Some of My Lives (20 page)

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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

BOOK: Some of My Lives
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I
still remember Alberto Giacometti's address by heart: 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the 14th arrondissement, a rather gloomy part of the Montrouge neighborhood of Paris. I remember it not only because of my visits there during the 1950s, and later, but because I used to send postcards to him, gathered on my frequent trips to museums and foreign parts for my magazine, of subjects that might interest him.
He had lived and worked there since 1921. He shared the crowded quarters with his brother and closest friend, Diego. Sometimes his wife, Annette, who had followed him from Geneva, was around too, although she found the place so uncomfortable that she moved to a hotel. Also, she objected to his insistence on keeping the light burning all night. He never got over his fear of the dark. But he had warned her, when very reluctantly he married her after some years of cohabitation, that he was not going to change his ways. And he didn't.
Annette was twenty years younger than Alberto. She was often treated with insulting indifference, but she will be remembered because she became one of his main models, both for paintings and for sculpture.
The studio was bleak. A single very bright lightbulb hung from the ceiling. A thick coating of dust reduced everything to a Giacometti color scheme of gray and more gray. There was always a distinctive smell of damp clay; a cluster of figures draped in wet cloth waited to be cast in plaster by Diego in his atelier just across the narrow corridor that separated the two studios. It was here that Diego made the armatures and the plaster casts from the original clay models.
There was a battered old sofa, two rickety chairs, one for Alberto,
the other for whoever was posing for him, usually Annette or Diego. Red marks on the floor recorded the exact position of artist and subject. His needs were reduced to his necessary working material: clay, plaster, paper, canvas, paints. At that time Alberto was alternating, sometimes on the same day, between painting, drawing, and sculpture. No flowers. No memorabilia.
The only personal note were two little paintings in the cramped bedroom next to the studio: one of Alberto as a child painted by his father, Giovanni, a well-known Swiss post-Impressionist; the other painted by Alberto at fifteen of his brother.
Alberto himself was an impressive presence, solid of build, handsome features as rugged as if they had been hewn out of the rocks from his native Swiss mountains. He came from Stampa, a remote village high in the Italian Alps. Years of living in plaster dust seemed to have coated him permanently; even his clothes began to look like fragments of an old wall. He smoked incessantly, so a dusting of ash added to the patina.
Years before, a drunk driver had run up over a curb and crushed one of Alberto's feet. Long stays in the hospital followed. He never fully recovered, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He never bothered to sue the driver, although the negligence was clear. He simply didn't want to be bothered with mercenary transactions.
In 1950, a figure of a towering woman, as slim as only a Giacometti figure could be, rose above two giant wheels, his hospital experience recalled. Talking about this sculpture, Giacometti said, “It is usually called
The Chariot
, but I think of it as
The Pharmacy Wagon
, because this sculpture comes from the glittering wagon that was wheeled around the corridors of the Bichat hospital which astonished me in 1938.
“In 1947, I saw the sculpture before me, as if it were finished. In 1950 it became impossible for me not to make it, even though for me it was already past.
“
The Chariot
was created by the necessity to have the figure in empty space, in order to see it better and to situate it at a distance from the floor.”
I wanted to photograph
The Chariot
for the first issue of
L'ŒIL
, but I didn't want to shoot against a plain wall. I got the idea of taking
the sculpture out to the Parc Monceau on a Wednesday, the day French schoolchildren have the day off.
It worked just as I had hoped. The children circled around it on their bikes, their bicycle wheels echoing the giant wheels of the sculpture. Giacometti was delighted.
Giacometti was always politeness itself, even though he hated being interrupted. He would greet the visitor amiably, but then came the mantra. There were endless variations, but the gist of it was: “I don't know why you bother to come. There's nothing to see. I can't finish anything. What I have done is no good, so I'm going to destroy it and/or paint it out, and/or erase it. You can see how badly things are going.”
This gloomy mood would disappear when he talked of art that was important to him. He told me that since childhood, he had made copies of works of art that he liked—from books and catalogs—sometimes just sketches with a ballpoint pen. He spoke of his favorites as if he had them in front of his eyes. He knew the walls of the Louvre as well as the walls of his cramped bedroom.
At the time I started my visits to the Hippolyte-Maindron atelier, I was preparing an illustrated book on Venice. We had commissioned the American author Mary McCarthy to write us a profile of a city. We were to illustrate it entirely with works of art that were still in Venice.
When I talked about this to Alberto, it stirred up torrents of visual memories. He had spent time in Venice in 1920, when he accompanied his father, Giovanni, who was representing the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Giacometti had written about his enthusiasms: “During that stay in Venice I was excited solely by Tintoretto. I spent the entire month running around the city, worried that there might be one more painting by him hidden somewhere in the corner of a church. Tintoretto was for me a marvelous discovery; he opened a curtain upon a new world. I loved him with an exclusive and fanatic love. Tintoretto was right and the others were wrong.
“The last day I ran to the Scuola di San Rocco and to San Giorgio Maggiore as if to tell him goodbye, goodbye to the greatest of friends.”
However, he went on to write that that very same afternoon, “when I went into the Arena Chapel in Padua, I received a body blow right in the chest, in front of the frescoes of Giotto. I was confused and lost. The power of Giotto asserted itself irresistibly on me. I was crushed by those immutable figures, dense as basalt, with their precise and accurate gestures, heavy with expression and infinite tenderness.”
Sometimes Alberto came to visit me at my Paris apartment. He was fascinated by two giant tree fern figures from the New Hebrides that I had in my salon. He thought that their great eyeless sockets carried the power of what he called
le regard
(the gaze). He used to talk about the importance of
le regard
.
“One day, when I was drawing a young girl, I suddenly noticed that the only thing that was alive was her gaze. The rest of her head meant no more to me than the skull of a dead man.
“One does not sculpt a living person, but what makes him alive is without doubt his gaze. Everything else is only a framework for the gaze.”
As an example of the power of the gaze, he mentioned the gaze of the Savior in Matthias Grünewald's great altarpiece at Isenheim.
My small office on the Left Bank, rue des Saints-Pères, had walls painted a shade of blue I like very much, the color of a pack of Gauloises cigarettes (I did not smoke myself). There were no pictures on the walls yet.
Alberto dropped by. He sat down opposite me. I said, “It must seem odd to you, an art magazine where there is not a single work of art in sight.”
“Not at all,” he answered. “You are a
personnage sur fond bleu
[a figure against a blue background]. That's the way I will paint you one day.” This never came about. It would have been difficult to pose at Giacometti's hours: all-night sessions, starting at already late hours—hard to combine with running a demanding monthly publication.
I had told him about my plan to run an article about him in the first issue. He was absolutely appalled. This was in 1954, before his worldwide celebrity, but he was hugely admired by the cognoscenti: Sartre, Genet, and Beckett had all written about him. But he was so
genuinely modest that he was convinced it would harm the new magazine if I featured him.
“Come and have a drink,” he said in his hoarse voice (all those cigarettes).
We went to a nearby café. He invariably drank red wine. He did his best to convince me not to show his work. “It will sink your magazine. Nobody will buy it.” Naturally, I paid no attention.
Incidentally, I was rather surprised when he wanted to know if Matisse had asked me to pose. He knew I had just visited Matisse.
It was Henri Matisse's son Pierre, the distinguished New York dealer who had introduced contemporary European art to America, who organized the first Giacometti exhibition in the United States. He had been to see the then little-known sculptor in Paris in 1946. He was sufficiently impressed to present the work in an important exhibition at his gallery in 1948.
It got the best possible send-off. There was an essay about the sculptor by Jean-Paul Sartre. At that time, Sartre was high on the radar screen of intellectuals and those who wanted to be in the know.
And most important, Giacometti sent along a letter that amounted to an illustrated catalog. He had made little ideogram drawings of each piece and described it. This provided an invaluable document—a living link with the artist and his thoughts about his own work. It has often been reproduced since then, including in the Giacometti catalog of his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition was such a success that the Matisse Gallery presented a second exhibition two years later.
As I mentioned before, domesticity was not for Alberto. Meals, such as they were, were taken in neighboring bistros or cafés. His main meal, always the same, consisted of two hard-boiled eggs, two slices of ham, two cups of coffee, two glasses of Beaujolais. Four packs of cigarettes throughout the day and more coffee continued the onslaught on his health.
Nights he roamed from café to café. He never went to bed before dawn. His companion on these nocturnal forays, exasperated but devoted, was usually his brother Diego. “How do you expect to work in that condition? Nothing will come of it—maybe a little chicken?” Usually, something did come of it, although Alberto, dissatisfied with his own work, frequently destroyed it.
“Diego's head is the one I know best,” Alberto said. “He posed for me over a long period of time, from 1935 to 1940, every day. When I draw or paint from memory, it always turns out to be more or less Diego's head.”
Before they were closed by law, his regular rounds included a stop at one of several brothels he frequented. His favorite was called Le Sphinx.
Julien Levy, the dashing New York dealer of the postwar art world, left this affectionate description of Le Sphinx in his
Memoir of an Art Gallery
:
The atmosphere was half nude, very carnal, pretty and amusing. The artists in the neighborhood had developed a habit of coming to the Sphinx at aperitif time … just for the pleasure of having a glass of wine and chatting in this rather unusual atmosphere. The girls were not at all averse to this, enjoying being treated to a drink and having a chat before their professional clients came in later in the evening.
Sadly, this easygoing oasis had to shut down in 1946, when a crusading female minister outlawed all the brothels. On October 6 of that year, the mistress of the Sphinx invited all her regular customers, including Giacometti, to celebrate the brothel's last evening.
Alberto described the origins of his
Four Figures on a Stand
as a memory of a scene at the Sphinx. His sculpture hoists four minute figures high up on a blocklike stand, which in turn is held aloft by four spindly shafts.
“Several nude women seen at the Sphinx as I was sitting at the back of the room: the distance which separated us (the shining parquet floor) and which seemed insurmountable despite my desire to cross it made as strong an impression on me as the women themselves.”
Alberto's feelings toward women were violently ambivalent. They were both adored and despised. They were goddesses to be worshipped from afar, but they were also fallen women who deserved to suffer. He admitted he had fantasies of rape and murder (like Cézanne).
“Whores are the most honest girls,” he said. “They present the
bill right away. The others hang on and never let you go. When one lives with the problem of impotence, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance.”
His last great love was a prostitute and sometime thief who called herself Caroline. She came into his life in 1960 and remained an agonizing thorn in the side of both Annette and Diego. He painted countless portraits of her in the following years.
In contrast to his rackety Parisian lifestyle, Alberto remained deeply attached to his mother and to his native village of Stampa. He returned there several times a year to see his mother and to draw. In later years, he telephoned her frequently from Paris.
I owe the following to Giacometti's friend the late art critic Thomas B. Hess. When asked what his mother thought of his work, Alberto answered, grinning, “She can't stand it, and she gets the whole village to back her up. She'll draw out one of my new paintings and say, ‘Look, isn't this terrible? Look at the dirty colors.' And the mailman will nod his head.”

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