Collection James Lord
In A Giacometti Portrait (1965) James Lord (1922 – 2009), an American writer, described sitting for a portrait by Alberto Giacometti (1901 – 1966) a Swiss sculptor and painter – one of the most renowned of the 20th century. Here are some excerpts which show how Giacometti was striving for what he felt to be an objectively true likeness, even though it was not an accurate duplicate of the image-in-the-viewfinder.____________________________
He said that that morning, as usual, he had had his familiar nightmarish awakening, accompanied by the realization that he couldn’t ever possibly hope to achieve his ambition: to paint what he saw. “If only some- one else could paint what I see,” he said, “it would be marvellous, because then I could stop painting for good.” After working for a little while in silence, he suddenly said,
“The head isn’t going well at all. It’s lopsided now. Merde! And I don’t seem to be able to get it straight again. Besides, the surface is so shiny with turpentine that I can’t see a thing.” I stood up, while he took the painting off the easel and put it on the floor under the light. The head certainly was askew. “It’s hopeless,” he muttered. “At that distance it’s hopeless. How can I make a nose really perpendicular in relation to the body? The simple fact is that I don’t know how to do anything. People think I’m affected when I say that, but it’s simply the truth.” ____________________
When he sat down to start work, he murmured, “I’ll never find a way out.” And a little later, nodding toward the canvas, he said, “Hell is right there.”
“Where?” I asked. “On the tip of my nose?”
“No. It’s your whole face.”
I laughed, but he didn’t. Later it appeared that the work was again going less well. “I don’t know how to do anything at all,” he said. “If only Cézanne were here, he would set everything right with two brush strokes.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “After all, Cézanne had plenty of trouble painting, too. He was always complaining bitterly about it.”
“True,” he murmured. “Even he had trouble.” ________
“But what,” I asked, “is the relation between your vision, the way things appear to you, and the technique that you have at your disposal to translate that vision into something which is visible to others?”
“That’s the whole drama,” he said, “I don’t have such a technique.”
“I understand what you mean,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s relative to what you consider the absolute. But you do have a technique, after all.”
“So little. When I was a young man, I thought I could do anything. And that feeling lasted until I was about seventeen or eighteen. Then I suddenly realized that I could do nothing, and I wondered why. I wanted to work to find out why. That is what’s kept me working ever since, moreover, that desire to find out why I can’t simply reproduce what I see. I started out with the technique that was available at hand, which was more or less the impressionist technique, and I worked with it until about 1925. Then suddenly, while I was trying to paint my mother from life, I found that it was impossible. So I had to start all over again from scratch, searching. And it seemed to me that I’d made some progress, a little progress, till I began to work with Yanaihara*. That was about 1956. Since then things have been going from bad to worse.” He sighed, glanced at the drawing he’d just done, and closed the book.________
*Isaku Yanaihara, the Japanese professor who had posed during that time for a quantity of paintings and sculptures.
As we saw in Chapter XX, some artists feel that they are matching what they see as accurately as possible, even though what they actually produce is a poor match for the image-in-the-viewfinder. The previous pages illustrate that Giacometti was one such artist, who, while working on his portrait of James Lord, continually complained that he could not get the simplest things right, such as the angle of the nose. A million schoolchildren would have been able to show him how to make a picture that looked more like the image-in-the-viewfinder. Giacometti would have been well able to achieve this type of accuracy had he wanted to – after all, it is only a matter of measuring. But he was seeking a different type of accuracy. He was constructing an object which somehow set out relationships which he considered to be important, and worth making more noticeable. He was looking for a match in emphasis, rather than a match in dimension. This is very much the way in which a caricaturist works; but while a caricaturist seeks to bring out characteristics which make a subject more recognisable, a fine artist seeks to bring out characteristics which make a subject more easily appreciated for its abstract qualities of shape and colour.
It may be worth mentioned a misapprehension that has severely compromised much art education, the idea that the basis of art is a photographic duplicate of the image-in-the-viewfinder. Some even suggest that this is the basic grammar of art, in contrast to Hogarth, for whom the basic grammar was a series of forms and relationships which the artist could learn as if learning a language. Few great artists started out making drawings and paintings which looked like photographs.
It is a paradox that starting in the Renaissance and after, paintings did become gradually more like photographs (with many exceptions). But it seems with the advent of studio training in the 19th century, the idea that art was a construction rather than a duplicate was finally given up. So the history of art may be seen as the gradual development of forms, getting ever more like a photograph, until finally academic realism and Impressionism completed the trend, only itself to be over-taken by high-quality colour photography.
In his book S J Solomon recounts that: When M. Léon Bonnat (1833 – 1922) was asked by a pupil who thought he had completed his study what he was to do next, his reply was: “Make it more like.” “And then? asked the pupil. “Then make it still more like!” was the retort. (page 110)This suggests that for Bonnat, at least while he was teaching, the aim of painting was to duplicate the image-in-the-viewfinder. This seems to have had its roots in a misunderstanding of Velasquez’ painting. Bonnat could have said that any painting by Velasquez was unfinished and instructed him to make it ‘more like’. There is always more detail that can be added. However what makes the paintings of Velasquez so remarkable is the way in which complicated details have been summarised and simplified.