Carving the Fat Off Space

In the hands of modern sculptors from Rodin to Lehmbruck, man's anatomy has shrunk as if he were being returned to dust. But no one has reduced the image of man to such near nothingness as Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti. During the 1940s, his sculptures shrank so much that he carried the results of four years' work in six matchboxes in his pocket; and since then, try as he may, his lovely, attenuated figures still look like fugitives from a cane gang. Inevitably, Giacometti's search for essentials gave his work a lean and existential look, leading Jean-Paul Sartre to write admiringly: "For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space."

Sahara Noses. "I would love to make round, full bodies," says slender Giacometti, 63. "I just want to reproduce nature." Yet fleshing out volume, traditionally a sculptor's delight, appalls him. Said he: "The distance between one side of the nose and the other is like the Sahara." And so his stick figures present the long and the short of man rather than his breadth. As existentialist sculpture, Giacometti's work would be old hat. But, as Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opens a retrospective of 140 works this week and London's Tate Gallery prepares another exhibition for July, Giacometti seems less tormented than an observer of a disjointed, brisk and familiar world. It is a world that, for all its grotesque attenuation, testifies to a robust, humanistic vision. The pessimism of a previous era, which colored his art grey, may no longer apply.

For the past 40 years, Giacometti has ground away at man in his gritty, plaster-spattered Montparnasse studio in Paris. His sooty potbellied stove still rusts away in a corner amid a welter of palette knives; the unpainted walls are covered with scribbly sketches, around which some ornate frames hang randomly like lustrous afterthoughts. This is his laboratory for capturing reality. To it come such models as his brother Diego, who makes furniture in bronze, and his wife Annette, to pose for motionless hours. For each session, they must return to the exact posture that Giacometti wishes; he ensures this by placing position marks in red paint on his studio floor. He works at an agonizing mental distance from his models. One girl, who has modeled for him for three years, has never spoken with him. Explains Giacometti: "We are not on very good terms." Even his wife can sit for him throughout an entire morning and later hear him say, "I haven't seen you yet today."

Elephantiac Foot. Giacometti's search is for the man within the graven image. "Heads, heads, heads!" he cries. "I've been doing nothing but heads for years. I'm no farther along than when I did my first bust at 13. Nothing I do will ever be finished, everything remains just another study." The sculptor maligns himself. Actually, his figures, singly and in groups, stand in ever more complex relationships. Increasingly, he has become discontent to leave his bronzes bare, painting their stark silhouettes as if providing the emperor's new clothes. Scale, too, remains a concern. A foot will bulk large with deliberate elephantiasis--an indication of foreshortening--or a head will contract into a pin to appear farther away. His Monumental Head stands only 371-in. high, yet it looms as massively as the great stone profiles of Easter Island.

"I know that if I could reproduce a head exactly as I see it," says the sculptor, "I would have everything else. If I could capture the ridge of the nos.e and the eyes, I would already be down to the neck. Then down to the feet is nothing. Under the feet you have the ground, and you can put anything you want to on the ground. But then again, I suppose, once you have the eye, you have everything, so you might as well stop. Anyway, I know with absolute, unshakable certainty that I can never succeed, even if I live to be a thousand."

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