Alberto Giacometti

The Art of Relation

Timothy Mathews

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780767864
• eBook ISBN: 9780857735096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Breton are just two of the great thinkers whose thought has been nurtured by the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which continues to resonate with artists, writers and audiences. Timothy Mathews explores fragility, trauma, space and relationality in Giacometti's art and writing and the capacity to relate that emerges. In doing so, he draws upon the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom and the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Bertolt Brecht; and recasts Giacometti's Le Chariot as Walter Benjamin's angel of history. This book invites readers on a voyage of discovery through Giacometti's deep concerns with memory, attachment and humanity. Both a critical study of Giacometti's work and an immersion in its affective power, it asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about our own time and our own ways of looking; and about the humility of relating to art.

Timothy Mathews is Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at UCL. He is the author of Reading Apollinaire (1990) and Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France (2006). He is co-translator with Delphine Grass of Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle (2010) and co-editor with Jan Parker of Tradition, Translation, Trauma (2011).

This relational writing is deeply moving. Timothy Mathews calls on and calls forth the many persons concerned for him in the viewing and feeling and touching of Giacometti pieces: here are Beckett and Sebald, Benjamin and Barthes, and the best readers such as Didi-Huberman. Mathews will impress with the sensitivity of both his seeing and his style.

Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, City University of New York

In Timothy Mathews’s both analytic and empathetic view, Giacometti’s work becomes the intellectual site, where a question can be asked, discussed, but never conclusively answered, that I find more decisive, in the immateriality of our digital environment, than ever before. It is a question about the threshold where artistic form turns into an intense presence whose challenge exceeds all other types of interaction.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Stanford University

Timothy Mathews’s writing vividly conveys what it is like to see, to point towards, to be in the same space as Giacometti’s precariously balanced, elongated, poignantly caged, suffering figures. His account of the ways in which he and others have responded to Giacometti’s sculpture is full of discoveries. The reader is invited to share in the process of discovery through the writings of Beckett and Benjamin, Blanchot and Sebald; and—most of all—through the words of Giacometti himself. This is art writing at its most exciting and humbling. It conveys why we look, and look again at the human form as only Giacometti gives it to us to see, with all its burden of traumatic history.

Mary Jacobus, FBA, CBE, Professor Emerita, University of Cambridge, Professor Emerita, Cornell University

Timothy Mathews’s indispensable study of Giacometti takes us into the volatile contact zone between sculpture and spectator, with its complex reciprocities which multiply questions, destabilize values and redefine relations. This wonderfully exhilarating adventure in polymorphous looking, written from within his own experience, calls on comparison (e.g. Beckett, Ernst, Benjamin, Breton, Blanchot) to give critical purchase to the pursuit of an elusive quarry, where emergence and dissolution, recognition and alienation strike up strange mutualities. Mathews tirelessly, resourcefully, enthrallingly confronts the question: What kind of perceptual world do we enter if we refuse the tyranny and partiality of a point of view?

Clive Scott, Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia

This is an extraordinary book. Thinking of form as responsive, Timothy Mathews opens urgent questions about the way art speaks of life, about witness and embodiment. Addressing the art of relation, this book places Giacometti in contact with Benjamin, Beckett, Sebald among others. Through its series of acute, exploratory and often deeply moving readings, we are brought to respond vividly, newly, to Giacometti’s sculpture and writing.

Emma Wilson, Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Cambridge

ALBERTO

GIACOMETTI

THE ART

OF RELATION

TIMOTHY MATHEWS

Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © Timothy Mathews, 2014

The right of Timothy Mathews to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 786 4 (HB)

978 1 78076 787 1 (PB)

eISBN: 978 0 85773 509 6

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset by JCS Publishing Services

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Closer, Bigger, Further Away

1 Seeing, Feeling, Knowing: Living with the Writing of Alberto Giacometti

2 Touch, Translation, Witness: Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez

3 Walter Benjamin with Alberto Giacometti: The Broken Embraces of Witness and Form

4 Walking with Angels in Beckett and Giacometti

5 W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti: On Reading Together Apart

6 Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin and Alberto Giacometti

7 The Struggle to Translate: Living with the Sculptures of Alberto Giacometti

Epilogue: The More You, The More Anyone

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

1 Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, c.1949–50

2 Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout, c.1952

3 Alberto Giacometti, Cube, 1934

4 Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, 1930–1

5 Édouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, 1864

6 The Seated Scribe, 2620–2500 BCE

7 Alberto Giacometti, Le Palais à quatre heures du matin, 1932–3

8 Alberto Giacometti, Boule suspendue, 1931 (1965 version)

9 Alberto Giacometti, Objet désagréable à jeter, 1931

10 Salvador Dalí, The Bather, 1928

11 Alberto Giacometti, Pointe à l’oeil, 1932

12 Alberto Giacometti, Femme égorgée, 1932

13 Alberto Giacometti, La Main, 1947

14 Rembrandt, Noli me tangere, 1651

15 Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez, 1947

16 Édouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868–9

17 Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes qui marchent, 1948

18 Alberto Giacometti, Quatre figurines sur base, 1950

19 Alberto Giacometti, Tête sur tige, 1947

20 Alberto Giacometti, Petit buste de femme sur socle (Marie-Laure de Noailles), c.1946, cast 1973, 4/8

21 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

22 Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche, 1947

23 Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche I, 1960

24 Teasmade (Image from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants)

25 Carl Gotthard Langhans, The Brandenburg Gate, 1788 and 1791

26 The Charioteer of Delphi, 474 BC

27 Pablo Picasso, Figure (proposée comme projet pour un monument à Guillaume Apollinaire) autumn, 1928

28 Georges Braque, Woman Reading, 1911

29 Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, 1929–30

30 Alberto Giacometti, Le Chariot, 1950

31 Alberto Giacometti, Le Couple, 1927

32 Alberto Giacometti, Femme cuillère, 1927 (1953 version)

33 Alberto Giacometti, Femme qui marche I, c.1932–6

34 Alberto Giacometti, L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide), 1934

35 Alberto Giacometti, Tête qui regarde, 1929

36 Alberto Giacometti, Grande Tête de Diego, 1954

37 Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, 1950

38 Alberto Giacometti, Figurine dans une boîte entre deux maisons, 1950

39 Alberto Giacometti, La Clairière (composition avec neuf figures), 1950

40 Alberto Giacometti, Grand nu, c.1961

41 Alberto Giacometti, La Forêt, 1950

42 Max Ernst, Nageur aveugle, effet d’attouchement, 1934

43 Max Ernst, La Grande Forêt, 1927

44 Alberto Giacometti, La Place II, 1948–9

45 Alberto Giacometti, Femmes de Venise, 1963 or 1964

46 Alberto Giacometti, Homme assis [Lotar III], 1965

Acknowledgements

Writing this book involved me in re-thinking and re-learning critical writing as I am given to understand it. An experience like that cannot develop without numerous acts of kindness and inspiration – some passing, some very long-standing, all of them crucial – of many people, and I hope none will mind that I simply list some of them here: Charlotte Arnold, Richard Aronowitz-Mercer, Brett de Bary, Helena Buescu, Simon Cooke, Jacqueline Chénieux Gendron, Martin Crowley, Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, Jane Fenoulhet, Patrick ffrench, Claude Frontisi, Marisa Galvez, Jane Gilbert, Roland Greene, Sudeshna Guha, Nicholas Hammond, Stephen Hart, Eivind Kahrs, Sarah Kay, Dilwyn Knox, Lucy Dawe Lane, Svend Erik Larsen, Rod Mengham, Michael Moriarty, Sharon Morris, Florian Mussgnug, Patrick O’Donovan, Richard Parish, Jan Parker, Peg Rawes, Jane Rendell, Ellen Sapega, Elinor Shaffer, Morag Shiach, Judith Still, Nicholas White, Nikola White, Emma Wilson, and the undergraduates, MA, and PhD students in French and in Comparative Literature at UCL, from whose energy and commitment to art I have learnt so much.

This book is dedicated to the living memory of Malcolm Bowie, and the grace of his critical writing; and to my wife, Patti White, who gives my life its purpose.

I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for publishing earlier versions of my writing as it developed into chapters in this book: the editors of French Studies, ‘Touch, Translation Witness Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez’, French Studies (2007); Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins, eds, ‘Trauma, Witness, Form: Thinking Walter Benjamin with Alberto Giacometti’, Guilt and Shame: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Martin Crowley, ed, ‘Walking with Angels in Giacometti and Beckett’, Contact!, special issue of L’Ésprit Créateur (2007); Helena Buescu et al, ‘Reading W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti’, Stories and Portraits of the Self (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, 2007); Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews, eds, ‘Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walt...

Table of contents

• Contents
• 2 Touch, Translation, Witness: Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez
• 7 The Struggle to Translate: Living with the Sculptures of Alberto Giacometti
• Notes