UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Hollow Man: Alberto Giacometti and the Crisis of the Monument, 1935–45 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Art History by Joanna Marie Fiduccia 2017 Ó Copyright by Joanna Marie Fiduccia 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Hollow Man: Alberto Giacometti and the Crisis of the Monument, 1935–45 by Joanna Marie Fiduccia Doctor of Philosophy in Art History University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor George Thomas Baker, Chair This dissertation presents the first extended analysis of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture between 1935 and 1945. In 1935, Giacometti renounced his abstract Surrealist objects and began producing portrait busts and miniature figures, many no larger than an almond. Although they are conventionally dismissed as symptoms of a personal crisis, these works unfold a series of significant interventions into the conventions of figurative sculpture whose consequences persisted in Giacometti’s iconic postwar work. Those interventions — disrupting the harmonious relationship of surface to interior, the stable scale relations between the work and its viewer, and the unity and integrity of the sculptural body — developed from Giacometti’s Surrealist experiments in which the production of a form paradoxically entailed its aggressive unmaking. By thus bridging Giacometti’s pre- and postwar oeuvres, this decade-long interval merges two ii distinct accounts of twentieth-century sculpture, each of which claims its own version of Giacometti: a Surrealist artist probing sculpture’s ambivalent relationship to the everyday object, and an Existentialist sculptor invested in phenomenological experience. This project theorizes Giacometti’s artistic crisis as the collision of these two models, concentrated in his modest portrait busts and tiny figures. Giacometti’s crisis moreover coincided with political and social crises in France and Switzerland in the 1930s and 40s. The rhetoric addressing these crises took up the terms of figurative sculpture to describe the destabilization of national self-representation: a loss of face, the inability to form a cohesive image of the body-politic, and the dissolving boundaries of the individual citizen. These metaphorical “figurations of crisis” are refracted in Giacometti’s crisis of figuration through its disruptions of the surface, scale relations, and integrity of figurative sculpture. Tracking these resonances, this dissertation articulates concrete and contextualized terms for the artistic crisis at its center — not as shambolic breakdown, but as a form and experience of substance attained through processes of destruction. iii The dissertation of Joanna Marie Fiduccia is approved. Megan Luke Miwon Kwon Debora L Silverman George Thomas Baker, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv CONTENTS Abstract ii List of Figures vi Acknowledgments xiv Vita xvii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Face and Facet 38 Chapter 2: Mountain and Miniature 124 Chapter 3: Body and Boundary 186 Conclusion 259 Figures 267 Bibliography 425 v LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 0.1 René Burri, Alberto Giacometti, 1960 Fig. 0.2 Brassaï, L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti (Alberto Giacometti’s Studio), 1947 Fig. 0.3 Jacques Ernest Bulloz, Vue d’ensemble de Pavillon de l’Alma à Meudon (View of the Alma Pavilion at Meudon), 1904–05 Fig. 0.4 Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche II (Walking Man II), 1959–60 Fig. 0.5 Alberto Giacometti, Pointe à l’oeil (Point to the Eye), 1931–32 Fig. 0.6 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Diego (Head of Diego), c. 1937 Fig. 0.7 Alberto Giacometti, Petite figurine sur socle (Small Figurine on a Base), c. 1939–45 Fig. 0.8 Brassaï, L’Objet invisible eclaboussé par plâtre dans l’atelier de Giacometti (The Invisible Object Splattered with Plaster in Giacometti’s Studio), 1947 Fig. 0.9 Ernst Scheidegger, Alberto Giacometti’s Desk in his Studio, 1958 Fig. 0.10 Alberto Giacometti, Femme [Plat, II] (Woman [Flat II]), c. 1928–29 Fig. 0.11 Alberto Giacometti, Boule suspendue (Suspended Ball), 1930 Fig. 0.12 Pablo Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929 Fig. 0.13 Alberto Giacometti, “Où va la peinture?” (Where is painting headed?), Commune, 1935 Fig. 0.14 Alberto Giacometti, Attélés ou chaumeurs, c. 1932 Fig. 0.15 Man Ray, Gift, 1921 Fig. 0.16 Meret Oppenheim, Objet (Déjeuner en fourrure) (Object (Fur Breakfast)), 1936 Fig. 1.1 Alberto Giacometti, Tête qui regarde (Gazing Head), 1929 Fig. 1.2 Alberto Giacometti, Cube, 1934 Fig. 1.3 Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Das deutsche Volksgesicht (The Face of the German People), 1932 Fig. 1.4 August Sander, “The Art Scholar,” from Antlizer der Zeit (Face of Our Time), 1929 Fig. 1.5 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Rita (Head of Rita), before August 1936 Fig. 1.6 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Diego (Head of Diego), c. 1914 vi Fig. 1.7 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de femme (Rita) (Head of a Woman (Rita)), 1935 Fig. 1.8 Alberto Giacometti, Masque de femme (Rita) (Mask of a Woman (Rita)), c. 1935–38 Fig. 1.9 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Rita (Head of Rita), c. 1936 Fig. 1.10 Alberto Giacometti, Petite tête de Diego (Small Head of Diego), 1936 Fig. 1.11 Henri Matisse, Jeannette I, 1910 Fig. 1.12 Alberto Giacometti, Paysage Tête-couchée/Tête tombée dans une graphique (Head Landscape/Head Fallen into a Diagram), 1932 Fig. 1.13 Alberto Giacometti, Projet pour un passage (Project for a Passageway), 1931 Fig. 1.14 Alberto Giacometti, Femme qui marche II (Walking Woman II), 1936 Fig. 1.15 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Diego (Head of Diego), c. 1937 Fig. 1.16 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Maria (Head of Maria), c. 1935–36 Fig. 1.17 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Bruno (Head of Bruno), 1930 Fig. 1.18 Alberto Giacometti, Tête du père (Head of the Artist’s Father), 1927 Fig. 1.19 Alberto Giacometti, Tête du père (Head of the Artist’s Father), 1927 Fig. 1.20 Alberto Giacometti, Autoportrait (Self-Portrait), 1925 Fig. 1.21 Alberto Giacometti, Le Couple (The Couple), 1927 Fig. 1.22 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de mère (Plat) (Head of the Artist’s Mother (Flat)), 1927 Fig. 1.23 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Josef Müller (Head of Josef Müller), 1927 Fig. 1.24 Michel Leiris and Alberto Giacometti (?), Tête qui regarde 1929 (collage) Fig. 1.25 Auguste Rodin, Balzac, Tête monumentale (Balzac, Monumental Head), 1898 Fig. 1.26 Upright female figure, Baule, Ivory Coast, Fig. 1.27 “Le Secret de la guérison du franc…,” L’Espoir français, 14 January 1938 Fig. 1.28 Abraham Bosse, Leviathan Frontispiece, 1651 Fig. 1.29 Display of facial profiles, 1928 Rassenkunde Exhibition Fig. 1.30 Musée de l’homme, Senegal display, 1942 Fig. 1.31 Marc Vaux, Femme, [Alberto Giacometti (Woman, Alberto Giacometti)], c. 1928 vii Fig. 1.32 René Magritte, Le Viol (The Rape), 1934 Fig. 1.33 Salvador Dalí, “Communication: Visage paranoïaque” (Message: Paranoiac Face), 1931 Fig. 1.34 Salvador Dalí, Le Phenomène de l’extase (The Phenomenon of Ecstasy), 1933 Fig. 1.35 Pierre Mabille, La Construction de l’homme, 1936 Fig. 1.36 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514 Fig. 1.37 Alberto Giacometti, Surrealist Table, 1933 Fig. 1.38 Alberto Giacometti, Studio [for the Countess Visconti], 1932 Fig. 1.39 Alberto Giacometti, [Figure dans un polyhèdre (Figure in a Polyhedron)], c. 1933–34 Fig. 1.40 Alberto Giacometti, Tête du Père (Ronde II) (Head of Father (Round II)), c. 1927–30 Fig. 1.41 Alberto Giacometti, Tête du père (Plat I) (Head of father, Flat I), c. 1927 - 1930 Fig. 1.42 Alberto Giacometti, Tête cubiste (Cubist Head), 1933 Fig. 1.43 Alberto Giacometti, Head-Skull (Cubist Head) [Tête crâne (Tête cubiste)], 1934 Fig. 1.44 Marc Vaux, [Tête (Head), Alberto Giacometti], c. 1934 (destroyed) Fig. 1.45 Alberto Giacometti, Head-Skull (Cubist Head) [Tête crâne (Tête cubiste)], 1934, rotated Fig. 1.46 Marc Vaux, Vase, Alberto Giacometti, c. 1934 (destroyed) Fig. 1.47 Arthur Jackson Hepworth, Studio of Alberto Giacometti, c. February 1935 Fig. 1.48 Alberto Giacometti, Tête sur un tige (Head on a Rod), 1947 Fig. 1.49 Liver of Piacenza Fig. 1.50 La Difesa della Razza, August 5, 1936 Fig. 1.51 Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait with a Palette, 1906 Fig. 1.52 Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905–06 Fig. 1.53 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Rita (Head of Rita), c. 1937–38 Fig. 1.54 Alberto Giacometti, Tête de Diego (Head of Diego), c. 1937 Fig. 1.55 Alberto Giacometti, Tête d’une femme (Rita) (Head of a Woman (Rita)), c. 1938 Fig. 1.56 Alberto Giacometti, Tête d’Isabel (Head of Isabel), c. 1938–39 viii Fig. 1.57 Francis Galton, Composite Portraits Fig. 1.58 Marc Vaux, Alberto Giacometti, Bust of a Man (Destroyed), 1939 Fig. 2.1 Alberto Giacometti, Draft of a letter to Bruno Giacometti, 1939 Fig. 2.2 Alberto Giacometti, Petit figurine sur double socle (Small Figurine on a Double Base), c. 1939–45 Fig. 2.3 Aerial plan of the “Landi” Fig. 2.4 Louis Beringer, Ticinese Grotto, Zurich, 1939 Fig. 2.5 Michael Wolgensinger, “Schifflibach” in the Iron Works Exhibition Hall, 1939 Fig. 2.6 Anonymous, Demonstration of workers at the Maggi factory, 1939 Fig. 2.7 Karl Egender, Design of “Kleider Machen Leute” (Clothes Make the Man), 1939 Fig. 2.8 H. Finsler, Bally Shoes in the “Kleider Machen Leute” Pavilion, 1939 Fig. 2.9 Display of Hats in the “Kleider Machen Leute” Pavilion, 1939 Fig. 2.10 R. Spreng, The “Textilhalle” of the “Kleider Machen Leute” Pavilion, 1939 Fig. 2.11 Raoul Ubac and Man Ray, Installation view of the “International Exhibition of Surrealism,” Paris, January 17 – February 28, 1938, 1938 Fig. 2.12 R. Spreng, “Modetheater” of the “Kleider Machen Leute” Pavilion, Zurich, 1939 Fig. 2.13 Louis Beringer, “Kleider Machen Leute” Pavilion, Zurich, 1939 Fig.