Giacometti in Montparnasse: His Studio & the Man

If we can still visit Alberto Giacometti's studio, we owe it to his widow, Annette. When his studio had to be vacated in 1972, she decided to take everything, including the walls painted by her husband, and recreate his studio in its current location at the Giacometti Institute in Paris. You can take it in at a glance—a tiny space of 23 square meters that served as his studio and living quarters from 1926 until his death in 1966. His elongated figures, his busts, and a seated figure welcome you, and you have a strange feeling that Giacometti will soon be back, and that, with a cigarette in his mouth, he will put on his glasses, carelessly thrown on top of his tools, and move swiftly from sculpture to sculpture—adding here, carving there, while perhaps waiting for a fellow artist or friend to pose for him.

The French poet and art critic Alain Jouffroy describes Giacometti's studio:

"One has the impression that there is nobody behind this gray door with its dusty windows, where an old piece of fabric prevents you from seeing through the glass of this small atelier. I push the door. Among tall, white sculptures—unfinished or half-destroyed—under an electric lamp which violently illuminates the wall with faded pink and yellow colors, near a small couch covered with newspapers, books, and a few canvases resting against a wall, here is Giacometti: silent, seated on a high stool, in the process of sculpting a figure in clay."

Giacometti himself described the driving force behind his creation:

"I certainly do painting and sculpture and always have, since the first time I drew or painted, to bite into reality, to defend myself, to nourish myself... to move forward as much as possible on all levels, in all directions, to defend myself against hunger, the cold, against death, to be as free as possible to work—with the means which are the most appropriate today... to see better, to understand better what surrounds me..."

He further reflected on the endless cycle of artistic creation:

"No sculpture ever dethrones any other. A sculpture is never an object; it is an interrogation, a question, and a response. It cannot be finished or perfect. The question is never repeated. For Michelangelo, with the Pietà Rondanini, his last sculpture, all starts again. And for a thousand years, Michelangelo could have continued to sculpt pietas without repeating himself, without going back, without ever finishing anything, always going further."

Giacometti also spoke of his deep, singular focus on his subjects:

"Sculpture is not, for me, a beautiful decorative object, but a way to try to understand a little better what attracts me and confuses me in any head... If successful, a sculpture will be a way to say to others, to communicate to others, what I see... I would like to do landscapes, but I am reduced to heads at the moment. Because if we have a head, we have everything else; if we don't have the head, we have nothing—for me, anyway."

He captured his philosophy on the inherent imperfection of art by comparing it to everyday objects:

"Have you ever seen perfect paintings? I've never seen one. This is one of the characteristics of art, moreover. For an airplane propeller to work, it must be perfect, and a wine glass must not be chipped to be usable. On the other hand, a work of art is always only a partial vision of the external world—and always precarious, too. In painting and sculpture, as in poetry, there can be no perfection. This is what makes them interesting: their virulence or their violence. As I've said, the bad paintings of a painter interest me as much as the good ones. There is no difference for me. In any case, we exaggerate the importance we give to Art with a capital A. The majority of living people do without it royally."

The French journalist Pierre Dumayet once asked him about the scaling of his figures:

Pierre Dumayet: "Why is she so small?"

Alberto Giacometti: "It's not my fault. It was in 1937. Because it was still impossible for me to get a head right, I wanted to create whole figures instead. I started them big, like this (Giacometti extends his full arm), but they kept shrinking until they were like this (he holds up half his thumb). This continued throughout the war. I was working every day, doing nothing else. I would start big, and by the time I was finished, it was tiny. It was diabolical."

Dumayet: "And did you understand why they were getting smaller?"

Giacometti: "I understood it afterward. The sculpture I wanted to make of this woman was the very precise vision I had of her the moment I saw her in the street, standing at a distance. I therefore tended to recreate the exact scale she had when she was at that distance."

Dumayet: "In other words, the extraordinary lengthening of your men and women comes from the fact that, through sheer discipline, you refused to let them diminish?"

Giacometti: "Exactly."

Dumayet: "You never see people life-size anymore?"

Giacometti: "Never again. Never again... never again."

As I prepare to leave Giacometti's studio, I catch a glimpse of this forlorn sculpture of a dog. I understand it was modeled after a hound belonging to his friend, Picasso. Giacometti deeply identified with this image of a solitary, stray dog—his art, after all, falls outside of any artistic movement. It is simply his vision.

The Giacometti Institute and studio can be found at 5 Rue Victor Schoelcher in the Montparnasse district of Paris.

Giacometti's quotes were sourced from three booklets available for purchase at the Institute: Pourquoi je suis sculpteur, Je fais certainement de la peinture, and Le rêve, le sphinx et la mort de T. All translations from the original French are my own.