The Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec is presenting a magnificent Alberto Giacometti Retrospective till May 13.
It offers a magnificent journey not Art, not “chachkies-making art", but Art as an essential and privileged way to probe the deepest layers of human existence.
I’ll probably go back next week, so very much looking forward to that.
Here are a few photos taken during my first visit, I was there with a very old friend, a former student, who is responsible for my coming in contact with Mercedes and Herbert Matter, close friends of Giacometti (and of just about anybody that mattered during the hay-days of the NY School).
Mercedes was a great painter, she founded the NY Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture (where she brought me to teach for a number of years, the best years of my life actually, and not “just” as a teacher), and Herbert was an immense designer and photographer (he taught at Yale).
Herbert was Alberto’s favourite photographer, as evidenced by the images and notes on this site.
Herbert was working on a book based on his many photos of Alberto and his work when he died, Mercedes completed it later.
Here are a few of the photos my friend and I took during our first visit of that show in Quebec City, I cannot recommend it highly enough, the show offers a very intimate connection with the many sculptures, paintings and drawings, it is my fourth Giacometti show (first one was in Paris in 1968, 2 years after his death, I was still an Art student then), and by far the most potent one.
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Thanks for sharing the images from the show. I was familiar with some of his sculptures, but not the paintings.
The photos do not really do justice to the works seen “in the flesh”.
There is a real distance built into each piece, and when you find it by moving to and fro the piece, it is experienced physically, your body “locks” there.
Giacometti had given my friends Mercedes and Herbert Matter a (very rare) magnificent painted bronze bust, a portrait of his brother Diego.
I spent many weekends at the Matter’s place in Connecticut (near Roxbury, they used to have Alexander Calder as a neighbour and close friend, he was Mercedes’ only child’s godfather), and I often had that Giacometti bronze in my lap or on a coffee table in front of me. Now, I am not easily spooked, but this bronze sculpture was so potent, I could not take it for more than 15 minutes at a time.
I already knew by then that there was a depth in Art that reached waaaaay beyond, or beneath, chachkies making (the search for that dimension was driving my own work), but there, as in the Québec retrospective, I was in something utterly magic.
I've had the opportunity to talk about this with people like Bill and Elaine de Kooning, John Cage, and many other great artists (the NY Studio School, and Mercedes, were very much “in” that world), and the consensus was, is, that we can touch that “magic” when we become able to “work by way of not knowing” (which shows the fallacy of ordinary Art education which posits knowing what to do and how as an absolute requirement for ’success”).
Which is why Mercedes wrote a scathing article in ArtNews, in 1963, which eventually led to the founding of the/her Studio School.
Later on, she did it again and wrote this beauty, "How Do You Learn to Be an Artist?"
In that paper she stated that “To have a degree in Art from some university is almost a sure sign that one did not study Art at that institution.”
Now, one needs to know that Mercedes was a highly respected artist (she had been Fernand Léger’s assistant as well as Hans Hoffman’s and a close friend and colleague of the “Who’s Who" of the Art scene for many decades and this, not “just” in NY) and was a celebrated teacher as well: in 1978 she received the College Art Association's “distinguished teaching of art” award (more info in this NY Times article, at the bottom of the page).
She was a fierce champion of the “working by way of not knowing”, and Giacometti’s work, at its best, exemplifies that:
In closing, it may interest some to know that this “Walking Man” bronze sold for about 104 million dollars just before the show opened: