Henry Moore Institute Online Papers and Proceedings

Dr Steven Harris The Theory and Practice of Filliou and Giacometti 22 May 2013 Source: Henry Moore Institute Online Papers and Proceedings www.henry-moore.org/hmi This article has been downloaded from the Henry Moore Institute’s collection of Online Papers and Proceedings, an online publishing facility bringing you the most recent developments in sculpture studies from both inside and outside the Institute. Here you'll find proceedings from many of the Institute's international conferences as well as the latest research from both up-and-coming and established scholars. Copyright remains with the author. Any reproduction must be authorised by the author. Contact: [email protected] The Henry Moore Institute is a world-recognised centre for the study of sculpture in the heart of Leeds. An award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre, library and sculpture archive, the Institute hosts a year-round programme of exhibitions, conferences and lectures, as well as developing research and publications, to expand the understanding and scholarship of historical and contemporary sculpture. The Institute is a part of The Henry Moore Foundation, which was set up by Moore in 1977 to encourage appreciation of the visual arts, especially sculpture. To subscribe our newsletter email: [email protected] www.twitter.com/HMILeeds 1 Dr Steven Harris The Theory and Practice of Filliou and Giacometti Thank you everyone for coming out this evening, and thank you to Jon Wood of the Henry Moore Institute for inviting me, and to Kirstie Gregory for making the arrangements. I have been asked to speak about the work of Robert Filliou and Alberto Giacometti together. It’s great to see the work of both of these artists at the Institute; in particular, you can see the lightness as well as the seriousness of Filliou’s work in this exhibition. I will focus my talk this evening on how each of these artists explored representation as a space of possibility in their works. To me, this suggests two things: the first is that art was, for each of them, a means of expressing or conveying thought, rather than a way to depict an external model. This was always true for Filliou, who came to art from economics and from theatre, and who had no training in the visual arts; it is most true for Giacometti between 1925 and 1935, the period in his work on which I will focus this evening. The second thing that an exploration of representation as a space of possibility suggests is that this thought must be made manifest in some material way, as a physical object. This material expression of thought is for each artist a way of relating to the world, and not just to art; this is why Filliou names the space of possibility that he conceptualises as ‘the mimetic territory of the genial republic.’ The mimetic territory resembles the world outside its boundaries, so as to make a difference in it; it is not purely conceptual, in other words, but is, rather, a sensible embodiment of thought. The work as an expression of thought must appear in the world as a material object, to show that it can and does exist, and cannot be discounted. A similar logic informs the production of surrealist objects, concerning whose invention Giacometti played such an important role. They too are objectifications of mental processes that assume physical shape, and they therefore have a greater presence than do virtual images or written texts, because they exist in the same way that a stone or a pot or a bird exists. Filliou and Giacometti belong to different generations, of course, and while Giacometti came of age in the 1920s, and was the son of an artist, Filliou only came to art later in his life, when he was in his 30s, from 1960 on. The formation of the two artists and the nature of the art system at the time they worked were very different. Nonetheless, their working processes are related in that each conceives of art as the result of a conceptual process, and this is what I will focus on here, one artist at a time. The work by Giacometti that I will talk about this evening was made between 1925 and 1935, the period in which he worked more conceptually. Before this and after this, he worked primarily from the model. Beginning in 1925, though, he moved away from a reliance on the external model, at first in relation to modernist, African and Oceanic systems of representation, and then to surrealist ones. 2 My main example of this kind of work is his ‘Man’, (1929), a linear figure with a scoop for a head in which the body is schematised rather than depicted naturalistically. The sculpture was conceived and crafted based upon an understanding of how the human body has been represented in African and Oceanic works, for instance in an Iatmul figure from Papua-New Guinea that was once owned by fellow surrealist Roland Tual, or a Mbole figure from what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Giacometti’s sculpture, like the Iatmul and Mbole figures, and like most sculpture from cultures around the world, is a human figure, but unlike the post-Renaissance European tradition before cubism, it has been conceived as a set of signs that can be construed as a human figure. It does not represent the body as a volume with an interior cavity and organs, but as an open lattice within a grid, in which the torso is represented by a line no thicker than its neighbours. As Giacometti wrote to his dealer Pierre Matisse in 1948, concerning such works, ‘for me, the figures were never a compact mass, but rather a transparent structure.’ (In the same letter, he also called such structures ‘a kind of skeleton in space.’) Giacometti learned from the alternative systems of representation he found in African and Oceanic art, which he could see in private collections and in ethnographic museums in France and Switzerland, to produce a more conceptual, less naturalistic representation of the body, and he continued to work in this way during the time, from 1930 to 1935, when he was an active member of the surrealist group in Paris. I will turn now to one of the works on display here at the Institute, the bust of Flora Mayo and to the drawing ‘Still Life in the Studio’, both of which were made in 1927, and which are important transitional works between an art that focuses on the model, and an art that is more conceptual in orientation. The bust is one of a small series of portrait busts that Giacometti made in 1927, including portraits of his father and mother, and this one portrays a fellow student at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, with whom he was romantically involved at the time. It bears a formal resemblance to Giacometti’s contemporary portraits of his father, and of course Giacometti has an affective relation to both of the sitters. (Note that the bust of Flora Mayo is a bronze cast of a plaster sculpture which was painted in places.) These busts, though solidly material and mimetic to some degree, are made at the moment when he is shifting from perception to the representation of a mental image, and this is registered in the flattened surface of the busts and in the graphic quality of the depiction, as if these were etching plates rather than volumetric sculptures. (In fact, the subtitle of the father’s bust is ‘flat and engraved’.) This makes them pictorial as well as sculptural, and they are somewhat grotesque and cartoonish but also much less naturalistic than traditional portrait busts, or than Giacometti’s work had been in the recent past. There is a pictorial logic that leads from these flattened busts to the flattened plaque sculptures of 1927 and the years immediately following, such as ‘Gazing Head’, or ‘Head (Self-Portrait)’, both 1927. Both of these sculptures were included in an exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in June 1929 that brought Giacometti’s work to the attention of André Masson, and the second one is featured in the ‘Still Life in the Studio’ drawing. These heads are still busts in some 3 way, though highly abstracted ones, but they have been flattened into planes that emphasise a pictorial surface more than they do the volume and mass of more traditional sculpture. They are concave and convex, so they still have some of the properties of relief sculpture, but Giacometti has moved sculpture closer to painting here, as works like ‘Man’ are closer to drawing. ‘Still Life in the Studio’ is much more naturalistic in its style than are these flattened busts, but we can read it as depicting a set of interests and possibilities consistent with the tradition of the Dutch still life to which it refers. Jonathan Wood has written about this drawing before me, in a recent collection of critical essays on Giacometti, so I will only describe it briefly here. There are four principal elements of this still life, which are arranged on a shelf against a wall, each of which overlaps with at least one other object in the arrangement: a paperback book, which has been tentatively identified as the surrealist writer Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, published by Gallimard in 1926; an alarm clock; Giacometti’s own sculpture ‘Head (Self-Portrait)’; and a second portrait bust, a plaster replica of a Sumerian bust of Gudea, the ancient ruler of Lagash, which Giacometti had recently bought from the Louvre when it sold off plaster replicas of works in its collection.

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