Alberto Giacometti by Timothy Mathews

Author:Timothy Mathews [Mathews, Timothy]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2014-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

21. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.

Oil transfer and watercolour on paper, 31.8 x 24.2 cm.

Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York Accession number: B87.0994. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

Location: Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

For it appears that we both can and cannot nurture such an idea. Who can say, watching Beckett’s Happy Days, whether Willie strives to embrace Winnie or shoot her? Our responsibility lies in our failure to nurture it and to recognize that failure. Benjamin’s angel is of the most human kind – he cannot stay, he will die, he cannot redeem himself or others, he saves only the idea of saving with which he comes to us. The gift of the angel is to understand while not understanding, and to understand that we do not. The angel Benjamin has given us is the angel of its own mourning.

What if we were to imagine him small, already drawn into his blind rush towards his place in that unplaced paradise of his own making, and ours? Small now, simply because he is far away, out of our reach, his effect on us unmeasured? What might he look like if that rush could show itself? Like Zeno’s arrow, the angel could only seem to stop endlessly, in a succession of moments, never reaching its objective, endpoint, or paradise; and we would see movement frozen, started in the freezing and frozen in the started. We would see our own understanding of the angel and its movement. Like for Watt thinking about the Galls, for each one of us who thinks of him, the angel will never be an angel any more.

The years 1945 to 1946: in Petit buste de femme sur socle (Marie-Laure de Noailles), Giacometti fashions a fragile figure over a mound. It is one of several from this period, some still more frail, barely there, barely beginning to live or die, barely beginning to be seen or to disappear.10 What is emerging from where? From wherever we stand, does the figure recede or grow? Greet us or bid farewell? What story is ‘ill-told’, as Watt says, in that indeterminacy?11

This is still the dramatic period of transition and change in Giacometti’s art. Beginning in the late 1930s, he tells us he can only find it within him to try and depict the human face and the human form – and to experience his constant failure to do so. Perhaps that sense of human frailty digs still deeper into him as the result of being knocked over by a car in the Place des Pyramides in Paris before the war, in 1938.12 Whatever the catalyst, what could be a more fundamental set of concerns than scale, human scale, and the human form itself?

If Giacometti’s figure is small, that is because we do not know where it is, or our relation to it, the relation that makes it small, to any one of us. To another it might be alive and in reach.

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