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Modernism with Its Throat Cut
John Haberin New York City
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti has a problem with women. In a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, he kept returning to them as to a bad dream. Yet the dreams persist in daylight, where the women refuse to hide. They lie easily, and uneasily, in a familiar world.
They lie on the floor with their throat cut. In that final agony, they can no longer hide the protective armor and sprawling, piercing stingers of an insect. In the palace at 4 A.M., they wait in silent accusation. They stand like thick matrons or gaunt, sexless children. They sit with their mouth wide open, knees tautly together, genitals spread like tight lips or the shallow bowl of a spoon. In more ways than one, they cannot keep their trap shut. 
They return after nearly seventeen years in a second retrospective, at the Guggenheim, with love. It opens with a portrait of his wife, whom he married in his late forties. Its two hundred works lean heavily on the Fondation Giacometti, which plays favorites but allows a look at the artist at work, in plaster and in paintings whose slashing lines and white highlights parallel the rough edges and reflective surfaces of his bronze. It also makes a good case for the influence of African, Egyptian, and Oceanic art, starting with early plaster in the form of small rough slabs, like relics. They show women and his father, while the portraits stick to family and the closest of friends. Giacometti, it appears, never gave up on others, even in the wee hours before dawn.
Sculptor's block
Of course, he has a problem with men, too. They swing from the palace rafters. They walk hunched over in the rain. They face one another without recognition in village squares, bare of the trappings of humanity. They have a sharp point aimed directly at their eyes. In paintings, near monochrome interiors offer little more by way of support.
The men keep striding, but their effort and pain come without pride. They appear as characters in a board game, as No More Play. Their sexual parts have a way of sprouting up when one least expects it. But then female eyes may turn into breasts and back again, too. Another exhibition at MoMA spoke of objects of desire. Giacometti's own title, Disagreeable Object, sounds more fitting.
His care for physical being and its psychological necessity makes him a quintessential modern artist. He worries to death the gendered, human body. He passes from the internal terrors of Surrealism to the real-world horror of World War II, which stranded him in his native Switzerland. His art changes from voids, blocks, and poetry to the human figure ever after. For all the nightmares, Giacometti wants to know how one can still represent the world without escaping it. The puzzle drives the twists and turns of a long career.
The son of a painter, born in 1901, he starts with plenty of self-confidence. Early self-portraits look comfortably modern, even before his encounters with such sculptors as Pablo Picasso, Henri Laurens, Constantin Brancusi, and Jacques Lipchitz. Like much painting in Europe after Cubism, they go for warm, bright tones but downright conservative forms. In drawings, his short, curvy hatching moves evenly across the surface, like marks of a burin. They have a traditionalist's faith in objectivity and shadow. They also show himself and his parents.
Still, one can already see some unusual choices. When he calls a geometric form a cube, of course it is not. When a white sphere hangs suspended next to a white crescent, one can imagine the collision of day and night. When he draws his own face, he stops at his hairline. When he draws female nudes, they make angular containers for empty space. Women stand opposite the male presence as inviting, threatening, but never firmly embodied. Later, when he paints his mistress, she breaks into tears.
The tensions erupt from the moment he settles in Paris with his brother, Diego, in 1922. He scratches a hunched-over male body into a rectangular slab. He also gets his first masterpiece with the frontal Spoon Women. Sure, he has a problem with sex, but also with objects in a material world of three dimensions. The heavier they get, the more they depend on cuts into flat sheets of plaster or stone quite as much as molded form. Instead of writer's block, this is sculptor's block.
Object, studio, and dream
In Paris, Giacometti finds André Breton, George Bataille, and the Surrealist circle. He also finds his place at "the Surrealist table." In The Palace at 4 A.M., not at the Guggenheim apart from a sketch, forms suspended from an attic wire could stand for male suicide or genitals. Woman with Her Throat Cut still looks vulnerable and frightening. The greater her death sprawl, the more stable and more encompassing the insect woman's pose. Disagreeable Object, a penis with thorns, serves as a challenge to conservative outcries over art even now.
Again he is harnessing form in space—a vision that still influences young contemporary artists in a show of "A Disagreeable Object." The three-story palace's open wood construction has the ingenuity and fragility of a child's toy. Sex looks like nothing more than a proverbial bump on a log. Like other Surrealists, Giacometti spoke of objects rather than sculpture. The term sounds like a rejection of fine art or formal, self-referential abstraction. For Giacometti, both are insufficiently real.
Two sketches of his studio have a startling matter-of-factness. (The Guggenheim includes a film of him at work there late in life, driving his models to exhaustion.) The most daring objects lie around in a perfectly ordinary interior. They do not escape from this world or even distort it. They transform and extend it without ever leaving home. As for Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, and Man Ray, art's dreams pack a wallop because they have entered a waking world.
In Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), a woman kneels in supplication, while withholding from sight her unseen power. If men and women can kneel next to the art object in this world, then they can also face the sculptor's or viewer's fears. Those fears become part of the puzzle of the visible and invisible. The male has to look on at his own helplessness, like the matronly woman awake before dawn. Like Freud, this art embraces sexism and neurosis. Yet its objectivity turns on them both, too.
Giacometti's concern for the physical anticipates his break with Surrealism in the 1930s. The loss of an anchor when his father died must have made its fictions a little less convincing. After the war, marriage to a younger woman must have made them feel too much like complaining as well. He lived until 1966. Above all, though, he wanted to refresh the puzzle of human form. He had been working on it all along.
His sculptural output fell off for a few years after the war, although painting and drawing continued. He turned back to real people—his wife, his mother, his brother, his mistress, and friends. (Diego also oversaw casting in bronze, often many years after the work in plaster. The Guggenheim gives the dates of both.) He turned more, too, to appearances. At the same time, he takes more conscious account of what it means for objects to become real and nightmares to become art.
Pedestal, chariot, and village
Before, Giacometti carved as often as molded. Now he builds his molds by hand, in small patches of clay. The more awkward the shapes, the better. Heads, hands, and feet grow larger and flatter. Noses grow more pointed, to the point that James Ensor might have loved them. Limbs get longer and thinner without losing the marks of the artist's hands.
When Giacometti leaves Surrealism, he adds more than images. In part, he returns to a hunger for ritual. In part, too, rough clay makes the nature of representation more of an issue than ever. He anticipates European sculpture like that of Jorge Oteiza. He anticipates the macho and terrible vulnerability of Jackson Pollock as well. One can see it in the bumps.
They can recall a poor science student trying to solder but burying wire in gobs of lead. Giacometti, though, did not deposit metal lumps. He had them cast, from their negative in clay. The roughness takes one further from fine sculpture compared even to his Surrealist phase. They foreground art's texture and sheer existence. Roughened bronze becomes a subject in itself.
The Surrealist object has become the art object. Yet the emphasis is still on the object. Before, art had come down off its pedestal and lay on the floor, with its throat cut. Now the pedestal returns as part of the work. Brancusi had pulled that trick before. Giacometti gives it endless, witty variations.
A tall layered base dwarfs a thumbnail person, for once making it hard to pick out the gender. A broader base stands for the village square. Heads wheel on chariots or threaten to collide on swings. Dennis Oppenheim has nothing on this today. Unfortunately, MoMA's curators, Carolyn Lanchner and Anne Umland with Christian Klemm and Tobia Bezzola of Kunsthaus Zürich, put works on pedestals of their own making. Their obstacle course approaches Giacometti's village squares, where many stride but no one ever meets.
Paintings, too, play with the medium. Wiry lines cover loose brown and gray wash. Jacques Derrida speaks of words as speaking to one under erasure. One might translate the French almost as well as "crossed out." Art here crosses itself out, but it keeps on speaking of what it has lost. And a sense of loss, too, attests to love.
Noses and shadows
For his last twenty years, Alberto Giacometti pretty much recycles striding men, tall women, and stand-alone heads. He liked his achievement so much that, at the very end, he wanted to combine them all. He hoped for a public commission of one each for Chase Manhattan bank near Wall Street—a plaza not unlike his own village squares. The Guggenheim's curators, Megan Fontanella of the Fondation Giacometti and Catherine Grenier, like it so much that they place it in the High Gallery at the very foot of the ramp, but he withdrew his proposal. A red cube by Isamu Noguchi has all but obliterated its memory. No wonder he felt to the very end on the brink of poverty and failure.
Still, he became rich famous. His unaccommodated man seems tailor-made for a postwar world of existential crises. Jean-Paul Sartre sat for portraits, as did Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet, and wrote the essay for an important catalog. Talk of existential anxiety gets on my nerves in a real crisis. And repetition before Andy Warhol seems way too easy. Yet he thoroughly earned both.
The subject of gender differences helped feed his reputation. An existential self needs an Other, and Giacometti happened to have one handy. For him, one has no consciousness apart from the Other. One exists only with others, in one's head or in society. Then, too, men for Sartre cannot just stand and stare, just as Giacometti's take strides. Sexual anxiety cannot rule out free will.
Aspects of sexual difference extend to paintings. Men look outward, while women gape with their eyes buried in dark outlines. Only men, oddly enough, cast shadows. Even their clown noses make them more solid. Men here are rooted in life, woman merely imagined. Yet they still defy stereotype as women for Picasso never could, with hollows for hips, small breasts, and real pain.
At the end, the differences soften somewhat, at the expense of impact. Giacometti has become a man with a famous style and famous friends. Sitters become more individualized, but a little too handsome. Background washes take over, and the crosshatching grows more routine. One needs a retrospective, as a reminder of what came before. Maybe even two.
Giacometti can seem at once old hat and persistently moving, like so much else about Modernism. He has become an institution even before one gets to all those celebrity portraits. He still, though, has his self-awareness when it comes to sexual desire. He also has his sense of scarring and rejuvenation. No More Play could represent a graveyard with stones cast aside for an ascent to heaven at the last judgment. Does his art still speak under erasure? At the very least, it speaks with its throat cut.
Alberto Giacometti ran at The Museum of Modern Art through January 8, 2002, and at the Guggenheim through September 12, 2018. Related reviews look at Giacometti at the expanded MoMA and paired with Barbara Chase-Riboud.