I n any fully-fledged exhibition of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, it sticks out and instantly catches your eye. Even beside those tall, bone-thin, intently Walking Men or in the commanding presence of a goddess-like Standing Woman, it is an attention-grabber because it is so immediately recognizable, combining numerous aspects of Giacometti’s haunting universe in one compact piece. It is also, of course, unlike any other work the sculptor ever made, standing at the mid-point of his complex, artistic development—a recapitulation of his career to date that also marks the beginning of his mature style.
Such art-historical musings are not what come to mind first, however. It is because it looks like—and in many ways is—a one-off, an oddity, an aberration even, that Le Nez never loses its power to fascinate and intrigue. What could have been going on in Giacometti’s febrile imagination when he created this weird hybrid with its erect organ which looks comical at first, hanging on a rope half-in and half-out of its cage, then increasingly terrifying as you get nearer to it?
By 1947, the year in which he completed his first version of Le Nez in plaster, Giacometti had long taken his leave of Surrealism. His early infatuation with the movement, its revolutionary aims and its leader, André Breton, had begun by 1930 and ended with a bang in 1935, when he was expulsed from the ranks of the faithful. During those five years, the young, Swiss-born sculptor had become a star of both the avant-garde and Parisian high society. Some of his masterpieces of that time, such as The Palace at 4am (1932), a disquieting, dream-like scene set in a fragile cage, and the violently sadistic Woman with her Throat Cut (1934), were already acknowledged as icons of the Surrealists’ heady intent to overturn and reinvent art and society. But an artist as inspired and self-willed as Giacometti was never going to toe the party line for long, and when he clashed with Breton, the ‘Pope’ of Surrealism, because his work was moving towards a new naturalism, there could be no compromise. Giacometti left, and he never looked back.
Self-sufficient though he was, not even Giacometti had taken into account how isolated his post-Surrealist life would be. Former friends and supporters avoided him, and no new exhibitions of his work were forthcoming. For years thereafter, Giacometti was marooned in his tiny, rickety studio behind Montparnasse, focussed not on provocative Surrealist pieces but on the intricate issue of rendering exactly what he saw when he attempted to model a human figure. Being infinitely critical of his own talents and versatility, Giacometti laboured day and night over each sculpture, refining and defining the tiny blobs of clay until, with one last pinch of the fingers or scrape of a penknife, nothing remained. Soon the rumour got around that the erstwhile Surrealist star was now engaged in a mad, fruitless quest that always ended in little piles of rubble.
When the war came, Giacometti eventually managed to get back to his native Switzerland, where his mother lived. In a shabby hotel room in Geneva, the sculptor resumed his manic quest, with dishearteningly similar results. Huge bags of plaster were lugged up to the studio room only to be swept out later as shards and dust. The artist’s resolve did not weaken, however, although (much to his mother’s annoyance) he was becoming a joke, even to himself. He laboured on throughout the war until the Liberation, when he was free to return to his old, austere routine in Paris. He kept hoping that his sculptures would grow, but the few that had survived were so tiny (the story goes) that he was able to take them all back with him on the train in matchboxes.
Art © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
While openly admitting that he had failed to produce the sculpture he had hoped for, Giacometti was delighted to rediscover his Paris studio and unearth all his previous work which he and his brother Diego had buried for safety in the studio’s primitive floor. He was also delighted to find that little had apparently changed in the city he loved, and soon he was revisiting the cafés and bistros, the bars and brothels that he had enjoyed so much before the war. An important change occurred, nevertheless. As a hardened bachelor, Giacometti had always preferred consorting with prostitutes rather than with ‘nice’ girls because the latter insisted on relationships—which he felt would interfere with his total commitment to art. But a few months before he began work on Le Nez, the artist’s lonely studio habits were upended by the arrival of Annette, a pretty girl half his age whom he had met in Geneva and who had decided she would leave her secure but boring life to share his spartan but more glamorous existence hobnobbing with the likes of Picasso and Sartre in the hotspots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
For all his studied indifference toward this momentous change, Giacometti was enchanted. He had just come through an anguished affair with Isabel Rawsthorne, a young English artist and good-time girl, whose omnivorous sexuality had left him more insecure than ever about his virility. Now, against his better judgment, his life had been illuminated by a young woman who adored him and whose girlish laughter rang out through the sombre, plaster-cluttered studio (whose mess she heroically attempted to clear up). Annette’s arrival in Paris coincided with another ray of light in the sculptor’s dreary outlook. The Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York had offered him an alluring show in the New World, and the first anywhere in over a decade.
No wonder 1947 turned out to be an annus mirabilis for this once successful but now half-forgotten sculptor. As if by magic, the constraints under which Giacometti had toiled for so long began to dissolve and, wonder of wonders, his sculptures began to grow, to rise up, as if nourished by the sap of new life. Once again, Giacometti found the power to turn his obsessive anxiety about sex and death (the former frequently reminding him of the latter) into art. Body fragments, a Hand (1947) here, a Head on a Rod (1947) there, began to form under his newly liberated fingers; he had seen body parts strewn everywhere when the Luftwaffe strafed a mass exodus he had joined as it moved south from occupied Paris. He had in fact been haunted by death since his early youth, when he watched an elderly companion die in front of him, his cheeks caving in and his nose growing more and more prominent. And recently, in 1946, an acquaintance had died next door to the Giacomettis’ bedroom, painfully reminding the artist, who had found the corpse with its mouth agape, of that earlier trauma.
Quite by chance, Walt Disney’s movie, Pinocchio, was playing in Paris at the time. Did that also prompt Giacometti, an avid cinema fan, to make his great, aggressively pointed Nez? Were memories of Fasnacht, Switzerland’s hugely popular, grotesquely masked carnival, among the influences that entered this enigmatic, but very deliberate and complex, piece? Giacometti’s long-established fascination with African and Oceanic art certainly played its part, with the sword-like (indeed swordfish-like) nose possibly being conceived as the artist’s superstitious attempt to ward off the evil eye. In his new, hard-won happiness, the artist had plenty to protect, and some commentators have even made out a revolver—with barrel, action and grip—in this imponderable creation.
Giacometti himself was clearly enthralled by his new sculpture and he produced several variations on the theme. The first, hand-painted plaster version, sporting a bright, red tongue, was included in the retrospective at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in 1948, a ground-breaking event that led to an international success that continued to grow throughout Giacometti’s career. Within a year, the artist had made a new, plaster Nez, incorporating a somewhat less coarse piece of gallows cord and a more refined metal cage. Then, in the early 1960s, it was decided to have the piece cast in a bronze edition, with the cage set, in a final flourish, on four elegantly designed feet.
Three-quarters of a century after its first creation, Le Nez has lost none of its power to puzzle and provoke. Having included it in several of the Giacometti exhibitions I have worked on, I have been fortunate enough to contemplate this strange masterpiece in different spaces and in different lights, but even this kind of everyday, working familiarity with the piece has not suggested any single, unified interpretation. At one point, I became convinced that this, Giacometti’s most Surrealist creation since leaving the movement over ten years earlier, gave him the chance to cock a snook at Surrealism and its lofty pretensions in general; the piece certainly recalls the moving parts that constitute the artist’s own Suspended Ball of 1930-31. Then I fancied that, having been side-lined for so many years as an eccentric in search of an elusive vision, Giacometti wanted to mark his return to the stage by cocking a snook—because surely Le Nez is never less than a major snook—at all those who doubted he was on the right track in his impossibly demanding sculptural quest. More recently, it has occurred to me that an artist whose eye was always fixed on the absolute would not have bothered with such petty squabbles. If Giacometti was going to settle scores, he would have done it more generously in the interest of all of us who struggle to make sense of this life by boldly confronting and defying death—ultimately the hallmark and function of great art.
Le Nez moves forward, like the prow of a ship, cleaving the waters of time, carrying the burden of humanity, anxiously, ironically, wisely, into the future.
