Ordeal by Sculpture

Along Paris' grim Rue Hippolyte Maindron stands a squat concrete building half hidden by a rickety gate. A casual passerby might think it a garage, but one peek through the window would probably give him a jolting surprise. The small. 12-by-15-ft. room is the private world of one of the world's most original sculptors: wiry, bushy-haired Alberto Giacometti. 53. In 28 years, a good deal of Giacometti has rubbed off onto the floors and walls of his bare, grey studio. The workbench is encrusted with old paint drippings and scabs of plaster. Cigarette butts cover the cement floor. The walls are acrawl with hasty sketches and doodles. Over all lies a thick layer of grey plaster dust.

Heads Underfoot. Sculptor Giacometti fits comfortably into this cramped clutter. Lying among the spare furnishings--a black potbellied stove, rumpled cot and banged-up chair--are strange sculptured objects: 6-ft.-tall female caryatid forms whose bark-rough plaster surfaces make them more like bewitched trees than goddesses, archaic-looking heads as tiny as a thumbnail, a slinking alley cat with body no thicker around than the thumb. None of them is finished, Giacometti truculently insists. But in the eyes of art critics, these curious forms are the best sculpture being done in France today.

Last week Giacometti's steadily growing reputation got a great push forward with simultaneous full-dress retrospective shows of his works in two of the world's leading art capitals. Two whole floors of New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum were given over to a full-sweep display of Giacometti's work from 1925 to the present. In London 37 Giacometti sculptures plus some of his most recent works, oils and sketches, assembled by the British Arts Council, won high praise even from London's Times, which expressed "unstinted gratitude . . . for a major artist," and praised Giacometti's "new vision of the figure in its surroundings."

No Man's Land. "I have always worked with the same purpose: to find out how to see reality," Giacometti says. The search has led him through an ordeal of experimentation and frustration -few artists care to undergo. The son of a leading Swiss painter, he started to draw as a boy, at 21 went to live in Paris. He quickly became one of surrealism's leading sculptors. His constructions rank among the wittiest that movement produced. But at the height of his fashion, in 1935, Giacometti made a decision that carried him for the next twelve years through an artistic no man's land: he had come to mistrust his sense of motion and space.

"It was nothing like I imagined," says Giacometti. "I found the human head absolutely strange and without dimensions . . . One could spend an entire life on the end of a nose. The difference between one side of the nose and the other became like a Sahara, limitless."

Giacometti plunged into an era of strange experimentation. Friends stopping by his studio found him working 48 hours at a stretch, chain-smoking and muttering as he danced and lunged with a penknife before a hardened clay block. Some of his works took on weird, elongated shapes; others were heads little larger than peanuts. Giacometti insists that he did not try to do it that way; it simply happened. "I've never tried to make my figures come out this way," he explained last week, pointing to a tall figure reminiscent of a grotesquely tallowed candle. "There's nothing voluntary about it. They've always surprised me."

Crazy, Absurd Activity. For years, Giacometti destroyed his work as fast as he produced it, but by war's end he began saving and showing the gangling figures and groups, which seem to some eyes to float in a mysterious time and space of their own. An intense, modest man in frayed cuffs and baggy pants, Giacometti has not let success dull his adventurous dissatisfaction.

His most recent men and women are gaining in weight. "They eat too much," he jokes. He is experimenting also in drawing and painting. Where it will lead, Alberto Giacometti does not know. "Art is not a science," says he. "It is a crazy thing, an absurd activity . . . If I had been able to resolve the problem, I would have ceased to work."

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