Giacometti's thin figures: dead men walking; in which the author advances a psychoanalytic interpretation of the artist's gaunt postwar figures, postulating the lifelong impact of a series of family losses and the shattering revelations of the Holocaust - among other factors - Alberto Giacometti

By the late 1940s, Alberto Giacometti was widely regarded as the artist who best represented mankind at midcentury. He had been a celebrated Surrealist sculptor, working in a semiabstract style, whose career was marooned in the mid-1930s, at first by his return to figuration and then by a decade of inhibition and voluntary obscurity which included the war years. In January 1948, Giacometti burst back into the art world with the first exhibition of his gaunt postwar figural sculptures. From the outset these works were startling, forcing viewers to confront some perceptual puzzles. Even today, they often look formidable or frightening when seen face-on, their bodies seemingly eaten away. Yet in profile, they appear quite different: remarkably resilient, elegantly lifelike, persistently human. Their formal and iconographic contradictions arrest our eyes and raise questions: How did Giacometti arrive at his new style, and what is it all about?

Giacometti had no satisfactory rationale for the extreme attenuation of his figures, even long after they had become famous icons. In interviews in 1964 he said: "I never tried to make thin sculptures ... they became thin in spite of me." (1) Over the past 14 years, I have been researching his life and art from the double perspective of art history and psychoanalysis, and I have discovered new information that I am convinced is important to an understanding of his breakthrough style.

Born in 1901 at the Italian edge of Switzerland, Giacometti grew up in the tiny Alpine community of Stampa. His father, the genial Giovanni Giacometti, was an important Swiss Post-Impressionist painter. Alberto and his three younger siblings often posed for him in long, seemingly endless sessions that were a natural part of being an artist's child. Alberto spent all his free time drawing and reading in his father's studio, and was acknowledged early on by his father as a fellow artist perhaps more gifted than himself. Alberto's mother, Annetta, was the pious daughter of the local schoolteacher, and the family disciplinarian. Alberto is remembered by his family as especially talented, curious and intelligent, but also tormented throughout his childhood by doubts, fears and superstitions. Contrary to Alberto's later assertion that the first death he ever observed was that of a stranger when he was 20, he had already suffered the loss of a grandmother before he was three, and at age 12, the death of a daily companion, his beloved maternal grandfather. In addition, his mother had nearly died, from a prolonged case of typhoid, when he was 10. Not surprisingly, the young Alberto worried excessively about possible fatal mishaps whenever his father or his brother Diego were away too long in the treacherous high mountains surrounding their home.

When Alberto discovered Egyptian art and culture while studying his father's art journals, he found not only a compelling esthetic but also a civilization which he later said he admired above all others--one which would eventually help him deal with his fears about death and loss. Those lifelong fears were probably exacerbated by the family tradition of supressing expressions of anger. Alberto learned very early to confine his hostile thoughts and feelings to his fantasy life and his art work. Many of his youthful drawings and paintings portray lurid scenes of battle and carnage. (2) Family reports and his own writing strongly suggest that his muzzled anger was often accompanied by both guilt and fear that his thoughts might cause actual harm. (3)

After four years at a strict evangelical secondary school, Alberto spent a year studying art in Geneva, then another year in Italy; at age 21, he departed for Paris. During his first three years there, he completed his formal artistic studies with Antoine Bourdelle and made frequent long visits back to Stampa. In 1925, Paris became Giacometti's primary home. The artist began what was to become a lifelong pattern: in Switzerland he was the hardworking son of a good family, polite and shy around women; in Paris he was a night prowler, frequenting cafes, brothels and late-night parties in the company of his many friends and acquaintances.

By 1929, thanks to the favorable reception of some of his first semiabstract sculptures, Giacometti came to be known as a leading Surrealist sculptor; he was closely associated with Andre Breton. Works such as Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932) and his text "Yesterday, Quicksand," a tale of family rape and murder, including patricide, published in May 1933, exemplified two of the Surrealist movement's prime themes--sex and aggression. In June 1933, a few weeks after the publication of Alberto's homicidal fantasy, Giovanni Giacometti died unexpectedly. Soon afterward, in a mix of sorrow and guilt eloquently expressed in poetry and drawings, Alberto's production slowed; he gradually turned away from the abstract style his father had never liked and began to work from nature, as Giovanni had always done. The death--at a critical moment--of the man who had unstintingly supported him seems to have played a major role in arresting Alberto's richly imaginative and effortlessly productive Surrealist period. Only one major Surrealist piece, Invisible Object (1934), was made after his father's death.