The longer, unedited version follows.
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Final
Portrait: Lord by Giacometti and vice versa, by Tucci
Why does one paint or sculpt? Nobody knows the
reason. Nobody decides: now I am going to make sculptures, or now I am going to
paint. One just does it. One does it out of madness, out of obsession, out of a
more automatic than conscious need... I have always failed.—If only I could
draw!—I can’t. That’s why I keep on drawing...
Anyway, this is what I deserve for 35 years of
dishonesty. ... All these years I’ve exhibited things that weren’t finished and
never even should have been started. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t
exhibited at all, it would have seemed cowardly, as though I didn’t dare to
show what l’d done, which was not true. So I was caught between the frying pan
and the fire.
Traditional biopics of artists are both
entertaining and pompous, allowing middle-class audiences the vicarious
pleasures of Bohemian excess; of shaking our heads at the benighted art
audiences of the past; and of ascending with the art-martyr (Vincent, Frida,
Jackson) into cultural immortality. I like them, in general, and think they
help build the case for an artist’s serious work, but sometimes they verge on
the formulaic in attempting to reach a mass audience. Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life and Ed Harris’s Pollock, both very good movies present
the creative life as a kind of holy melodrama, hitting the marks of the various
Stations of the Creative Cross. For my taste, Peter Watkin’s Edvard Munch, concentrating on the painter’s
youth in the sexually liberated but fraught artistic circles of 1880s Christiania/Oslo,
immerses us in the culture and engages our sympathy without falling into aesthetic
hagiography. (Julie Taymor’s Frida
was also relatively free of sentimental gravy, despite the melodramatic life of
the artist, perhaps because of its fantasy interludes with puppets — its
Brechtian distance from illusionism.) The carefully selected episode of an
artistic life can serve as a microcosm or metonym that informs and illuminates the
whole life and career. Less is more.
The new film Final
Portrait, by the actor-director Stanley Tucci, wisely takes the path of
simplification and compression, aided by its source material, A Giacometti Portrait, the 68-page
memoir (written for a magazine, but published in book form in 1980), by James
Lord, a young American who became friends with the Swiss-Italian sculptor and
painter in Paris and consented to pose for him. Fortunately for us, what was
intended to have been a simple oil sketch that would require, in Lord’s words,
“but an hour or two, an afternoon at most” grew into a project that consumed
the eccentric and stably unstable (or unstably stable) genius artist, requiring
eighteen session, from September 12, 1964, to September 29, before Lord’s
deadline date, his return to New York having been postponed several times.
His reward was not just a valuable painting and
token of his friendship with the famous artist, but also, through his covert
note-taking, a day-by-day journal of the vicissitudes of the creative process,
alternating between Giacometti’s ferocious drive to work and the creative
destructions which he felt powerless to control, marked by interludes of
despair and self-doubt. (Lord writes that “Giacometti sometimes “exuded gloom.”)
Having just reread the book, I now see what an ideal collaborator Lord was for
Giacometti: both curious and almost inhumanly patient, especially for a
“youngish” (his term) man. Others might not have endured the dramatics: in
1935, when Giacometti despaired of being able to paint or sculpt a head (as he
did repeatedly in the book), André Breton said, with the exasperation one would
not have expected from the pope of Surrealism, “Everybody knows perfectly well
what a head is.”
Well, not everybody. Matti Megged, in Dialogue in the Void: Beckett &
Giacometti1, summarizes a story that the young Giacometti wrote,
about the feelings of dislocation and panic that sometimes afflicted him, with
objects appearing to have lost their normal roles in the universe, and infused
with mystery; in Giacometti’s words, “both living and dead at the same time,”
and “suspended in a dreadful silence”:
...the story is that of a painter or sculptor or
who has to get hold of reality through its essentials. Objects and memories
flee, change, disappear, lose their relation to time and space, both the artist
may catch them, give them proper space and shape. And the way to do that this
is “not to take a hold of the outline, but of the center. All that is there is a
hard core closed with a suggestion of mass dissolving into space.
The art historian Peter Selz, who curated the 1965 Museum
of Modern Art exhibition of Giacometti’s work, verified that this sense of
alienation persisted forty-five years later:
“To render what the eye really sees is impossible,”
Giacometti repeated one evening as we were seated at dinner in the inn at
Stampa [Switzerland, Giacometti’s birthplace]. He explained that he could not
really see me as I sat next to him—I was a conglomeration of vague and
disconnected details —but that each member of the family sitting across the
room from him was clearly visible though diminutive, thin, surrounded by
enormous slices of space. Everyone before him in the whole history of heart, he
continued, had always represented the figure as it is; his task now was to
break down tradition and come to grips with the optical phenomenon of reality.
What is the relationship of the figure to the enveloping space, of man to the
void, even of being to nothingness?
Lord describes with admirable grace and sang-froid what might have driven many
of us to imprecations and theatrical gestures of despair and despondency like
the artist’s, as in his heroic but foredoomed grasp for the unattainable, he
paints (in black and white with fine pointed sable brushes) and unpaints (in
gray, which, for him, contained all colors, with a medium-sized round brush)
Lord’s portrait innumerable times over the eighteen-day process. (Giacometti’s
wife, Annette, and brother, Diego, were sympathetic, but as experienced models,
themselves, phlegmatic in the Galliuc mode. Annette: “You’ll get used to it.”) It
should be noted that Giacometti admired Cézanne’s perception-based method, his
commitment to interpreting reality, and his lack of finish, without reservation:
“He was the greatest of the nineteenth century. He was one of the
greatest of all time.” For his part Cézanne had a similar existentialist
(avant la lettre) role model,
identifying himself, according to Rilke, with Frenhofer, a fictional artist
invented by Balzac, who works in secret on a mysterious masterpiece, but kills
himself, leaving behind an immense canvas of inchoate paint, a pictorial mist
from which only a woman’s foot emerges. As Lord’s last day of modeling
approaches, he devises a stratagem to forestall yet another collapse of his
portrait into entropy2:
...after a time he began to use the large brush
with white, painting the area around the head and shoulders and finally part of
the face, too. This led me to infer that little by little he was painting out
what he had previously done, undoing it, as he said. Presently he took one of
the fine brushes again and began to paint with black, concentrating on the
head. He was constructing it all over again from nothing, And for the hundredth
time at least..... I meant to try to stop him.... I observed him with painstaking
attention, and when the moment I had foreseen came, I said, ”I’m very tired. Do
you mind if I have a little rest?.... I stood up, went behind him, and looked
at the painting. It was superb. The awkward vagueness of 45 minutes before had
completely disappeared. Never before had the picture looked just as it did
then, and it has never looked better. I said, “It looks fine. Why not leave it
as it is now?”.... He’s sighed.... “Well,” he said, “we’ve gone far. We could
have gone further still, but we have gone far. It’s only the beginning of what
it could be. But that’s something, anyway.” “I think it’s admirable,” I said.
“That’s another matter,” he replied.
I have gone on in some detail about the Giacometti-Lord collaboration
because Tucci’s movie, which has received criticism from some film critics for
its apparent lack of plot and lack of character development—for being, as one
wrote, tantamount to watching paint dry—adheres so faithfully to the book, and
therefore evinces both its virtues and faults. Tucci is a fine actor and
director, and in my opinion, the creator of the best Woody Allen comedy in the
early, funny style (appreciated by the aliens of Stardust Memories) ever made by a non-Allen director (though Allen
performs a small role as a small-fry stage director), The Impostors, with Tucci and Oliver Platt as a pair of picaresque
actors on the lam. I was therefore thrilled to hear that Tucci was taking on
this project with a fabulous cast including Geoffrey Rush as Giacometti; Armie
Hammer as James Lord; Tony Shalhoub as Diego, the artist’s brother, and an
artist himself; Sylvie Testud, as Giacometti’s Swiss wife, Annette; and
Clémence Poesy as Giacometti’s young model and mistress, Caroline. The acting
is superlative, even if the ‘characters’ are not given much to do, plotwise,
and Tucci’s command of tone and pacing are all that could be desired with what
is essentially a two-man play (with the painting as the MacGuffin). James
Merifield’s set, which replicates Giacometti’s famous, much-photographed studio
at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, becomes almost another character: dusty and
disheveled, black, gray and earthen colored, it’s an exudation of its chain-smoking,
muttering tenant from 1928 to 1965, a nest shaped by its odd bird. The music,
by Evan Lurie, is sprightly, insouciant, and French, comme il faut.
Since I have just seen the movie and reread the book, I can’t help but
mention some of the slight differences, none of them substantive: Caroline and her BMW do not appear
in the book; the comical money-hiding and pimp-paying scenes are transposed
from Lord’s later biography (I think, not having read it recently); Yanaihara, implicitly
depicted as Annette's lover, is barely mentioned in the book except as a sympathetic
friend and model; Alberto comments on the beauty of the trees not from his
studio, while convalescing, but while walking down Rue d'Alesia afterward; and
his criticism of Picasso is also taken from the biography in all probabiity; and
it was Alberto who read LeCarré’s The Spy
Who Came in From the Cold and who thoughtfully analyzed its plot and
characters, not Shalhoub’s drolly laconic Diego; finally, there’s a hint in the
movie at Lord’s homosexuality which is not in the book. Noteworthy on the other
side of the balance sheet is its accurate depiction of Giacometti’s habitual lunch
at the rue Didot cafe-tabac: ham, hard-boiled eggs, two glasses of wine, and
two cups of espresso.
When Giacometti asked on Day 6 if the process was “getting
on your nerves,” Lord protested that “the entire experience was an exhilarating
one.” On day 15, as the project wound down. Lord “tried to tell him what a
wonderful experience posing for him had been and how much I had appreciated is
letting me do it. “Are you completely nuts?” he said. If you are a Giacometti
fan, you will feel that the filmed book on seeing and depicting, Lord by
Giacometti and vice versa, by Tucci, was light-hearted and drily humorous but
deeply respectful—strangely moving and exhilarating. (If you are instead a
casual artster, you may mutter, stamping your foot, that the film was nuts.)
Giacometti died a year later, of cancer, in 1965,
before Lord could make a return visit. Lord, who wrote Giacometti: A Portrait, in 1985, died in Paris of a heart attack in
2009. In 2015, Portrait of James Lord,
1964, oil on canvas, 45-5/8”x31-3/4”, was valued at twenty to thirty million
dollars—about what Jeff Koon’s Play-Doh sculpture is expected to fetch.
I have always been sensitive to the fragility of
the living beings, as if it took an incredible amount of energy just for them
to stay on their feet ... I shall never succeed in showing in a portrait all of
the force there is in a head. Just staying alive demands so much will power, so
much energy.
1 I was
fortunate enough to have taken a seminar class from the figurative sculptor
Stephen deStaebler (whose work bears some resemblance to Giacometti’s) in the
late 1980s. Megged was a scheduled guest, so I looked up his book, which
compares the existentialist/absurdist sculptor and playwright.
2 Giacometti, who cared more
about process than product, as exemplified by his destruction of some
twenty-five or thirty drawings made on defective litho transfer paper, depicted
in the film. He showed no work between 1937 and 1945, as he transitioned from
Surrealist sculptures depicting juxtapositions of real objects to his mature
style, based on observation of the model and his interior vision. The figures that
he made kept shrinking, almost to nothingness. Charles Juliet recounts, in Giacometti (1986):
On the eve of Giacometti’s return to Paris,
Albert [Skira, the art-book publisher] asked him what arrangements he had made
for shipping his sculptures. “But I’m bringing them with me,” he replied. “They
were packed,” ... Skira was surprised to note, “in a matchbox a little bit
bigger than the ordinary ones.”
