Giacometti’s Wasted Souls
“It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.”
---Samuel Beckett
“Space does not exist, it has to be created… Every sculpture based on the assumption that space exists is wrong; there is only the illusion of space.”
---Alberto Giacometti, circa 1949
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Walking Man. 1961
It is difficult not to see the incredible outpouring of Alberto Giacometti’s postwar sculptures as the result of considerable intense meditation on suffering, anxiety and feelings of isolation in Europe at the end of World War II. The searing black and white images of emaciated bodies at extermination camps being thrown into burial pits, the collective suffering and near starvation in the occupied countries during the war’s last days, were vivid in the mind of those most closely situated, even in Switzerland (which was neutral during the war) where Giacometti had taken refuge in Geneva after fleeing Paris in 1941. How could the artist not have created these stick figures out of the horrific images of the war’s victims?
Well, except that it isn’t true, according to philosophy/art professor Arthur C. Danto, who knew Giacometti when Danto was a young art student in postwar Europe. Danto recounts the artist’s exasperation at the interpretation. This is not to say that Giacometti wasn’t deeply affected by the war. It must have had a very deep impact on the way he felt about his art. In fact, he emerged into his second phase of art with his sculptures of “thin to the point of disappearing’ pieces. But to see it primarily as a cry of pain and that alone is to undervaluate him as the great artist that he is.
Giacometti was not without his emotional complexities. He had several devastating traumas in his life and was intensely preoccupied with dreams and with death. But he was no recluse. In fact, he was very sociable and went out to cafes every evening with friends and carried on spirited conversations with them.
With the liberation of Paris and the rest of western Europe came the emergence of the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sartre, not usually a commentator on art, wrote two essays on Giacometti. Perhaps, as Danto further suggests, we must rethink existentialism itself: “...the field of perception is everywhere inflected by all of our sense modalities working together in synthesis, of how the world discloses itself to consciousness and how philosophers must learn from artists...rather than from science.”
In other words, existential philosophy proceeds from art, not the other way around! Sartre implies this when he writes about Giacometti’s later works “The moment I see them, they appear in my field of vision the way an idea appears in my mind.”
The Walking Man is not fleeing from the past. he is walking directly toward the future that is to be. We love him for his unflagging courage. In fact, we wish for it ourselves. For all of his gouged, blackened surfaces and thinness to the point of disappearing, the artist has given his walking man strong shoulders, just as he does with his wife Annette, with whom he had a stormy relationship
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Annette 1961
Her pose is motionless, however. But it is resolute. Her husband was irresponsible to the point of cruelty and neglect and reading that history makes me look at her sculpture closely...and it is a long look. It may very well be a kind of stilled existential stance but I don’t interpret her as unable to meet whatever she must.
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Falling Man, 1950, Avignon, Musée Calvet (Depot Musée d’Orsay).
This work appears as a central icon of the Existentialist view of his work. Here is the slightest of Giacometti’s figures, ready to topple from his pedestal and yet with his head is thrown back (“ecstatically,” in one critical piece I read on it). He is meeting his fate even though he falls, embracing the transcendent moment.
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City Square. 1948
In City Square, Giacometti presents a grouping of walking men and one still woman in their midst. This work was also considered a statement on the bombed out rubble of cities in the aftermath of the war’s conflagration. Again, the people he has sculpted are well grounded both in their substantial feet and in the solidly built surface the artist has rested them on. It matters that we are grounded. The artist explains: “In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting...They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity...It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do...” Giacometti again confounds his interpreters...
The figures, as Peter Schjeldahl puts it, ”seem like the ravaged but ultimately heroic victims of wasting forces” and these images recall Samuel Beckett closing words from “The Unnamable”...
”You must go on.
“I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.”
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= new reply since forum marked as read
My introduction to both existential philosophy and to Giacometti's art
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mystery. I did a TON of research on Giacometti before writing this and nowhere were the big hands mentioned...
jutted in defiance, the eyes seem sad, the brows angry... I think the hands represent internal power/strength.
Great essay, as always!
The highlight of my DU Friday.
I have to assume such a lovely piece had to have been in the works long before the tragic events in Charleston. Or maybe you are an instant genius! 
(I'm not)
Giacometti's figures speak so eloquently of tragedy, and survival.
I am so impressed with the way they so powerfully interact with the space around them.
My personal favorite is "Pointing Man" which can be seen in the background of your last image.
Such a frail figure, but activates the space around him so dynamically.
Shows the power of the individual, even in our weakened, ruined state.
Do we use that power for good or evil?
