"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 want to sculpt a living person, but what makes him alive is without a doubt his gaze. The heads from the New Hebrides are true, are more than true, because they have a gaze. Not the imitation of eyes, but really and truly a gaze. Everything else is only the framework for the gaze . . . . If the gaze, that is, life, is the main thing, then the head becomes the main thing . . . . the rest of the body is limited to functioning as antennae that make people's life possible--the life that is housed in the skull . . . . At a certain point in time I began to see the people in the street as if their living essence was very tiny. I saw living beings exclusively through their eyes." [1951]
"It might be supposed that realism consists in copying a glass as it is on the table. In fact, one never copies anything but the vision that remains of it at each moment, the image that becomes conscious. You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision . . . . Each time I look at the glass, it has an air of remaking itself, that's to say, it's reality becomes uncertain, because its projection in my head is uncertain, or partial. One sees it as it if were disappearing, coming into view again, disappearing, coming into view again --that is to say, it really always is between being and not being. And it's this that one wants to copy." [c. 1964-64]
[Ashton, Dore, ed. Twentieth-Century Artists on Art. New York: Pantheon Books. 1985.]
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Giacometti's Apprentice Years: Alberto Giacometti, 'Early Works in Paris (1922-1930)'
Yoshii Gallery
20 West 57th Street
Through June 25, 1994
This small, outstanding exhibition should not be missed by anyone interested in modern sculpture. Its subject is the period of Giacometti's apprenticeship in Paris, when he was restlessly searching for a direction and pursuing remarkably diverse paths at the same time.
A viewer can't help being powerfully struck by Giacometti's extreme openness: to African, Cycladic, Aztec and Oceanic art, to Picasso, Lipchitz, Laurens and Brancusi, not to say to more traditional modes of European sculpture.
In 1922, he went to Paris and signed up for life-drawing and sculpture classes with Antoine Bourdelle, an esteemed disciple of Rodin, at the Academie de la Grande-Chaumiere. The nude figure drawings, the product of this academic training, describe volumes of bodies through a network of connected points and facetted planes. They look back to CÚzanne and to early Cubism. They also hint at the eroticism and nervous energy that would come to characterize Giacometti's mature art.
"Torso" was his first important sculpture. Its trunklike, angular and tensile form is like a rougher, more energized female counterpart to Brancusi's famous "Torso of a Youth" that nonetheless retains the phallic connotation. Giacometti also made Cubist sculptures composed of tightly compacted shards and blocks with figural references: the barrel shape in "Cubist Composition" seems to lean affectionately into a kind of boxy form, suggesting two lovers' heads.
In these years he made open, scaffolded works, too, the gridded "Man (Apollo)" among them, which are indebted to African sculpture and also have something of the quality of drawings in space. And he invented the radical thin slabs of the Plaques: simplified, Cycladic-inspired near-reliefs, with their subtly hollowed shapes as abstracted signs for eyes or noses.
"The idea of cold eroticism emerges in the 'Plaques,'" observes Casimiro Di Crescenzo, the show's curator, in his extensively documented catalogue. (A monograph on the artist, edited by Angela Schneider, has recently been published in an English edition by Prestel and includes an essay by Karin von Mauer on Giacometti's early years.)
The Plaques helped to secure Giacometti's reputation and led to a show with Miro and Arp, and to his association with the Surrealists. By 1930, still only 29, he was a rising star in Paris. Later, he tried to minimize what he had done in the 1920's. (At the same time, he had bronze casts made of many of these early works.) In any case, the energy and invention that one senses from the works in this show are undeniable and inspiring. Every young artist should see the exhibition.
[Kimmelman, Michael. Giacometti's apprentice years: Alberto Giacometti, 'Early Works in Paris (1922-1930)' Art in Review. The New York Times, June 3, 1994.]
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