Left Alberto Giacometti with one of his iconic tall, thin sculptures
Above All of the installations are set away from the walls and demountable to respect the building’s history
Above right Around the studio there is evidence that Giacometti often failed to finish his pieces
Try to see Stanley Tucci’s 2017 film Final
Portrait with Geoffrey Rush playing the ageing Giacometti with that haggard, bulbous, bespectacled face, framed in a wiry halo of grey hair, set permanently in an expression of droll contempt for everything, especially his own work and – of course – how much he despises Picasso. A central part of the film was the recreation of the studio, which, over the years, came to assume an almost mythical status. We are immersed in its notoriously cramped space. Te film’s production designer, James Merifield, worked closely with Institut Giacometti. As for the feel of the place, it appears in accounts not just by Genet but also Samuel Beckett, and Simone de Beauvoir, who said it was ‘submerged in plaster […] cold, with neither furniture nor food – he takes no notice, he works’. It featured in plenty of magazines, with Brassai and Robert Doisneau portraying Giacometti’s craggy, gaunt form, with its bush of salt and pepper hair, in among his tools and paintings. Giacometti was an atheist, left wing, bohemian, good looking, charismatic, yet plagued by chronic mental torment and the hesitant production of a relatively small corpus of work notable for its marvellous marriage of innovation and tradition. He was a voluble and,
by all accounts, enchanting conversationalist, humbly courteous, and his most frequent topic happened to be the hopelessness of his enterprise. He took long walks with Beckett, who knew the feeling, reportedly in mutual silence. Te self-inflicted ordeal of trying to complete the final painting has all the agony of Beckett. Tucci notably allows his camera to make a leisurely, largely silent tour of the studio, including the vast hidden dirty bundles of cash about the place – because he and his brother did not trust banks.
Tin figures, elongated, improbably fragile: Giacometti’s distortions are a byword in modern sculpture, as instantly recognisable as a Henry Moore hole. Tis is Giacometti the existentialist: how can any sculptor know, and make known to anybody else, the person who sits before them? Looking at Giacometti’s figures melting in empty space you can also see the hunch-shouldered man walking towards the camera in Cartier-Bresson’s picture: greying, slightly hunched but brisk and determined, he hastens past crumbling walls on a sunlit back street, Rue Hippolyte- Maindron, before turning at a pale green door with a makeshift handle and entering the secret world of a fabulously filthy studio.
Tat’s it. Te loneliness of being. Tere it is, mankind, unknowable, unbearably solitary and complex, and Giacometti, according to this received version, the Sartre of sculpture. Part of the message of Final Portrait is that Giacometti felt unable to finish many of his pieces. Sartre described Giacometti’s Sisyphean ‘search for the absolute’, and the artist’s revisions are painfully evident in the film. Clustered around and on every surface of the studio there is evidence of Giacometti’s inability to finish many of his pieces. Te message that creativity can be painful comes over loud and clear, the whole process a kind of purgatory, his workplace feeling like a prison. Te process never became any easier. Searching for something elusive, his friend Beckett summed it up with his injunction to ‘fail again, fail better’.
Tere might not seem to be much left to say about Alberto Giacometti, the surrealist who became a paragon of existentialism in his ravaged response to war. He hasn’t changed, this master of the skinny sublime. Te world has though, and with it the significance of a man who termed himself a failure and chose to live in bohemian squalor even while, in his later years, he was quite rich and famous. His new old home is a revelation.
Charleston, Sussex
An ancient farmhouse near Lewes on the edge of the South Downs, this was the unoficial country headquarters of the Bloomsbury Group, a ragbag of brilliant writers and thinkers (Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey) and third-rate artists (Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). Woolf’s home, Monk’s House, is a dramatic and bracing walk away across the Downs.
Hill Top, Cumbria
The place where Beatrix Potter felt most at home, this farmhouse above Windermere became her studio and featured in many of her stories.
Trewyn Studio, St Ives
Finding this tiny house, yard and walled garden in 1949, Barbara Hepworth called it ‘a kind of magic, a place where I could work in open air and space’. She lived here until her death in 1975. Most of her bronzes have been left just as they were, and the garden – a collaboration between Hepworth and the composer Priaulx Rainier – is unchanged.
Hogarth’s House, Chiswick
Bought by William Hogarth in 1749 when Chiswick was a rural village an hour’s ride from the centre of London, the house is decorated with engravings of his satirical work.
ABOVE RIGHT: SUCCESSION ALBERTO GIACOMETTI (FONDATION GIACOMETTI, PARIS + ADAGP, PARIS)
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133
