In Giacometti’s Studio

Posted: 08 Nov 2011  |  By: Joseph Brennan

In Giacometti’s Studio
Michael Peppiatt
Yale University Press
ISBN 978 0 30009 393 3
220 pp
RRP $79.95

In Lost Beyond Telling, Richard Stamelman described the emaciated beings of sculptor Alberto Giacometti as concerned with loss, “with the signs that absent things leave of themselves … with the fundamental alterity of one’s perception of the world”. Similarly, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre remarked that Giacometti saw “the void everywhere”, creeping in all places and secreted from all creatures. Perhaps the best example of a place where this void crept was in the artist’s studio.

In Giacometti’s Studio is Michael Peppiatt’s second book on Giacometti. In it Peppiatt explores his personal feelings on the artist’s cramped, near forty-year studio, which he describes as crucible of his experiments. Giacometti’s studio has been a source of photographic interest since the artist first took up residence there in 1926. Brassaï’s 1982 The Artists of my Life, for example, included photographs of Giacometti in his studio, many with the artist omitted, presenting the space as, in the words of Mary Bergstein, “a work of art unto itself”.

His death in 1966 left the space holding countless failed and unfinished works and a quantity of drawings that, Peppiatt suggests, leaves us to believe “his hand simply never stopped”. Initially having planned not to remain in the space longer than necessary — believing it no more than a ‘hole’ — Peppiatt argues that the reason he never left was because it reflected his dark nature, being “as bereft of hope as of any human comfort”. Ellen Spitz took a similar position when she described the studio as “a kind of addictive play space” where “never-banished demons recrudesce and where life and death, presence and absence remain locked in a ceaseless combat”. In this regard Peppiatt describes the studio as a “repository of repeated failure”. A failure Giacometti reminded himself of regularly.

When he shifted from works inspired by dreams to those using live models in 1935, it was a change that signalled his abrupt departure from the Surrealist movement and began an obsession with capturing the human form (the head in particular). “A head,” he wrote in a 1947 letter to Pierre Matisse, “became for me an object completely unknown and without dimensions … If I could just do a head, one head, just once … But it’s impossible.” As Stamelman wrote, the modelling of a head was “Giacometti’s lifelong, unrealised ambition”. It led him each day to work “amidst the rubble of destroyed statues littering his studio floor”, which reminded him of how little he, or others, knew of representation.

The work’s black and white photography (drained of colours like Giacometti’s works themselves) functions as both archive and theatre, offering insight into the man and his practice. ‘Sculptures in the corner of the studio, with Standing Woman in foreground’, for example, shows a finished work alongside plaster versions — in what Alex Potts described as “various states of unfinish” — as well as clay figures wrapped in cloth, which is insightful given that many sculptors of the period tended not to make a preliminary clay model.

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Image: Giacometti painting, surrounded by plaster models. Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger, c.1960. ©Neue Zürcher Zeitung.