Giacometti: Critical Essays (review)

This informative and imaginative critical mosaic champions a comparative pallet in approaching the uniqueness of powerful aesthetic artefacts. The inexhaustible questions of relation that Giacometti poses are addressed in one of the book’s central concerns: the interaction of Giacometti’s visual art with writing, not just his own but that of many French-language writers, as well as others. The uniqueness of each writer emerges in company with the coherence and energy of Giacometti’s own enterprise. Like Alex Potts, but at greater length, Peter Read discusses the ambivalent response of Ponge to Giacometti and situates it in the pre- and post-war environment comprising surrealism, existentialism, and absurdism. Read shows Ponge rejecting the obsessive subjectivity and the consequent metaphysical pessimism of these various approaches. But Giacometti is not granted the power simply to draw a line, and in Read’s account the search is on for a visceral, life-affirming expression of existence (p. 184). Sarah Wilson explores a neighbourhood inhabited by Giacometti and Tahar Ben Jelloun but also Levinas and Genet. Ben Jelloun reads Genet’s L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, Wilson suggests, like a Genetian ‘captif amoureux’: someone in the position of having a ‘passion for the other, the humiliated’. Passion: not simply intensity of feeling for the ‘oppressed’, but an engagement with the ‘interiority of others’, which Genet shares with Levinas, as Wilson indicates, as well as with Ben Jelloun and Giacometti himself (pp. 214–15). This is one of the many intertexts illuminated in the book, unstable and for that reason approachable ones, open to multiple points of entry: testimonies to the simple ability to understand others. But if the Genetian ‘wound’ becomes the wound of assimilation, as Wilson suggests, this book resists by being anything but a literary or philosophical assimilation of Giacometti’s art. Potts addresses Giacometti’s use of the pedestal, his concern with ‘articulating the connection between a sculpture and the ground where it is placed’ (p. 131), and compares Giacometti’s practice with that of his contemporaries Henry Moore and David Smith. As in his many framing devices, in this intense engagement with the ‘ground’ Giacometti investigates ‘psychically charged spatial encounters between groups of figures and the viewer’ (p. 138). Subjectivity, materiality, community: some of the many themes running through the book. A living experience of art emerges again in Thierry Dufrêne’s explorations of space, depth, and the silent visual murmurings coming between the sculptor and his model (p. 123). Peter Read and Julia Kelly have put a range of critical frames on display, including the document, cultural history, visual culture, the history of form, intertextual relation, Hegelianism. The book will absorb literary critics as much as art historians: it is a testimony to Giacometti’s own iconic figure striding confidently forwards but enveloped in the frames allowing him to move.