Essays in Aesthetics by Sartre Jean-Paul;

Author:Sartre, Jean-Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road

1 Tr. Titian Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1477-1576) owed his enormous success as a portraitist to his ability to paint each subject’s ideal of himself.

THE PAINTINGS OF GIACOMETTI1

From the back of the room where I was sitting at the Sphinx, I could see several nude women. The distance that separated us (the glossy wood floor seemed insuperable even though I wanted to walk across it) impressed me as much as did the women.2

The result: four inaccessible figurines balanced on the edge of a vertical background formed by the floor. Giacometti painted them as he saw them—from a distance. Still, the four women have an arresting presence. They seem to be poised on the floor ready at any moment to drop down upon him like the lid on a box.

I have often seen them, especially in the evening, in a little place on the Rue de l’Echaudé, very close and menacing.

Distance, far from being an accident, is in his eyes part and parcel of every object. These whores, twenty steps away—twenty impossible steps away—are forever outlined in the light of his hopeless desire. His studio is an archipelago, a conglomeration of irregular distances. The Mother Goddess against the wall retains all the nearness of an obsession. When I retreat, she advances; when I am farthest away, she is closest. The small statue at my feet is a man seen in the rear-view mirror of an automobile—in the act of disappearing; moving closer to the statue is to no avail, for the distance cannot be traversed. These solitudes repel the visitor with all the insuperable length of a room, a lawn, or a glade that none would dare to cross. They stand as proof of the paralysis that grips Giacometti at the sight of his equal.

It does not follow, however, that he is a misanthropist. His aloofness is mixed with fear, often with admiration, sometimes with respect. He is distant, of course, but man creates distance while distance has no meaning outside human space. Distance separates Hero from Leander and Marathon from Athens but not one pebble from another.

I first understood what distance is one evening in April, 1941. I had spent two months in a prison camp, which was like being in a can of sardines, and had experienced absolute proximity; the boundary of my living space was my skin; night and day I felt against my body the warmth of a shoulder or a bosom. This was not incommodious, for the others were me.

That first evening, a stranger in my home town, having not yet found my old friends, I opened the door of a café. Suddenly I was frightened—or almost; I could not understand how these squat, corpulent buildings could conceal such deserts. I was lost; the scattered patrons seemed to me more distant than the stars. Each of them could claim a vast seating area, a whole marble table while I, to touch them, would have had to cross over the “glossy floor” that separated us.

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