Giacometti in the Rain

by Henri Cartier-Bresson

One of my favorite anecdotes about the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti is that one evening he was sitting at a café, when suddenly a group of armed gunmen came in demanding the cash register. Afterwards, feeling a little shaken up, Giacometti went to another café for a drink. Suddenly he recognized the men sitting at the bar next to him. They were the very same gunmen who had just robbed the other café! Like the artist, they were a little shook up and in need of a drink to calm their nerves. As the story goes, Giacometti is supposed to have laughed and said, “this is the best thing that could have happened tonight!”

In the photograph (above) by Henri Cartier-Bresson, we see Giacometti hunched over, slightly disheveled, smoking a cigarette in the rain. He’s just had his habitual espresso and lunch at a nearby café and is trying to get back to his atelier. His head is tucked into his coat, like a turtle. He’s enduring the rain, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it.

Endurance was Giacometti’s specialty. As he put it, “Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.” He sculpted night and day, frequently destroying his works, then starting all over again. He would be so covered in plaster that his friends joked that they could always find him because he left footprints everywhere he went. Simone de Beauvoir, an ardent admirer, once wrote that “a bath would be a problem for him" and that “he seems to like dirt.”

Giacometti once joked that when his art made him rich the only difference was that now he didn’t feel so bad about having holes in his socks and in his shoes. It’s a characteristically witty inversion of the idea that an artist’s success can be measured by how much money he makes. In fact, Giacometti actively avoided fame and success, creating sculptures so small that (legend has it) for a while his entire collection could be kept in six match-boxes. And yet the more he ran away from commercial and critical success, the more it seemed to follow him. As he put it, “I resisted the intrusion of fame and success as long as I could […], but maybe the best way to obtain success is to run away from it.”

But instead of trying to appear succesful, or wanting to look like a dandy, Giacometti just wanted to disappear into the background. His ideal was to be left alone, so that he could dedicate himself entirely to his work. The whole point was to keep chasing an elusive and impossible goal, a kind of perfect form. In response to the surrealist writer Breton’s quip that “everybody knows what a head looks like,” Giacometti replied that it was the opposite; “No-one really knows what a head looks like.” In his fruitful failure to identify the perfect form, Giacometti kept working day and night, coming closer and closer to an ideal that also became his life’s work. As Beckett (Giacometti’s close friend), put it, “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dares fail.”

To me, the photograph of Giacometti in the rain also evokes one of his animal sculptures (pictured above), titled “Dog.” It’s a rather sad looking animal, with a drooping tail and the appearance of an ambling gait. When asked about the sculpture, Giacometti joked that it was a self-portrait. One day he had been walking aimlessly around Paris, feeling dejected and lonely, when the image of the dog came to him. Like the artist walking through the rain, the dog endures. He keeps on going. And perhaps this, then, is the ultimate reason we keep on creating, and sharing art. It is one way, perhaps the only way, to keep on going. As Giacometti put it: “we have gone too far, and yet not nearly far enough.”

Julian

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