orderly in a eld hospital for his military service, but was
allowed to settle in Zurich in 1916. Artistically, he had, little by little, left behind
his conservative training, and had be come more expressive, especially through his
use of elongated forms. He committed suicide in 1919. For relatively recent
German-language scholarship on Giacometti and Lehmbruck, see Knappe (2000).
Bobeks work may serve as a telling example of just how difcult it may be to
succeed in adopting Giacomettis aesthetic.
4. Giacometti sometimes denied the validity of existentialist readings of his
work:
While working I have never thought of the theme of solitude. I have absolutely
no intention of being an artist of solitude. Moreover, I must add that as a
citizen and a thinking being I believe that all life is the opposite of solitude,
for life consists of a fabric of relations with others. . . . There is so much talk
about the malaise throughout the world and about existential anguish, as if
it were something new. All people have felt that, and at all periods. (quoted
in Selz, 1959: 30910)
References
Danto, A.C. (2001) Sculpting the Soul, The Nation 3 December.
Giacometti, A. and T.B. Jelloun (1991) Giacometti and Jelloun. Paris: Flohic
Editions.
Honisch, D. (1994) Scale in Giacomettis Sculpture, pp. 6571 in A. Schneider
(ed.) Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings. Munich: Prestel.
James, M.I. (1992) Paris: Giacometti, Burlington Magazine 134(1068): 2013.
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Knappe, M. (2000) Die Bildhauer Karl Bobek: Leben und Werk, PhD dissertation,
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Krauss, R. (2001) Alberto Giacometti: Museum of Modern Art, New York,
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Markus, R. (2000) Surrealisms Praying Mantis and Castrating Woman, Womans
Art Journal 21(1): 339.
Sartre, J.-P. (1996 [1945]) The Search for the Absolute (translated excerpt from
Alberto Giacometti: derrire le miroir), pp. 1858 in K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds)
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Selz, P. (1959) New Images of Man, in Giacometti. New York: Museum of Modern
Art.
Stooss, T. and P. Elliott (1996) Alberto Giacometti 19011966. Edinburgh: National
Galleries of Scotland.
Sylvester, D. (1994) Looking at Giacometti. London: Chatto and Windus.
Von Unruh, F. (1957) Wilhelm Lehmbruck, College Art Journal 16(4): 2759.
Roy Boyne is Principal of St Cuthberts Society (one of the oldest Durham
University colleges founded in 1888 with 1200 resident and non-
resident students) and Professor of Sociology at the University of Durham.
Roy is a Board member of TCS, and is vice-chair of Culture North East. In
2006, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Strasbourg, working on
a funded collaborative research project on Comparative cultural strategy
and socio-economic indicators. His 27,000 word report is published, and
will provide a foundation for his forthcoming book on cultural strategy.
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