EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Giacometti on his Sitters’ Inner Being

So much of the poetic method in art remains a closely-held secret. Like initiates in a mystery religion, great artists have long had a common understanding that what they prize in their creative process should not be shared with the unappreciative masses or their visually-handicapped patrons. Such knowledge should be reserved for those who use it and those who can discover it through comprehension. Besides, if it had been handed to common minds in the past, they might have been charged with treason, sacrilege or mere misrepresentation...and sometimes were anyway. Rembrandt was taken to court for not catching a good likeness in a portrait which he then refused to change. As for ordinary painters or illustrators they would have been as unaware of the process as the layman; a poet might have had a better understanding if only they could see art the way they read poetry which they rarely can. William Blake was an exception. The critics themselves who have long argued that a great portrait reflects an aspect of the sitter’s inner being are way off track. Ever since the Middle Ages great portraits have represented the artist’s creative mind not the model’s whose psychic life was not conveyed to canvas. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), the artist who, post-Cubism, made strange portraits clearly removed from reality could admit as much without risking the noose, the dungeon or the law courts.

The current issue of Open Windows, the online magazine of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, discusses their Giacometti portrait of his cook, Rita (above), and how it was constructed. Unsurprisngly the writer, unaware of what readers of EPPH know, is unable to explain what, in the absence of psychological content, is the meaning (or aesthetic value) of the portrait.

“Rita’s features become an amalgam of criss-crossing strokes, in ‘a mask that makes her identity inaccessible’. The artist himself said as much when he remarked, regarding the matter of any possible connection between his portraits and the sitter’s inner being, that ‘I have enough trouble with the outside without bothering about the inside’. In the presence of his model, all familiarity vanished, and the person became for him like a stranger, someone he seemed to be seeing for the first time. Whether it was his brother Diego, his wife Annette, or some other of the models that posed for him for years, once he had set his easel before them, he began to analyse them in such a way as to capture their structure. Like Paul Cézanne, a painter whom he admired, Giacometti attempted to unravel that structure of the person sitting for him, in a process of concentration that nevertheless led him to perceive his subject differently each time. After long sessions in which the model posed immobile, the final outcome of that analysis was a portrait lacking any social or psychological connotations.”¹

 

1.Marta Ruiz del Árbol, “Giacometti and Portrait of a Woman”, Open Windows 5 (April 2014), online at http://assets.museothyssen.org/pdf/estudios_de_la_coleccion/ventanas/5_eng.pdf (retrieved May 13th 2014).