拍品专文
In 1935, Giacometti returned to a practice he had abandoned for ten years: modelling directly from nature. As he later recalled, he proposed:
to make (quickly, I supposed; in passing) one or two studies
from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a
head, of a whole figure...this study (I thought) should take a fortnight, and then I wanted to realize my compositions. I
worked from the model throughout the day from 1935 to 1940. Nothing was like what I imagined it to be. A head (I soon
left the figure aside, it was too much) became an object completely unknown and without dimensions. (quoted in
Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings 1913-1965, London, Tate Gallery, 1965).
This decision to reengage nature resulted in Giacometti's expulsion from the Surrealist group, with which he had been closely aligned in the early 1930s. In 1940, he abandoned the model again, and began making heads and standing female figures from memory (fig. 1), working in this mode until 1942. Upon his return to Paris from Switzerland in 1945, Giacometti's figures began to grow in size and, after a difficult period in which he destroyed, reworked, and pared down his sculpture, Giacometti evolved a unique figural style characterized by lean silhouettes and highly inflected surfaces. In 1948, Giacometti presented his new work at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, in his first one-man exhibition since the war.
Giacometti's postwar figures, solitary and in groups, are often described as isolated beings ravaged by space, their bodies engulfed by a hostile environment. Speaking about the figurative work of Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Theodore Roszak, and Giacometti, among others, Peter Selz stated the problem directly in 1959:
The revelations and complexities of mid-twentieth
century life have called forth a profound feeling of
solitude and anxiety. The imagery of man which has
evolved from this reveals a new dignity, sometimes
despair, but always the uniqueness of man as he confronts
his fate. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, these
artists are aware of anguish and dread, of life in which
man--precarious and vulnerable, confronts the precipice,
is aware of dying as well as living....
Like the more abstract artists of the period, these
imagists take the human situation, indeed the human
predicament rather than formal structure, as their
starting point. Existence rather than essence is of the
greatest concern to them. (P. Selz, op. cit.)
This Existentialist critique, with its emphasis on the precariousness of the human condition, now appears considerably overstated. To be sure, even Giacometti's smallest figures have a material presence of great magnitude. What is more, the rhetoric of "existential solitude" and alienation that critics have so often read into his figures diverts attention away from Giacometti's sustained investigation into the structural conditions of vision in his postwar work.
It is the physical condition of objects in space in relation to the sculptor's perceiving eye and the object that he fashions which produces such great tension in Giacometti's work. The artist explicitly acknowledges and attempts to span the physical and perceptual distance between the sculptor and his model. Jean-Paul Sartre immediately understood Giacometti's dilemma as a phenomenological crisis within the field of vision. Writing on the occasion of Giacometti's first exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, Sartre argued:
...when [sculptors] worked from nature, instead of
rendering what they saw--that is to say, the model, ten
paces off--they outlined in the clay what they knew to
be there--that is to say, the model. As they wanted
their statue to give a spectator standing ten feet off
from it the impression they had experienced before the
model, it seemed to them logical to make a figure which
would be for the spectator what the model had been for
them; and that was only possible if the marble were here
as the model were there. But what does it mean to be
"as it is" and "there?". At ten paces, I form a certain
image of that nude woman; if I approach her, and regard
her from up close, I no longer recognize her: these
craters, tunnels, cracks, this rough black hair, these
smooth shiny surfaces, this whole lunar orography; how
could all these qualities go to compose the sleek fresh
skin that I admired from far off? What is it then that
the sculptor ought to imitate? However close he comes
to this face, one can approach closer still. Thus the
statue will never truly resemble what the model is or
what the sculptor sees; one must construct it in
accordance with certain rather contradictory conventions,
imagining certain details which are not visible from so
far off, under the pretext that they exist, and
neglecting certain others which exist just the same,
under the pretext that one does not see them...
In frontally opposing classicism, Giacometti has
restored an imaginary and indivisible space to statues
....this is because he was the first one to take it into
his head to sculpt man as he appears, that is to say,
from a distance. (J.-P. Sartre, "The Search for the
Absolute," Alberto Giacometti: Exhibition of
Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, New York, Pierre
Matisse Gallery, 1948).
As Reinhold Hohl has argued, Giacometti recognized that space "does not exist merely in front of a figure, but surrounds and separates it from other objects. When we look at something we see as much of this space (particularly at the sides of the object) as our field of vision permits. The figure seen at a distance appears pronouncedly thin in relation to the absolute standard of our field of vision. As a consequence of its thinness, the figure also appears relatively tall." (R. Hohl, "Form and Vision: The Work of Alberto Giacometti," Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1974, p. 24). Although Hohl's remarks appear to confirm Sartre's observations, one might question whether an "absolute standard" does, in fact, exist for our field of vision, or is it the fantasmatic projection of an ideal, unified subject? This is a challenging question which leads into difficult theoretical terrain. However, some preliminary observations can be made in relation to La place II of 1948-49.
With reference to this important sculpture, Giacometti later remarked:
In the street people astound and interest me more
than any sculpture or painting. Every second the
people stream together and go apart, then they approach
each other to get closer to one another. They
unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in
unbelievable complexity....The men walk past each other
without looking. Or they stalk a woman. A woman is
standing and four men direct their steps more or less
toward the spot where the woman is standing....It's the
totality of this life that I want to reproduce in
everything I do. (Ibid., p. 31).
The colloquial tone of Giacometti's statement, however, belies the structural complexity of La place II, to the degree that the sculpture invites an entirely different reading. A series of related sketches of solitary figures walking are much more than isolated studies of movement, changing spatial configurations, and gesture. In Hommes qui marchent dans une place of 1949 (fig. 3), for example, Giacometti moves far beyond the representation of the urban boulevardier (see lot 3), and engages the viewer's own experience of his position in space as mutable and contingent. In La place II, Giacometti provides an actual physical ground upon which he plots an open field of spatial coordinates. As four male figures pass through the square, their positions are defined as inherently unstable in relation to one another, while at the same time they appear to be measured against the immobile figure of the standing woman in the center. Occupying the background plane of this spatial theater (the base reads like a proscenium), the solitary female figure is located at the imaginary vanishing point of an implied perspectival system, one in which the viewer has been forced to abdicate his position as the controling agent of the field of vision. Indeed, Giacometti dismantles the perspectival system by adjusting the size of his figures and collapsing the distance between them. In so doing, he unseats the viewer from his privileged position as the omnipotent subject of vision. The viewer, like Giacometti's figures, occupies one point among many in space. He is a being-seen, constituted in relation to an other--a radically decentered subject. La place II is a brilliant critical reckoning with the experience of vision as representation.
(fig. 1) Plaster busts and figurines in the studio on the rue
Hippolyte-Maindron, January, 1948 (Photo by Brassai)
(fig. 2) Alberto Giacometti and La Place at the 1950
Kunstmuseum exhibition. (Photo by Maria Netter)
(fig. 3) Alberto Giacometti, Hommes qui marchent dans une place, 1949, Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Liberman, New York
(fig. 4) Alberto Giacometti, La place II (top view)
to make (quickly, I supposed; in passing) one or two studies
from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a
head, of a whole figure...this study (I thought) should take a fortnight, and then I wanted to realize my compositions. I
worked from the model throughout the day from 1935 to 1940. Nothing was like what I imagined it to be. A head (I soon
left the figure aside, it was too much) became an object completely unknown and without dimensions. (quoted in
Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings 1913-1965, London, Tate Gallery, 1965).
This decision to reengage nature resulted in Giacometti's expulsion from the Surrealist group, with which he had been closely aligned in the early 1930s. In 1940, he abandoned the model again, and began making heads and standing female figures from memory (fig. 1), working in this mode until 1942. Upon his return to Paris from Switzerland in 1945, Giacometti's figures began to grow in size and, after a difficult period in which he destroyed, reworked, and pared down his sculpture, Giacometti evolved a unique figural style characterized by lean silhouettes and highly inflected surfaces. In 1948, Giacometti presented his new work at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, in his first one-man exhibition since the war.
Giacometti's postwar figures, solitary and in groups, are often described as isolated beings ravaged by space, their bodies engulfed by a hostile environment. Speaking about the figurative work of Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Theodore Roszak, and Giacometti, among others, Peter Selz stated the problem directly in 1959:
The revelations and complexities of mid-twentieth
century life have called forth a profound feeling of
solitude and anxiety. The imagery of man which has
evolved from this reveals a new dignity, sometimes
despair, but always the uniqueness of man as he confronts
his fate. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, these
artists are aware of anguish and dread, of life in which
man--precarious and vulnerable, confronts the precipice,
is aware of dying as well as living....
Like the more abstract artists of the period, these
imagists take the human situation, indeed the human
predicament rather than formal structure, as their
starting point. Existence rather than essence is of the
greatest concern to them. (P. Selz, op. cit.)
This Existentialist critique, with its emphasis on the precariousness of the human condition, now appears considerably overstated. To be sure, even Giacometti's smallest figures have a material presence of great magnitude. What is more, the rhetoric of "existential solitude" and alienation that critics have so often read into his figures diverts attention away from Giacometti's sustained investigation into the structural conditions of vision in his postwar work.
It is the physical condition of objects in space in relation to the sculptor's perceiving eye and the object that he fashions which produces such great tension in Giacometti's work. The artist explicitly acknowledges and attempts to span the physical and perceptual distance between the sculptor and his model. Jean-Paul Sartre immediately understood Giacometti's dilemma as a phenomenological crisis within the field of vision. Writing on the occasion of Giacometti's first exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, Sartre argued:
...when [sculptors] worked from nature, instead of
rendering what they saw--that is to say, the model, ten
paces off--they outlined in the clay what they knew to
be there--that is to say, the model. As they wanted
their statue to give a spectator standing ten feet off
from it the impression they had experienced before the
model, it seemed to them logical to make a figure which
would be for the spectator what the model had been for
them; and that was only possible if the marble were here
as the model were there. But what does it mean to be
"as it is" and "there?". At ten paces, I form a certain
image of that nude woman; if I approach her, and regard
her from up close, I no longer recognize her: these
craters, tunnels, cracks, this rough black hair, these
smooth shiny surfaces, this whole lunar orography; how
could all these qualities go to compose the sleek fresh
skin that I admired from far off? What is it then that
the sculptor ought to imitate? However close he comes
to this face, one can approach closer still. Thus the
statue will never truly resemble what the model is or
what the sculptor sees; one must construct it in
accordance with certain rather contradictory conventions,
imagining certain details which are not visible from so
far off, under the pretext that they exist, and
neglecting certain others which exist just the same,
under the pretext that one does not see them...
In frontally opposing classicism, Giacometti has
restored an imaginary and indivisible space to statues
....this is because he was the first one to take it into
his head to sculpt man as he appears, that is to say,
from a distance. (J.-P. Sartre, "The Search for the
Absolute," Alberto Giacometti: Exhibition of
Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, New York, Pierre
Matisse Gallery, 1948).
As Reinhold Hohl has argued, Giacometti recognized that space "does not exist merely in front of a figure, but surrounds and separates it from other objects. When we look at something we see as much of this space (particularly at the sides of the object) as our field of vision permits. The figure seen at a distance appears pronouncedly thin in relation to the absolute standard of our field of vision. As a consequence of its thinness, the figure also appears relatively tall." (R. Hohl, "Form and Vision: The Work of Alberto Giacometti," Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1974, p. 24). Although Hohl's remarks appear to confirm Sartre's observations, one might question whether an "absolute standard" does, in fact, exist for our field of vision, or is it the fantasmatic projection of an ideal, unified subject? This is a challenging question which leads into difficult theoretical terrain. However, some preliminary observations can be made in relation to La place II of 1948-49.
With reference to this important sculpture, Giacometti later remarked:
In the street people astound and interest me more
than any sculpture or painting. Every second the
people stream together and go apart, then they approach
each other to get closer to one another. They
unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in
unbelievable complexity....The men walk past each other
without looking. Or they stalk a woman. A woman is
standing and four men direct their steps more or less
toward the spot where the woman is standing....It's the
totality of this life that I want to reproduce in
everything I do. (Ibid., p. 31).
The colloquial tone of Giacometti's statement, however, belies the structural complexity of La place II, to the degree that the sculpture invites an entirely different reading. A series of related sketches of solitary figures walking are much more than isolated studies of movement, changing spatial configurations, and gesture. In Hommes qui marchent dans une place of 1949 (fig. 3), for example, Giacometti moves far beyond the representation of the urban boulevardier (see lot 3), and engages the viewer's own experience of his position in space as mutable and contingent. In La place II, Giacometti provides an actual physical ground upon which he plots an open field of spatial coordinates. As four male figures pass through the square, their positions are defined as inherently unstable in relation to one another, while at the same time they appear to be measured against the immobile figure of the standing woman in the center. Occupying the background plane of this spatial theater (the base reads like a proscenium), the solitary female figure is located at the imaginary vanishing point of an implied perspectival system, one in which the viewer has been forced to abdicate his position as the controling agent of the field of vision. Indeed, Giacometti dismantles the perspectival system by adjusting the size of his figures and collapsing the distance between them. In so doing, he unseats the viewer from his privileged position as the omnipotent subject of vision. The viewer, like Giacometti's figures, occupies one point among many in space. He is a being-seen, constituted in relation to an other--a radically decentered subject. La place II is a brilliant critical reckoning with the experience of vision as representation.
(fig. 1) Plaster busts and figurines in the studio on the rue
Hippolyte-Maindron, January, 1948 (Photo by Brassai)
(fig. 2) Alberto Giacometti and La Place at the 1950
Kunstmuseum exhibition. (Photo by Maria Netter)
(fig. 3) Alberto Giacometti, Hommes qui marchent dans une place, 1949, Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Liberman, New York
(fig. 4) Alberto Giacometti, La place II (top view)