(1901-1966)
Giacometti was the son of a famous Swiss painter. He moved to Paris in 1922, where he began his study of sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle. a pupil of Rodin. During the 1920s he began experimenting with forms of free association taught by Surrealist movement. During the 1930 he then began a painful search for the means to re-present the human figure in its real situation in space. His ideas on that he developed in the late 1930s, were moving in directions similar to those of the major philosophers in France, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty andjean-Paul Sartre, both of whom developed fresh theories of perception that influenced the post-World War II artists.
GIACOMETTI'S THOUGHTS ON ART
"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 livingperson, but what makes him alive is without a doubt his gaze. The headsfrom the New Hebrides are true, are more than true, because they have agaze. Not the imitation of eyes, but really and truly a gaze. Everything elseis only the framework for the gaze.... If the gaze, that is, life, is the mainthing, then the head becomes the main thing ... the rest of the body islimited to functioning as antennae that make people's life possible-the lifethat is housed in the,skull.... At a certain point in time I began to see thepeople in the street as if their living essence was very tiny. I saw livingbeings exclusively through their eyes. " [1951)
"If one sets one's heart on grasping as much as possible of what one sees, beit in science or art, the procedure is the same. The scholar specialized inany field will find that the more he knows, the more he will have to learn,and never should he hope to reach full knowledge. Besides, full knowledgewould be death itself. Art and science mean trying to understand. Failureor success plays a secondary role. This adventure is of recent date-it startedapproximately in the eighteenth century with Chardin, when one began tobe interested more in the artist's vision than in serving the church or giving pleasure to kings. At last, man given to himself! ""One could not express in words what one feels with one's eyes and one'shand.
Words pervert thoughts, writing distorts words-.one no longer recognizesoneself. I do not believe in the problem of space; space is created solely bythe objects; an object that moves without any relation to another objectcould not give the impression of space. The subject alone is decisive. Space,shapes, canvas, plaster, bronze . . . so many means. The only importantthing is to create a new object whichconveys an impression as close aspossible to that received when contemplating the subject.... Sculpturerests in the void. One hollows out space so as to construct the object, andthe object as such creates space, the space that exists between the subjectand the sculptor. " [1962]
"It might be supposed that realism consists in copying a glass as it is on thetable. In fact, one never copies anything but the vision that remains of it ateach moment, the image that becomes conscious. You never copy the glasson the table; you copy the residue of a vision.... Each time I look at theglass, it has an air of remaking itself, that's to say, its reality becomesuncertain, because its projection in my head is uncertain, or partial. Onesees it as if it were disappearing, coming into view again, disappearing,coming into view again-that's to say, it really always is between being and not being. And it's this that one wants to copy. [1964]