“What is important, is to create an object capable of conveying a sensation as close as possible to the one felt at the sight of the subject.”
Alberto Giacometti is recognized as the most important sculptor of the twentieth century; his craggy, emaciated figures, lithe with energy yet eternal in their stasis, have come to symbolize the human condition in the wake of World War II. From his earliest days working alongside his father Giovanni Giacometti in Italian-speaking Switzerland, to his engagement with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, to his self-imposed exile in Geneva for much of World War II, Giacometti was a man possessed by an urge to create yet never entirely satisfied with his creations. His return to Paris shortly after the end of the war would not put an end to these aspects of his work but did herald the beginning of a new style—one that would fundamentally change the history of art. Le Nez of 1947 is one of his most important and recognizable sculptures, a masterpiece of Giacometti’s post-war artistic production.
Art © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The year 1947 was of crucial importance for Giacometti and many of his most celebrated creations such as L’Homme qui marche, L’Homme au doigt and Le Nez date from that period. After years of self-imposed exile in his native Switzerland, in 1945 the artist had returned to his spiritual home, Paris. He had spent the preceding years working on an ever-smaller scale as he attempted to render the perspective of distance in sculptural form. It was a period of intense frustration and of destruction as well as creation; when he arrived in Paris he carried an entire three years’ worth of work in six match boxes. Back in the city he had so loved before the war, his spirits were buoyed by the discovery that his old studio was just as he had left it some three years prior, carefully preserved by his brother Diego. The two brothers soon took up their old routines, with Alberto rising at midday and then working late into the night before adjourning to a favorite haunt. His energy was further rejuvenated by the arrival of Isabel Rawsthorne—who was briefly his lover and would later become Francis Bacon’s friend and muse—and then, more significantly, with the arrival of Annette Arm in the summer of 1946. Annette, much to the surprise of Giacometti’s friends and family, would become his wife by the end of the decade.
- 1947
- January 1948
- May 1948
- 1949
- 1950
- 1956
- 1964
- 1964-1965
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1947Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez,
1947, painted plaster, rope, metal, wooden base, Kunstmuseum Basel, on permanent loan from the Alberto Giacometti Stiftung, Zurich
Alberto Giacometti creates the first iteration of Le Nez in 1947. A pointed tongue and painted red spiral wrapping around the nose’s extension set it apart from later versions, as does the more constricted cage element complete with painted base. -
January 1948Excerpt of a letter, written in 1948, from Alberto Giacometti to Pierre Matisse, showing Le Nez hanging in a cage
Hung from a metal bar by a rough piece of rope, the first version of Le Nez was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1948—Giacometti’s first exhibition in over a decade and his very first in the United States. -
May 1948Detail from a photo by Richard Winther of Giacometti’s studio in May 1948.
By May of 1948, just four months after the first version of Le Nez was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, Giacometti had already significantly revised the form of Le Nez. The cage, and the head’s position in it have been simplified, the jaw no longer gapes, and the prominence of the tongue has altogether disappeared. -
1949Alberto Giacometti, Sketches for The Nose, in profile and facing, 1949, pencil on paper, Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Giacometti’s greatest works of art were constantly shifting within his own mind. In 1949 the form of Le Nez is still in flux, as shown in a small sketch where the figure’s tongue has reemerged and the definition of the eyes has sharpened. -
1950Alberto Giacometti in his studio in 1950.
In this image of the artist’s studio the final form of the head is visible hanging in a cage at the artist’s feet. The cage would go through further modifications in the following years. -
1956Paul Facchetti, The Nose II, 1956, photograph, Fondation Giacometti, Paris
By 1956 the final head remains unchanged but Giacometti has placed it in the cage which held the original head in 1947 – with more space between the bottom of the neck and the cage floor the cage enforces a verticality not felt in the cage seen in the 1950 photograph. -
1964Bo Boustedt, Le Nez on exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in 1964
During Giacometti’s exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in 1964, the final plaster has again shifted within its cage. Here instead of a plaster bottom, as in the original cage, or one that sat directly on the surface beneath it, four small legs have been added to elevate the cage from its supporting surface. In addition the cage has narrowed, allowing the figure’s nose to protrude even further into the empty space outside of the sculpture. -
1964-1965The present work
The bronze edition of eight casts are made at the Susse Foundry. While the four small feet from the 1964 arrangement are maintained, they are shortened and refined with small roundels at each foot. A hook is built into the cross bar to allow the supporting material – whether rope or metal – to easily support the head.
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It was not just Giacometti’s return to Paris nor his more serious romantic life that precipitated the great change that was to take place in his sculptures in the late 1940s. As James Lord relates in his biography of the artist: “… Alberto had changed. The more perceptive of his friends… sensed a difference. Before the war, it had been evident to everyone that his was a singular and imposing personality, with the assumption of genius thrown in to point up the singularity. At the same time, however, he was one artist among many: Miró, Max Ernst, Tanguy, Masson, Balthus, not to mention the eminent elders, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Laurens, et. al., plus the entourage of writers: Breton, Eluard, Leiris, Sartre, and so on. This was impressive company, in which Giacometti had easily held his own. After the war, however, people saw that something had been added. A special aura seemed to mark him as a man apart. It was the onset of that massive accretion of creative and spiritual power which gradually made him a legendary figure. Meanwhile, he had not ceased to be entertaining, brilliant and highly appreciated by the friends who welcomed him back to Paris” (J. Lord, Giacometti A Biography, New York, 1985, pp. 249-50).
It was during these first years after the war that Giacometti had several quasi-hallucinogenic experiences that he credited with changing the very way he saw and perceived the world around him. The first was in a cinema in Montparnasse where he was watching a newsreel: “… First of all, I no longer knew what I was seeing on the screen: instead of it being figures, it was becoming black and white blobs, that’s to say they were losing all meaning, and instead of looking at the screen I kept looking at my neighbors, who were becoming something altogether unknown. It was the reality around me that was the unknown, not what was happening on the screen. Going out on the boulevard I had the feeling of being faced with something I had never seen before, with a complete change in reality…. Then the way everything looked became transformed, as if movement was no more than a series of points of stillness” (quoted in Alberto Giacometti The Origin of Space (exhibition catalogue), Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg & Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, 2010-11, p. 224). Further experiences in his daily life around the city and a variety of nightmares contributed to this shift in his vision. “I began to see heads in the void, in the space which surrounds them. When for the first time I clearly perceived how a head I was looking at could become fixed, immobilized definitively in time, I trembled with terror as never before in my life and a cold sweat ran down my back. It was no longer a living head, but an object I was looking at like any other object, but no, differently, not like any other object, but like something simultaneously living and dead. I gave a cry of terror, as if I had just crossed a threshold, as if I were entering a world never seen before. All the living were dead, and that vision was often repeated, in the subway, in the street, in a restaurant, in front of my friends. The waiter at the Brasserie Lipp became immobile, leaning toward me with his mouth open, without any relation to the preceding moment, to the moment following, with his mouth open, his eyes fixed in an absolute immobility. And not only people but objects at the same time underwent a transformation: tables, chairs, clothes, the street, even the trees and the landscapes” (quoted in J. Lord, Giacometti A Biography, New York, 1985, pp. 258-59).
Photograph © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
Art © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
A separation of reality from objects and human form was not a new endeavor. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Giacometti had been a part of the Surrealist group. His Surrealist works—including Boule suspendue, Pointe à l’oeil and Le Palais de 4 heures—would echo in the form of Le Nez while his focus in 1947 on the fragmentation of the human body also harkened back to facets of Surrealism. The depiction of isolated body parts expresses the essence of Surrealism in general. It contains two concepts central to Surrealist art: that of desire and fetishism and that of threat and violence. The focus on the human head and the nose in particular can be found throughout the movement. In Salvador Dalí’s Le Sommeil, a monumental human head, separated from a body, sleeps in a fantastic landscape supported by sticks propped under its various protuberances while in René Magritte’s La Bonne aventure a large nose stands alone on a beach, the desolate shoreline punctuated by a leaf in the shape of a tree.
If in Le Nez Giacometti has incorporated visual structures from his Surrealist period (the cage with suspended elements and a long, threatening protuberance) and other artists’ Surrealist works (the fragmentation of the body) the similarities end there. Le Nez and the two closely related sculptures from 1947 Le Main and Tête sur tige, depicting an arm and a head on a pole respectively, are all modeled in Giacometti’s mature style and convey a vastly different emotive quality. “Contemporary with the tall standing figures of 1947-48 was a group of fragmentary sculptures which have an affinity with those of the Surrealist period: The Nose, Head on a Rod and The Hand. These works do not stand on plinths in the conventional way but are suspended in the air, held up by slender rods or, in the case of The Nose, hang on a thread. These are unusually emotive works, seeming to suggest the drama of the human condition and those feelings of anxiety, vulnerability and alienation expressed in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre” (Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle, Vienna & Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 22).
Le Nez is a forceful, imposing sculpture. It claims the space around it, pushing past the cage from which it is suspended. The head is powerfully sculpted, the mouth agape and hollow. The neck is impossibly slender, smaller than the nose's root. Giacometti's sculptures from the 1940s onward seems to invite intimacy. Their texture activates each viewer's sense of touch, an echoing awareness of Giacometti's process. In these sculptures, too, for all their strength is an aura of fragility and mystery. They are impossibly thin, impossibly worked. The particularity of the suspension of Le Nez further heightens this perception.
The idea of being finished with a work of art was not one that sat well with Giacometti. He constantly sought to modify and rethink existing works, often revisiting pieces from five or ten years before. The first iteration of Le Nez was created in plaster in 1947. Hand painted by the artist and with a more narwhal-like shape to the nose, this form’s open mouth and red painted tongue create a sculpture more animalistic in feeling. Hung from a metal bar by a rough piece of rope, this version of Le Nez was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1948—Giacometti’s first exhibition in over a decade. Within a year of that exhibition, Giacometti had made a second version which narrowed the form of the nose and removed the shape of the tongue. This sculpture, also in plaster, was hung in a more finely finished cage. It was not until around 1964 that a plaster cast was made by the artist after this second 1949 version which was, in turn, used to make the bronze edition. The bronzes are suspended in the more refined cage-form but in these the additional feature of rounded feet has been added to the base of each leg. These continued modifications—all of which play with proportion of sculpture to cage, height of the head and assumptions about the viewer’s perception—exhibit Giacometti’s constant refinements of his forms and an ongoing desire to perfect his work.
LE NEZ: THE PLASTERS AND BRONZES
Le Nez thus combined everything Giacometti had learned from his early years as a Surrealist in Paris, pushed through his obsession with miniaturization as a way of controlling viewer’s perception of size and figures from the early 1940s and arrived at his mature style both in the emotive impact of the work of art and in his new physical style of sculpting, which was to remain with him for the rest of his life. “Giacometti made energetic marks on his materials from this time onward,” writes John Lord, “more vital, visible marks than before, indicating in a tactile, recognizable way how the artist’s fingers were governed by his eyes, which were governed equally by his creation and his vision. Rough, rippling, gouged, granular, the texture of his sculptures, though unlike any human integument, has a glimmering animation all its own. This mobile aspect of the sculptural surface amplifies the appearance of volume by more actively engaging the spectator’s eye, and by concentrating attention on its own vitality it effectively situates the human image at a fixed distance” (J. Lord, Giacometti A Biography, New York, 1985, p. 279).
