The Streets of Paris by Susan Cahill

Author:Susan Cahill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Alberto Giacometti: Rue des Thermopyles

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT THERE IS

LOCATION: 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, Studio

MÉTRO: Pernety

As a schoolboy, Giacometti (1901–1966) was admired as a talented artist and brilliant student. He would become, in the words of art critic John Berger, “a most extreme artist,” a contemplative sculptor and painter who believed that “no reality could ever be shared.”

He grew up in a close family in a small village in the alpine valley of Bregaglia in southeastern Switzerland, about twelve miles from the Italian border. From November until February the high mountain walls along the valley cut off all sunlight. Alberto, born in October as the sunless, austere season got underway, had a profound connection with this place and his mother that lasted through both their lifetimes. As a child, his dearest friends were stones (more like boulders), a cave, and trees, the material of his future art. He loved to sit and read and illustrate his storybooks in his painter/father’s studio; he loved the art of Dürer and Rembrandt. At fourteen, returning home from boarding school for vacation, he spent his train money on a book of Rodin reproductions, which meant he had to walk ten miles over the Alps carrying his precious book. At fourteen, he made his first sculpture, of his brother Diego’s head.

Before he finally moved to Paris in 1922 just after his twentieth birthday, he had studied in Geneva, which he disliked, Venice (Women of Venice would be one of his most renowned masterpieces), Florence, and Rome where he fell in love and began to visit brothels. He also developed some themes of his lifework: the universe now became alien, beyond his own self, altogether incomprehensible. Reality is unknowable. His later friend and walking companion, Samuel Beckett, agreed. Some artists, according to Giacometti, achieve a partial view; most stay blind. He was no Cartesian. Seeing is being. “The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him … a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute.”1

On his father’s suggestion that he go to Paris to study with Antoine Bourdelle (Rodin’s former assistant) at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, he worked for five years in Bourdelle’s studio though teacher and student were never simpatico. The evidence of their radically different vision and gifts is on exhibit in Bourdelle’s hard-to-find studio/museum north of the Gare Montparnasse (16, rue Antoine-Bourdelle, www.bourdelle.paris.fr) and in the many museums showing the sculpture and paintings of Giacometti (the Beaubourg, Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and others in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., London, Zürich, Rome, Turin, Venice, Vienna, etc.) Take a tour at www.fondationgiacometti.fr/en/16 discover -the-artwork/. Or google “Images from museums in Paris showing Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture and painting.”

Paris in the era when Giacometti arrived, just after World War I, had become the countercultural center of artistic life in Europe. Dada was the first of the movements formed to overturn traditional canons in visual and literary art,

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