Guerin, Frances

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Kent Academic RepositoryFull text document (pdf)Copyright & reuseContent in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated allcontent is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of researchThe version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.EnquiriesFor any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.ukIf you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.htmlCitation for published versionGuerin, Frances  (2019) Giacometti's Obsession with Grey.   . Zocalo Public Square, 5 pp.  Internet.DOILink to record in KARhttps://kar.kent.ac.uk/73494/Document VersionUNSPECIFIEDApril 3,2019What Giacometti’s Obsession With the Color Gray ReallyMeantzocalopublicsquare.org/2019/04/03/giacomettis-obsession-color-gray-really-meant-2/ideas/essay/EssayWhen the Sculptor Turned to Painting, His Palette ExpressedHis Existential YearningsAt the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, a visitor looks at a selection of Alberto Giacometti’swork. Photo by Paolo Monti. Courtesy of the Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC, and WikimediaCommons.by Frances Guerin | April 3, 2019The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) is best-known for his lean, elongatedsculptures that grew progressively taller and thinner over the course of his oeuvre. Hislesser-known painted portraits, like the sculpted figures, reflect his fascination with therelationship between the human body and space. And, interestingly, that space istypically painted gray. The gray worlds of the portraits are as important as the faces andbodies of Annette, Caroline, Diego, and all of the other relatives, friends, lovers, andacquaintances who appear in Giacometti’s paintings. If we give Giacometti’s grays the 1/5attention they deserve, we gain insight into the artist’s process and aesthetic, as well asthe raison d’être of his art.Critics claim the cool palette of Picasso’s blue period reflects the depression heexperienced between 1901-1904. When standing in front of Picasso’s Death of Casagemas(1901), for example, we experience the weight of grief at the loss of his best friend. Butfor the next artist, blue can evoke the very opposite. Consider, for example, InternationalKlein Blue, the dazzling ultramarine that defined the Yves Klein’s oeuvre. Face-to-facewith the luscious electric blue of the French artist’s paintings, we want to dive in andrevel in their vibrancy. The contrast between Picasso’s and Klein’s blues could not bemore pronounced.Alberto Giacometti at the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962.  Photo by Paolo Monti. Courtesy of the Fondo Paolo Monti,BEIC, and Wikimedia Commons.This variability in tone, texture, hue, and temperament can be found in different artists’uses of the color gray. In the case of Giacometti’s portraits, the multiple uses of gray evencan be found on a single canvas.According to Giacometti, gray was the color “that I feel, that I see, that I want toreproduce,” the color that “means life itself to me.” But what was this life that he soughtto reproduce, in gray?Giacometti did not come to gray by chance. His critics and commentators like to explainthe gray in which his figures are immersed on the canvas as an extension of the plasterand stone shavings that formed layers of dust over his chaotic studio. Others write abouthis use of gray as a disregard for, or negation of, the substance of paint. For them, gray isthe background, the inconsequential space within which a human figure sits. 2/5However, I don’t believe Giacometti pursued an aesthetic nihilism. Prior to World War II,his portraits were the same multicolored palette as those of the surrealists,expressionists, cubists, and formalists. After focusing his energy on sculpture duringWorld War II, he returned to painting with two male busts and two standing women in1946. These four paintings are gray. In 1947 and 1948, following a brief experimentationwith a brown palette, Giacometti settled on gray for the remainder of his life. He neverreturned to other colors.Critics like to explain Giacometti’s turn to gray as a response to photographs he saw ofthe suffering on the World War II battlefields, including images from the concentrationcamps.You may opt out or contact us anytime.But this explanation doesn’t match the complexity of Giacometti’s gray canvases. In aninterview towards the end of his life, he discussed the reality of the streets he had beensearching to recognize. He claimed that, prior to the war, reality presented itself to hiseyes as a photograph, that he saw the world as if on a screen: distant, yet accessiblefrom different perspectives. On his return to Paris, after the war, reality becameunfamiliar, increasingly unstable, and eventually, unknowable. Reality on the BoulevardMontparnasse, outside Giacometti’s studio, might have been “marvelous,” but it becamealtogether out of reach for the artist.Could it be that gray was the color best able to represent this feeling of a strange,unknowable reality? Certainly, the irresolution and ephemerality of the color gray seemswell-suited to Giacometti’s ongoing and impossible search to represent modernity.While siblings of the portraits can be found on the canvases of artists such as FrancisBacon, Giacometti’s figures find their closest relatives in literature. Samuel Beckett’sVladimir and Estragon, and Hamm and Clov, are the literary cousins of Annette, Diego,and Caroline. They are all immersed in stagnant, gray worlds, always with a slither oflight coming through a dirty window. Giacometti’s models recess into their graybackgrounds, as do Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist beings, their spiritual kin. Theunidentifiable heads of Diego, Annette, Caroline and others are filled with anexistentialist “nothingness” that defines their intrinsic lack of human self-identity. Indeed,Giacometti turns to gray to capture the fleeting moments as Sartrean-like human beingsmove along a path to ultimate disappearance.Giacometti’s canvases also capture the myriad possibilities of existentialism in theirmateriality. Giacometti’s gray is tinged with purples and greens; it is, at times, steely blue,and at others, muddy brown. It can be highlighted in red or white, washed in rich earthtones, or, in a painting such as Dark Head (1959), gray is almost black. Giacometti’s graynot only opens itself to all other colors, but it also covers the spectrum from light to dark,and white to black. In the portrait, Diego (1958), gray is light itself, shining around thehead of Giacometti’s brother, illuminating the shape of his nose. Gray often moves fromice cold to warm and sunny on a Giacometti canvas. As it oscillates between dichotomies,3/5gray never sits still, bringing life to the figures and the backgrounds against which theyare painted. Characteristic of both Giacometti’s conception of humanity after Sartre andthe color itself, the rainbow of grays on Giacometti’s canvases are vibrant and always inprocess. They are neither—and both—figure and ground, representation andabstraction, perpetually in the process of becoming, often taking shape as what they arenot.In keeping with this colorful vibrancy, when we stand before them, the paintings comealive, we see figures as people with personalities given to them by their luminous grayfaces. Giacometti’s figures have few individual characteristics; their only expression is inthe variant gray tones of their bodies and faces, highlighted by the gray brushstrokesthat surround them. True to the modernist challenge to classical portraiture, these workshave nothing to do with capturing an individual’s identity or soul. They are about theperception of a body and face, distorted by its posture, in space. Like their sculptedsiblings, the portraits are figures in which we identify the human. But, in the end, theyare no more than manipulations of an anonymous, gray medium.As much as Giacometti had a love affair with the placement of a figure in space, and anobsession for how and where, whether it was still or moving, what size and scale thefigure should be, he also had a love affair with paint—with the material as opposed tothe materialism of painting. That love affair gives the portraits life; in the scratches andscrawls and the swathes of gray, we see the hand of Giacometti at work, still.Giacometti’s tall, slender figures might be in motion, but they are trapped inside theframe. They are like their maker, who is also stuck on an idea, obsessively working andreworking their bodies until he tears their canvases. The worn, gray canvases bring outthe substance of the material of painting, and simultaneously, expose what might beseen as their creator’s internal frustrations. The figures, in frames within frames withinframes, are at the vanishing point of a mise-en-abîme of incarceration, sometimes aboutto fall out of the frame. They never succeed in freeing themselves fully from entrapmentin their gray world. Together with their artist, they represent the curse of modernexistence, mired in gray. In time, however, the portraits—like Beckett’s well-knowncharacters—carry within them the promise of freedom.The appeal of Giacometti’s portraits to the popular consciousness and the art market isinconsistent with their abstract philosophical complexity. But one thing is sure:Giacometti’s gray figures are not specific to their postwar historical moment, and neitherdo they belong solely to the existential crises of the 20th century.Giacometti’s process made visible on the canvas is an expression of time, an evocation ofmemory and history. The figures are worked over in pencil, charcoal, or paint; rubbedout, smudged, drawn over until the canvas is torn. The “never-finishedness” ofGiacometti’s portraits is evidence of his obsessive excavation of the past, as well as hisbelief in a future moment when resolution might occur.When we stand before these paintings, we recognize that they are not simply unfinished.4/5It is as though Giacometti is still working, and will continue to do so into infinity. We don’tneed to hear from those who sat for him that Giacometti was a perfectionist of sorts. Hismodels tell of endless sittings, and a continual postponement of the end. We see thisexact perpetuation in the paintings themselves: Like gray, they are unfinished, ill-defined,uncertain, and still breathing possibility into the present. If Giacometti kept his sittersmuch longer than they anticipated, on the canvas, he never let their representations go,even when he claimed he was finished.As much as Giacometti had a love affair with the placement of a figure in space, and anobsession for how and where, whether it was still or moving, what size and scale thefigure should be, he also had a love affair with paint—with the material as opposed tothe materialism of painting. That love affair gives the portraits life; in the scratches andscrawls and the swathes of gray, we see the hand of Giacometti at work, still. We meetwith Giacometti on the painting to give it significance, creating an ongoing conversationbetween artist and viewer in the 21st century. As single-color field canvases, what canthe portraits have to say about the complexity of the three-dimensional world, of theevolving patterns of human life? Everything, I would argue—just like the color in whichthey are painted.5/5

What Giacometti's Obsession with the Color Gray Really Meant

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What Giacometti's Obsession with the Color Gray Really Meant

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