L’Atelier d’Albert Giacometti at the Pompidou

Crème de la crème

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Between one breath and the next


With high-speed trains from St Pancras to Paris only weeks away, we round up the French capital's cultural highlights. Adrian Searle kicks off this special issue with a visit to the stunning new Giacometti exhibition

Tuesday October 30, 2007
The Guardian

Alberto Giacometti lived and worked in the same decrepit Montparnasse studio for 40 years, having taken it on in 1926, a few years after arriving in Paris from Switzerland as a student. He slowly occupied more and more space in the same leaky, ramshackle warren of workshops, until his death from stomach cancer in 1966. First, his brother Diego moved there with him, and, after the war, his wife Annette moved in too. It is difficult to quite comprehend the sort of life they had there, and why they continued to live as they did, given the artist's commercial success.

The Pompidou Centre's marvellous L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti is a retrospective featuring not only Giacometti's sculptures, paintings and drawings, but also the studio itself - what went on there, and what was removed after the artist's death, including sections of the walls on which he drew and painted. These were not so much murals as a palimpsest of stains, scribbles and scratches, among which loom faces, walking men and standing women: Giacometti's perennial subjects. One beautiful face stares from the door of a battered wardrobe. At first, it looks like a dark, accidental splodge, the residue of some nocturnal incident. But look closer and the painted face takes on all the dignity and authority of an Egypto-Roman funerary portrait.
Taking its title from Jean Genet's famous essay on the artist, the exhibition is based on works, and a wealth of other material, in the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation collection, much of which has not been shown before. There are more than 600 exhibits, including photographs, sculptures, things pulverised by overwork, heads on sticks looking like cannibalistic lollipops, discarded trial runs and variations on familiar themes. There are figures without bases and bases without figures - these are like empty tombs. There are his 1950s designs for scarves, delightful 1930s wall plaques of a bird and a fish, a playful lamp standard. The variety is unexpected.

Some figures in plaster have lost their arms, or seem to adhere to the metal armatures about which they were modelled only by good luck and rust. These fragmentary images are displayed among rickety bits of furniture, unfinished sculptures and the paintings that were once piled up around the studio walls, providing a backdrop to Giacometti's one long, uninterrupted conversation with himself. The studio was the artist's cave. There are moments in this exhibition that feel like a disinterment.

The studio was a place where things got buried, lost or forgotten, broken up, trampled, ground into nothingness. Even as the models and lovers came and went, the things in the studio, and their placement, remained much the same. Sculptures got made and unmade, lost and found, amid a steady fall of clay and chiselled plaster. Working and reworking, modelling and remodelling, overpainting and obliterating, repainting and redrawing - it was ceaseless.

Giacometti habitually reworked things because he could, rather than because he should have. Much got worked to death and resurrected, or perhaps just arrested and interrupted at some indeterminate point - like being frozen between one step and another, one breath and the next. Only in Giacometti's lithographs, in which the soft, greasy litho crayon glides so sexily and easily across the plate or stone, does he allow himself the pleasure of an impulsive first thought. There are also groups of walking men who would be nothing more than stick figures were they not quivering with palpitating little blobs. They pulsate in the light.

At one point, I came across a row of wiry, probing metal rods, emerging vertically from a plaster block the size of a car battery. These little rods seem to have attracted stray bits of hair and little gobbets of plaster, as if they had just been blown there, like litter, and stuck. One asks if this really is a sculpted row of figures, or nothing at all. I began to hyperventilate, moved that so much depended on these tenacious shreds, cobwebs and spit. This shouldn't be happening to a critic, I told myself; you're case-hardened, immune to artistic heebie-jeebies. But art is a sort of act of faith, a matter of the spectator's desire as much as an artist's intention. History and context matter, but at a certain point you're on your own. Maybe it was this that I found suddenly so upsetting. Then again, Giacometti could also be funny, perhaps without meaning to be.

His bronzes may sometimes have the tragedy of bones sticking out of the mud, but his Study for the Chariot is a stupid plaster slab, with dinky off-kilter plaster wheels at each corner. Some of his early busts are like the things people once flung at their enemies during a siege.

A child prodigy, during his 20s Giacometti sculpted his father, a painter, with all the winning ineptitude of a four-year-old, fashioning his dad's face as a flat iron set into a cannonball. He went on to sculpt men in sweaters as lumpy and indomitable as the mountains in Italian-speaking Switzerland from where he came. A large 1954 bust of his brother Diego is funky and cartoonish when seen from the side; head on, it is like a frontal attack by a toothless piranha.

After touching one of Giacometti's figures, Genet wrote: "I cannot describe the happiness of my fingers." Giacometti's own fingers had of course been there first - pinching, smoothing, gouging and pulling at the plaster or the clay. In a short film in the exhibition, the artist is seen working on a bust. He suddenly pulls the sculpted head off its neck, regarding what he has done with total equanimity.

The last major Giacometti show I saw was in New York in 2001, just after 9/11. Trucks were still ferrying the rubble and remains away. Then, Giacometti made me think of the way human beings occupy space, how they displace the emptiness around them, the traces they leave.

The current exhibition is much less academic, and is the best I have ever seen on the artist. It is beautifully installed and arranged, with constant surprises and pleasures - the long series of drawn portraits of Matisse; a 1930s figure reunited with its arms, one of which has a hand like an Alessi lemon squeezer; a surrealist toy I have never seen before; and numerous works I knew only from old black-and-white photographs.

The studio and the artist have become an inseparable myth, along with the stereotype of Giacometti the postwar Paris existentialist walking in the rain or wreathed in smoke and plaster dust. Giacometti with Beckett and Genet, Leiris and Sartre; Giacometti with his women and his models and his bohemian morals; and - most important of all - those implacable standing figures of women and men walking, pointing and falling. He made a sculpture of a leg as tall as a man, and sculptures of figures no larger than a fingernail-paring, standing on plinths the size of a sugar cube.

Like Jackson Pollock's barn in East Hampton, and the chaotic workroom in Francis Bacon's Kensington flat, Giacometti's studio was smaller than one would think possible for the production of his works. Each of these essentially private places became known, thanks to the photographers who trailed the artists to their lairs. Look at any Pollock painting and Hans Namuth's famous images come to mind, of Pollock dancing over the canvas on the barn floor; then there's Bacon, laughing or out-staring the camera as he sat amid a spectacular untidiness; and Giacometti, handsome, cigarette in hand, in the silvery photogenic gloom of the Rue Hyppolite-Maindron, wretched piles of cinders and plaster muck everywhere, the walls and even the furniture covered in drawings and hastily painted figures. In an obscure way, the studio comes to represent the interior of the artist's brain.

Giacometti imagined his sculptures crossing a piazza or standing on a street corner, but they belonged in some essential way to a city of the mind or of dreams, which he faithfully recorded in texts and drawings, and made visible in haunting prewar sculptures such as The Palace at 4am. In reality, everything in Giacometti's art was unfinished, every conclusion an interruption, every starting point a dead end. But he left such marvellous things, finished or not - a paradoxical body of work. It is often thought that he refuted his surrealist sculptures of the 1930s, but their psychological impact is at one with his later work. He seemed to opt later for hard-won images and sculptures that tried and failed to capture the fleeting moment. But that is exactly what is right about them, especially those that nearly did not survive. Even what might appear as their impermanence, decay and lack of concretion gives them their charge.

Crumbling on their armatures, they have a heartbreaking presence · L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until February 11. Details: +33 1 44 78 12 33 or www.centrepompidou.fr