In a new biography by Michael Peppiatt, 20th-century Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti gets the rock star treatment. The cover Giacometti in Paris The work is composed almost entirely of the artist’s rugged, hollowed-out face, as timeless and veristic as a Roman bust and as eminently cool as Keith Richard. It’s a wise choice, suggesting that what’s inside will be more about the man, his aura and charm, than his art. But the image, taken by the photographer Franz Hubmann, reflects something essential about Giacometti’s work itself: his uncanny ability to capture the energy of ancient art in a modern format.
From the book’s opening pages, the reader is in safe hands with Peppiatt, a British writer and art historian who spent much of his career in Paris. The book opens in the 1960s with a charming tale of a young Peppiatt visiting the painter Francis Bacon—whom he met in an interview for a student publication—to say goodbye before heading to Paris to work. Bacon insists that his young friend meet Giacometti: “The fact is that there is something terribly likeable about him. And he knows absolutely everyone in Paris.” It is a promise to the reader that Peppiatt’s subject is likeable, his life intersecting with some of the most influential figures in 20th-century Paris.
The author sets out with a letter of recommendation from one titanic artist to another. But like many young people, he thought he had plenty of time. Hesitant to show up, despite Bacon’s letter, he discovers that Giacometti has meanwhile died. “It could have ended there,” he writes. “Most missed opportunities do.” Instead, he sets about collecting books and catalogues on Giacometti, accumulating everything he can, including gossip, and is now writing a biography of the artist who got away. From the start, Pappiatt’s narrative is a little awestruck and always sympathetic to the affable Giacometti, who possessed a preternatural devotion to his work. He lived in a cold, plaster-strewn hovel for most of his Parisian life, even after fame and money could easily have changed that.
Although the book contains many evocative photographs of Giacometti’s astonishing studio-cum-living space—something like a semi-organic cave inhabited by an obsessive hermit or a bombed-out bunker where no one survived—and of his famous friends, lovers, and haunts, there is not a single standalone image of his work. This is strange and more than a little sad. Yes, Google exists, but a book is a standalone object, or ideally should be; I started reading on an airplane, for example, without internet access. In any case, I missed the work itself throughout the book, especially when Peppiatt describes Giacometti’s drawings or compares works I couldn’t easily recall. Whether this is perhaps a question of rights, reproduction costs, or some other difficulty in reproducing Giacometti’s work, it is never addressed.
The absence of artworks is a significant omission, but Peppiatt otherwise paints a compelling portrait of an intensely determined artist who generally had a good life that he generally did not squander. Peppiatt is somewhat light in his account of Giacometti’s relationships with women, which can be disturbing, such as a lifelong obsession with prostitutes and his published fantasies of rape, as well as works such as “Woman with a Cut Throat” (1932). He convincingly describes the love and humanity of the artist’s closest relationships. His brother Diego, for example, lived with or near him for decades as a studio assistant, a constant model, and a lifelong friend. The brothers were named by their artist father, Giovanni, after Dürer (Alberto) and Velázquez (Diego), so while not quite nepo babiesThey were ready to become talented artists. The fact that one of the brothers succeeded and the other supported him is surprising and encouraging. Samuel Beckett, a close friend of the artist, went so far as to compare their relationship to that of Theo and Vincent van Gogh.
Giacometti is best known for his post-war style, with his heartbreaking and haggard figures, skeletal and post-apocalyptic, yet somehow struggling. A vision of humanity still struggling in the ruins. A little dark and a little hopeful, just like the man himself.
