Rue d’Alésia à Paris

by Richard Oxman

> “A thankless, well-nigh ridiculous task, performed with humility as an act of pride. If the outcome happened to be fame and fortune, no right-minded man would have interpreted it as a symptom of success.” — James Lord, speaking of Beckett’s and Giacometti’s attitude toward their work…in his mind.

> “Giacometti definitely looked at fame as a ‘misunderstanding.’” — Stranger on a train

In the 1960s, Giacometti’s health began to fail seriously. In 1963 he underwent an operation for cancer of the stomach. He made the curiously characteristic remark: “The strange thing is…as a sickness, I always wanted to have this one.” The cancer did not recur, but in 1965 heart disease and chronic bronchitis were diagnosed. Giacometti died in June 1966 at the Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland.

A couple of weeks after Giacometti’s death, my Uncle Max (who had met Alberto on the artist’s only venture to New York, during a major exhibit…not long before the fatal diagnosis) showed me a fascinating photo that he had found in *Paris-Match*. They had published it only seven days after his demise.

What a rise. What a revelation. His arms go through his sleeves, keeping them dry in a downpour, as he crosses rue d’Alesia. But his raincoat is hiked up above his head, shoulders hunched…preoccupied…very far from realizing that his crumpled trousers and battered shoes are no match for the rain.

John Berger thinks the image is remarkable because of what it reveals about Giacometti’s character, his *symbolic* poverty…being worn more naturally than it would be…on a monk. In fact, AG’s financial status never factored into his behavior one way or the other. For me, the image –upon first sight– immediately and viscerally took me directly to his studio. I was looking at a Giacometti sculpture. One of his miniatures was crossing that street. No question.

His art went through many radically different changes; I can only hope that readers will review the various stages. One description might be interesting at this juncture, however:

Tout cela n’est pas grand’chose
toute la peinture, sculpture, dessin,
ecriture ou plutot litterature,
tout cela a sa place
et pas plus

Les essais c’est tout,
Oh merveille!

It all means little
all the painting, sculpture, drawing,
writing, or rather literature
it all has its place
and nothing more.

An attempt is everything,
How marvellous!

It’s a poem Giacometti wrote in October, 1965…while crossing the Atlantic…close to the River Styx. [1]

Like Beckett, Giacometti was only interested in failure.

Giacometti and Beckett probably met before the war. It’s well known that they spent many hours together…alone in Paris…till six or seven in the morning.

Gerard Regnier once provided an intriguing observation about the two:

“I can’t resist repeating an anecdote here that was told me by the painter Byzantios: one evening, or one night rather, Giacometti came to sit next to Samuel Beckett in the Coupole. And he whom one normally listened to, around whom people gathered –he made an unprecedented effort to enter into his neighbor’s thoughts, to surround him with an ever tighter net of questions, as if driven by unbounded curiosity — which Beckett, however, seemed not to notice.” [2]

For Beckett, the war years were a time of severe deprivation, trauma even beyond what Giacometti went through at the time. But he forced himself to work, immersed himself in writing. For very rare reasons.

It helped to maintain sanity in those years of the Occupation, of course, but soon after hostilities ended…Beckett was hit with multiple rejections of the novel he had written in hiding; it appealed to absolutely no one. As James Lord notes, “Publishers advised the author that a ‘realistic’ account of his wartime experiences would make him a fortune. To which Beckett retorted, ‘ I’m not interested in stories of success, only failure.’” [3a]

By May 1963…when the curtain rose on Jean-Louis Barrault’s *Godot* production, both men were world famous. And as Estragon and Vladimir prepared to mount a very special stage… very different than what the first production in 1953 offered, Samuel Beckett asked Alberto Giacometti to design the lone tree which appears in the play: “It would give us all enormous pleasure.” [3b]

Respecting the playwright, producers, performers…and the five characters, for starters. And the Odeon Theatre –a state-supported affair– had to be wearing a grin ear to ear.

Giacometti’s tree, for many, with its bare, ruined, choirless limbs extending isolation and loneliness, symbolized both life and death…”because the bough from which a man can hang himself also bears leaves emblematic of rebirth,” as Lord put it. [4]

More than the site of the action, however, the tree had something of the world’s axis about it.
Many of Giacometti’s works had eternal enigmatic aspects in their veins. And his expansive talk about very clear, positive notions was an excellent complement: “This adventure is new,” he once said, meaning that those who found themselves interested in *how* the artist sees and suffers reality…should refocus on *that* he sees and experiences it. He elaborated: “It began about in the eighteenth century with Chardin, when the artist began to take his object more seriously than serving the church or pleasing the king. He was finally left to himself!”

Keeping in touch with reality was the only thing that counted: “I see something, I find it marvelous, I’d like to try to paint it. Whether it’s a failure or a success — in the end, it’s not important…. I will definitely have gained something and the world around me will be richer, for I have come to know the world as something that so far surpasses me that I can’t even make the attempt to approach it.” [5]

Learning through failure by Giacometti had zero to do with getting more hip about what he could put over on the public or patrons. It had to do with accepting the world as something greater than oneself…and to be richer for the experience in the face of humility…on a scale that is not even talked about today.

Seeking “redemption” in an immanent transcendence is exquisitely close to Camus:

“Man may authorize himself to denounce the total injustice of the world, but he cannot affirm its total ugliness. There is a transcendence we experience –every beautiful thing is a promise of it– that leads us to prefer this limited and incomplete world to any other. Art leads us to the origin of the revolt against the world, to the extent that it attempts to stamp its form on values in the perpetual process of becoming” [6]

It’s true that I never came across a work of art by Giacometti that I didn’t like. It’s also true that anyone who’s like him…I’d have to love. Anyone who, today, could embrace our *abyss*, and refrain from turning it into a cheap formula…substituting it for a deep and real understanding of the meaning of existence.

Jolly Giacometti Footnotes:

[1] Angela Schneider, ed., Alberto Giacometti (New York: Prestel, 1994), p. 42.

[2] Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), p.280.

[3a] James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (New York: Farrar-Straus-Giroux, 1985), p. 337.

[3b] *Waiting for Godot* has been consistently voted the most influential theatre piece of the 20th-century in every major poll taken…over the last forty years. It’s not a work to merely be seen, read or talked about…once or twice. Such words from Beckett are extremely rare.

[4] Lord, op. cit., p. 428. Just one leaf in the play, however…not *leaves*.

[5] Hohl, op. cit., p. 210 (for both paragraphs).

[6] Ibid., p. 210…where Albert Camus’ words from The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt are cited.