Giacometti by James Lord

Author:James Lord
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

A honeymoon would have been laughable, but later in the summer the artist took his bride to Maloja, where she was presented to his mother. The two Madame Giacomettis were predisposed to like each other. Annetta thought Annette “a nice girl,” though she observed that her son treated his wife like a daughter.

The years 1949 and 1950 were anni mirabiles for Giacometti, wonderful in the wealth, diversity, and mastery of works produced. One after another, the most extraordinary productions emerged from his studio. They include at least a dozen of those by which he remains most vitally present among us. To try to say how this came about would be, perhaps, to do away with an essential part of it. The artist himself, though, deserves to be heard. In this context, as in so many others, Giacometti found penetrating observations to be made. “In every work of art,” he said, “the subject matter is primordial, whether the artist is conscious of it or not. A greater or lesser degree of plastic quality is no more than evidence of the degree to which the artist is obsessed by his subject matter; form is always the measure of this obsession. But it is the origin of the subject and of the obsession which should be sought …”

Thus, the artist would have us seek in the rationale of creativity a meaning to which he can accede only through the medium of our perception. It stands to reason. By that same token, we are bidden to look into his life and work as deeply as we can, and by whatever means, in order to see the truth he forged. If we are perceptive enough, we may also catch a glimpse of ourselves.

There are too many extraordinary sculptures of 1949 and 1950 to allow for discussion of each. Among them all, however, there is one, perhaps, more extraordinary than the others by reason of having required him to be extraordinary. It asks the beholder to be extraordinary, too.

The town hall of the 19th arrondissement stands in an out-of-the-way corner of northern Paris. Thrown up during the reign of Napoleon III, it is distinguished mainly by an air of bogus majesty, and only the portico is reminiscent of architecture favored by the first and more forceful Bonaparte. The building faces a square, opening on its southern side toward a public garden, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. The center of this square had been occupied before the Second World War by a pedestal bearing the bronze statue of an obscure French pedagogue named Jean Mace. During the Occupation, the Germans collected many statues throughout France to melt them down, and that of Jean Mace was one of these. The post-war plethora of empty pedestals was seen as a symbol of national shame. Sculptors were solicited to supply replacements. The memorial to Jean Mace cannot have had a high priority, but the authorities got around to it in time. Partly at the behest of the ever more influential

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