Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore preserved their creative mobility and have never been afraid of abandoning a felicitous solution for the sake of a new one that is perhaps better or more complete. Success and fame have not overwhelmed them: the work, both in the process of working and its product, is more important than success. Giacometti and Moore have revised many of their judgments and preconceived ideas, when they felt they had reached a truer insight, and have advanced step by step with the aid of complete inner honesty. The pattern that underlies their work, the formative energy that permeates everything, have remained the some; each of their carvings and models are Moore and Giacometti they have been fortified against influences of all kinds by their original attachment to nature and time.
Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore are involved with the process of creation and they find themselves only where this process, and not ultimate perfection, reigns. In this paper I try to compare and contrast the work and lives of Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore.
Henry Moore has never failed to go his own way; it has been a way with detours. A sculptor who started in 1922 may have had more difficulties than an older man who started, say, in 1912. A great deal had already happened, the great breakthrough had already been achieved, and anyone who followed had to take his place in the ranks or wait till he was given the password. But the talented receive the password from the world with its facts and questions.
Since form is the organization of human experience, the artist is at all times faced with a difficult start; but it is doubly difficult when the pillars of spiritual and social life have crumbled, when the old categories of thinking and perceiving have proved invalid and the new are still in flux. It would seem that Moore put his trust in his own inner daemon; the attachment to his own self as the subject of his whole psyche, including its unconscious elements, was so decisive that initially the environment disturbed him little. The self stood over him like something suprapersonal and led him into the realm of Motherhood. Since a psychic constitution like Moore's is unalterable, his early works, all differences notwithstanding, show the same attitude as the late ones; what changes is the scope of experience and the degree of mastery over the vocabulary of forms. Moore has worked with unparalleled intensity for its extension and intensification. The solid, central, three-dimensional and vital sculptures of the 1920s were followed by the surreal compositions of the 1930s, those enclosed within themselves like signs and the open ones, of which some advance outwardly to the boundaries of the technological, while others go to the limits of the demonic and on into the darkness of the earth.
The 1940s, the war and post-war years, revealed to Moore precisely the sunny side of life in the shape of community and tradition, both religious and humanist so that the archaic and earthy retired into the background. (4) But this was only a transitory stage, and the 1950s led Moore into situations where tension and relaxation reached their maximum. The "Greek" element is an incidental component; the absolute and the chthonic, on the other hand, show through everywhere and produce such contrasting works as the 'Standing Figures' and the mythological 'Cross' in Scotland, or the 'King and Queen' and the 'Warrior'. There is no fissure anywhere; everything comes from the some centre; only the manifestations vary. Moore has been misunderstood in two directions and blamed on the one hand for his "naturalism" or "classicism", and on the other for his abstraction. But for Moore both were not a goal, but a path, and the leap to the one was no less bold than to the other. After so many experiments in the 1930s, to make a 'Madonna' or a 'Family Group' for a school playground demanded the same effort as to fashion a 'Reclining Figure' as the open repository of earthiness; a 'Reclining Figure' in the style of the Parthenon was just as hazardous an enterprise as the 'Outer and Inner Forms'. (7)
It is not vacillation, but a process of self-testing, when Moore utilizes apparently opposed forms of expression; the pluralism of his consciousness is paralleled by a multiplicity of modes of expression, archaic and new. "The totality of all possible events is integrated in the limitless virtuality of our consciousness," says Paul Valery. "It also combines the individual with the past of the species, with the world of symbols." (3) The situation is the same in the works of Moore as in Joyce's "Ulysses" or Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". What seems contradictory in many of his works, the archaic expression and the technological framework, is in reality an expression of his capacity for working within many dimensions at the same time, which is one of the maturing sculptor's most remarkable characteristics. It gives his work the mysterious richness, the radiation that is as exciting as the world in which we live. On the other hand Alberto Giacometti is best known for his very tall, elongated sculptures of figures. He might seem a merely eccentric artist, distorting things for the sake of distortion, but the merit of his is that it justifies what Giacometti always said about his own art, that it was merely an attempt to render what he saw. Take, for example, pieces from his wartime sculptures. They are some of his most peculiar works - tiny, helpless figures placed on bases which seem, by contrast, colossal, although the whole piece might be only five or six inches high. When Giacometti returned from exile, he was able to carry all his wartime work with him in a suitcase. What these sculptures do, brilliantly, is convey the sense of people seen from an immense distance. Giacometti's career, from this show, looks like an on-off love affair with the live model. There are some wonderfully observed portraits; a relatively early, sober one of Renato Stampa, or a later one, festooned with wiry, fierce lines, of the writer Jean Genet. But periodically, Giacometti abandoned modeling from life in favour of memory and imagination. In a fascinating surrealist period, his sculptures, such as a "Woman with Her Throat Cut", became ideas of people, rather than observations of them. And, again, after the war, with those anorexic immense figures, he became someone in thrall to fantasy men and women, and not to reality. There are some startling, beautiful things in this immense show, and everyone should take the time to go and see it. But a little skepticism lingers. Giacometti is an artist of piercing, obvious merit but, somehow, the mannerisms and willfulness of his style stand in the way of anything more. He is tantalizingly close to being a great artist, but you can't help feeling that he didn't achieve quite what he set out to achieve, and his art, inspiring as it is, in the end fell short of his ambitions. Giacometti's filiations with the Surrealists came to follow the lead of his art rather than Breton's ideology, he returned to sculpting human heads from a live model. Breton publicly confronted Giacometti with his apostasy from Surrealist orthodoxy; for his part, Giacometti dismissed his commitment to surrealism as a mere "transitional exercise" and a form of "masturbation." (8) Giacometti's break with the Surrealists pushed him back into obscurity. He reemerged in the 1940s, this time as a hero of existentialism, thanks largely to Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an essay called "The Search for the Absolute" when Giacometti exhibited his work at Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York in 1948. (5) All at once Giacometti's extraordinary elongated sculptures--the walking men, the women standing at hieratic attention: doubtless his best-known works--were hailed as symbols of Man's Lonely Confrontation with the Abyss, etc. Well, perhaps they are. But they are also unforgettable sculptures, moving in ways unconnected with expostulations about Being and Nothingness, the "upsurge of freedom" and so on. It might be said that, when it comes to art, hell is other people's theories. As Giacometti's biographer James Lord put it, "Seeing, not believing is what he cared about." (8) The excellent sampling of Giacometti's art --seventy-odd sculptures, thirty-odd paintings, and sixty drawings--at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts should help corroborate Giacometti's independence from the theory-mongers. True, Jean-Louis Prat, Director of the Fondation Maeght (which owns sixty-five works by Giacometti) and Guest Curator of the exhibition, declares that "more than any other artist, [Giacometti] expresses the precariousness of our existence and of the times in which we live." (8) Giacometti did not exactly discourage this sort of talk. And there was much about his biography that provided fodder for gloomy existential rumination. But as one moves through this thoughtfully chosen and well-installed exhibition (the elegant galleries designed by Moshe Safdie are perfect for Giacometti), what really seem precarious are such portentous statements about Giacometti's art expressing the precariousness of existence. This exhibition reveals the distinctively aesthetic logic of Giacometti's art, its development out of Cubism and post-Impressionism, it's striving to explore certain distinct modes of artistic expression. Given the abstract nature of much of Giacometti's art, it may seem curious that "likeness" was one of his artistic bywords. He often said that his main ambition was to "copy" what he saw, "to give the nearest possible sensation to that felt at the sight of the subject" He was not being paradoxical. This exhibition shows how the elusive--indeed, the impossible--goal of "likeness" fueled an artistic career of astonishing pathos. Giacometti frequently complained that the more he worked on a picture or sculpture, the more difficult it was to finish it. evidence of that difficulty is patent throughout Giacometti's art. He set himself the impossible task of fixing in visible form the evanescent heart of the moment. What is extraordinary is how often his pictures and sculptures, heavy with the marks of their making, distill the hard light of naked reality. Moore, on the other way, saw the meaning of his work as a sculptor in 'blockiness' and volume and plasticity and the values connected with it; modelling in clay appeared to him a betrayal. Henrry Moore revised this opinion in the course of his development, not because the other view was brought to him from outside, but because he discovered the value of the open and dynamic in comparison with the closed and static, the expression of the absolute and demonic in comparison with the landscape-like and earthy. It must be established, however, that Moore does not give up the old in favour of something new; the absolute of the 'Standing Figures' in Scotland is present in another fashion in the Mexican 'Reclining Figure', and the demonic element in the Scottish 'Crosses' also partakes of the qualities of the landscape on a higher plane. The combination of antitheses is rooted in Moore's psychological structure, in which nature in the shape of the collective unconscious stands next to spirit, vitality next to law. It is spirit that intervenes and organizes, that turns a manual activity into an artistic one that prevents the motherhood origins of life from becoming an obsession. It is spirit that drives the artist to the most daring experiments, without which the present would cease to be the present and a transition to the next stage. The inexplicable is an unavoidable part of every artistic conception; it is a "factum sui generis", the very thing that art is all about. When Goethe had written his 'Fairy Tale' he was at first unable to say what it meant, and asked his friends to tell him. (4) The public, Moore said in a speech at Venice in 1952, has no natural relationship to art and expects from it a confirmation of its notions of social, spiritual and artistic ideality, most of which amount in practice to a majority decision reached without any good grounds. Nothing is further from Moore's wishes than to provoke, but he defends his compositions and himself even when the composition is the fulfillment of a specific commission, and he believes that society can do no more than wait, the state no more than guarantee the artist's freedom. In return society and state have a share in the advancement of human consciousness brought about by the artist, who redounds to the advantage of all, or, as Giacometti succinctly, put it: "Our objective is not pleasure or it is pleasure only incidentally. We have discovered that art has a biological function, that the artist is the sensitive organ of an evolving consciousness -- of man's progressive apprehension and understanding of his universe."(1) "It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job" cautioned Giacometti, relatively early in his career. "It releases tension needed for his work." Strange, then, that over the next years Giacometti was to prove one of the most voluble of artists. When not carving one of his familiar reclining female figures, most of them bearing his signature sculptural idiom, the hole, Giacometti accepted invitations to set down his reminiscences and his thoughts on art--his own work and that of other artists and periods. However, how many of today do artists would have the modesty to describe what they do as just a "job"? That same spirit informs Moore's writing. His statements are never hectoring, bombastic or obscurantist. There is no toying with the interviewer in the manner of Picasso. Nor was Moore given to the kind of visionary, dreamlike narratives or philosophical musings favored by Giacometti. The approach is down-to-earth, the prose workmanlike. Moore at this stage was already a committed modernist, believing in the supremacy of carving over modeling and the superiority of non-Western art over the Greco-Koman tradition, or what he was to refer to a few years later as "the complete domination of later decadent Greek art as the only standard of excellence." This trip is famous in accounts of the artist's life for the aesthetic and emotional crisis it precipitated when his exposure to the riches of Renaissance art forced him to rethink this doctrinaire rejection of the Western canon. Moore seems to be examining as much as articulating an idea, turning it over in his head as if it were one of the stones or bone fragments he had begun picking up during his outings as potential source material for his sculpture. These are Moore's most productive years as a writer, both in terms of output and what he has to say. In four of the six key texts of this period--"A View of Sculpture" (also known as "The Nature of Sculpture" in James's book), "On Carving" (the Haskell interview), "Unit One" and "The Sculptor Speaks"-- Moore lays out his artistic credo: the importance of the human figure (it is "what interests me most deeply"); the relationship between representation and abstraction ("creations, new in themselves, not merely feats of copying, nor of memory, having only the second-hand life of realistic waxworks"); truth to materials ("Sculpture in stone should look like stone, hard and concentrated"); the penetration of the sculptural mass ("The hole connects one side to the other, making immediately more three-dimensional.... A hole can itself have as much shape as a solid mass"); the need for "vitality" in sculpture ("a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the object it may represent"); and the importance of natural forms ("from which [the sculptor] learns such principles as balance, rhythm, organic growth of life, attraction and repulsion, harmony and contrast"). (2) These are the decades when Moore came into his own not only as an artist but as a critic of art. Giacometti Writing again on Mesopotamian art in 1974 he begins, "It is my profound conviction that the testimony of the past must not be ignored. Knowledge of our history can be of great use in our life." He sounds like a mayor at a ribbon cutting. Perhaps we should not entirely blame Moore for these bromides. By the early 1950s, he was Britain's foremost artist and the public face of modern sculpture worldwide. His rise coincided with the invention of the modern media culture, creating an incessant and unprecedented demand for interviews and pronouncements. Moore, who had risen from humble origins by, literally and figuratively, the sweat of his brow, was justifiably proud of his place in english society. And he was a naturally open, accessible personality. The pressure to respond to the barrage of entreaties must have been nearly irresistible. equally, Giacometti paint, pencil, plaster, and clay are no longer a substratum, and exert their presence as material. At close range, facets, folds, and finger marks in his sculptures affirm themselves beyond figurative representation." Line in his drawings and paintings is afforded an opacity that releases it from direct denotation. Brushstrokes vacillate, refusing to be pinned permanently to the figure on the canvas, thus insisting upon their status as material markings. Both artists recast the importance of matter in their respective oeuvres of democratic plurality. Moore does not discriminate between people and objects when choosing an interlocutor. Moore and Giacometti reflect their negation of inherent hierarchy and supremacy by predicating the status of the material they employ, be it acoustic, visual or tactile. But Moore and Giacometti avoid elevating matter to the status of objective sensualist, substantial plenitude, and complete presence. Moore's rhythmic and Giacometti's hue and line on the one hand resist instant denotation and affirm their presence as matter. However, their very resistance to signification itself bears meaning and reincorporates matter back into metaphor, discourse. Both artists effect a derealization of matter by form. All matter is subject to contingency. Giacometti's pencil, paint and plaster depict a figure, and then represent themselves, thus undermining the presence of the figure. They generate a dynamic tension between the composition and decomposition of presence. Theatrical acousticity can also illustrate this duality and dislocation. First, dramatic representation is in its conception both concrete presence-of bodies, objects and voices-and absence of "real-life" action. (6) In succeeding years Moore and Giacometti rarely spoke about the war. One can easily understand why. Less easy to understand is why critics and scholars should have interpreted this reluctance as an indication that it had no bearing on his artistic development and left its impact unexplored. One wonders if Moore's war experience is the source of the dark strain that runs through his art. In the catalog to his 1994 exhibition, "A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the First World War" the art historian and critic Richard Cork (the first person to explore the possible impact of the war on Moore's art) proposed that the source of the stump leg in the 1952 "Warrior With Shield" was not, as Moore had once said, "a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952 and which reminded me of the stump of a leg amputated at the hip" but rather the memory "of similar deformations Moore [had] observed at Cambrai. (7) He saw many of his fellow soldiers receive fatal wounds during [the battle]; and ... the patients he found [after arriving at the field hospital] could easily have included soldiers with bodily truncations as grievous as the amputated warrior Moore modeled thirty-five years later" Art historical overreaching? Perhaps, except that (which Cork does not mention) the stump leg had already appeared in a 1934 reclining figure, the one usually interpreted as little more than a gloss on Giacometti's "Woman with Her Throat Cut." (9) In other words, long before Moore took that walk on the beach, the stump leg motif was a part of his art. Moreover it is one of three that recur throughout Moore's work, the other two being heads cleft almost in two and heads thrown back with the mouth wide open. When it came to the art of his own time, though, Moore was on less sure ground. He could be glib, even philistine, about artists or movements he disliked. Giacometti's works is dismissed as "panicky" born of "weakness" Non-objective art lacks humanity, "forbidding the artist to use so much mental and human and visual experience that it can never have the fullness and richness of meaning that art with a human reference with human drama has". (5) In the end Giacometti and Moore were able to have it both ways, to "speak or write very often about their job" yet retain "the tension needed for their work." It had been the pattern of their lives to do what was expected of them in one corner of it in order to gain the freedom to do what they wanted, and this was no exception. Their "gramophone records" allowed Giacometti and Moore to discharge his obligations as a public figure and still function as artists. But they paid a price for this success. The statements that gave the public what it wanted sold their work short. They deserve better. Moore and Giaometti created a body of work whose depths we have yet to fully sound, much less thoroughly plumb. Perhaps it is time to lay their words aside and let his art speak for itself.
Bibliography
1. "Notes on Sculpture." The Creative Process. ed. Ghiselin, Brewster, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, (1952), pp. 68-73.
2. Hendy Philip. "Henry Moore," Horizon, Vol. IV, No. 21, London, Sept. (1941), pp. 200-6
3. Arts Council of Great Britain. A Retrospective exhibition of Drawings by Henry Moore, London, (1948), 4-p.
4. Giulio Carlo. Henry Moore, Torino, De Silva, (1948), 26 pp.
5. Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, (1965).
6. Herbert Lust, Alberto Giacometti The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings. NY: Crown, (1970).
7. Hofmann Werner. Henry Moore and His Art. Schriften und Skulpturen, Frankfurt a. M., Fischer Bucherei Nr. 250, (1959), 104 pp.
8. J. Fletcher (with essays by Silvio Berthoud and Reinhold Hohl), Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966. Washington: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, (1988).
9. Jean Genet. Alberto Giacometti Ouevre Grave. Tarascon: Maeght editeur, (1990).
