Mythic Giacometti
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Mythic Giacometti Details
From Publishers Weekly Lord’s 1985 biography of the Italian artist Alberto Giacometti was, in his own words, "a monument dedicated to honor and perpetuate the memory, aspirations and achievements of a legendary hero." This little book, offered as a kind of coda, retells the story of the sculptor’s life as a sequence of critical moments that evoke the Oedipus story, and suggests that Giacometti had a mythic destiny, from his birth and baptism through to the demise of his father, whose funeral Giacometti was too ill to attend. Certainly his was a fraught life: the artist had an erotic obsession with feet and a ferocious attachment to his mother. On two occasions, he awoke to the unexpected company of a dead body. Lord’s exegetical treatment of these and other events, though by no means groundless, is often labored and oddly evasive, as when he advances the possibility that an early encounter with an older man was sexual. Lord presents his speculations with tortuous and unmistakably compassionate logic, yet he does not pursue the meaning or consequences of the episode. His writing has the strength of conviction, but the prose often becomes lumpy with qualification and abstraction. At 80, Lord belongs to a generation that arguably prefers to discuss art and life in terms of principle and paradigm rather than emotion or history. By pursuing his Freudian theme in isolation from the larger scope of biography, he reveals more about his own stake in the artist’s life than he does about his subject or his work. Which is perhaps as he meant it to be.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist Lord came to Paris during World War II and soon became acquainted with the protean heroes of the avant-garde (adventures he has eloquently chronicled in a series of memoirs), including sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Lord became the enigmatic and self-destructive genius's biographer, and Giacometti (1985) remains a gold standard among artist's biographies. Now, at 80, Lord reprises his great work, finally sharing the "tragic revelation" that served as its blueprint to "elucidate the symbolic and mythological verities" of Giacometti's extraordinary experiences. What Lord reveals in a refined biographical essay as riveting and potent as Giacometti's rarefied totemic figures are the startling parallels between the sculptor's life and the myth of Oedipus. As Lord describes Giacometti's attachment to his mother, suppressed rivalry with his artist father, obsession with feet (Oedipus means "swollen foot"), self-punishing inclinations, complicated sexuality, and the mystical evolution of his radical art, he does, indeed, trace an archetypal paradigm. By placing Giacometti firmly within the mythic realm, Lord's provocative exegesis rekindles appreciation for the heroic artist's searing, otherworldly vision. Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more Review Praise for Giacometti: A Biography:"Giacometti owes his life in words to the most conscientious kind of American seeker a European visionary could hope to stumble on." --Seymour Krim, The Washington Post Book World Read more About the Author James Lord's books include A Giacometti Portrait, first published in 1965, and Giacometti: A Biography (FSG, 1985), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent work is Plausible Portraits of James Lord (FSG, 2003) Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Mythic Giacometti1Long before the ominous dawn of history, men were already creating myths in the hope of finding out who they were, where they had come from, and what fate awaited them in the inscrutable hereafter. What they sought many millennia ago, when time itself was measured by fire or ice, was little different from what we are looking for today: an explanation of the inexplicable. Mythic insight is concerned to elucidate the meaning of life. In order to do this one must follow the presumption of such meaning to its origin, to the idea of creation, of a Creator Himself, or Itself. A myth expresses in symbolic terms what is both metaphysical and ethical. No form of life, however, not even the human mind or spirit, is capable of illuminating once and for all the first cause of creation, which remains as mysterious to us as it was to prehistoric man. To be sure, we know more than he did. But is our understanding greater? What reason have we to assert that our myths are superior to his, since their purpose, now as then, is to define reality forever in absolute comprehension of the universe?Life on earth arises from origins of suffering tooprofound, tragic, and inexplicable to be adequately appreciated through a semblance of understanding or progress. The mystery of birth is inseparable from the mystery of death. This duality demands a symbolic interpretation, and accordingly the symbolism of mythology concerns the enigma of life in its totality. Myths, in short, be they of whatever spiritual origin, have evolved as patterns developed from the nucleus of all human relationships and, though they have yet to answer the prehistoric questions, are essential to the search for meaning in mankind's experiences.Of all the heroes of Greek mythology, none is better known or has had greater impact upon the psychic constitution and social behavior of our planet's population than that of Oedipus, King of Thebes. His name and myth are nearly common knowledge today, popularized even by the cinema and famed for a century due to Freud's use of both in order to describe a psychological condition or complex theoretically characteristic of neurotic people. The myth of Oedipus was well known, of course, millennia before Freud, appearing in the Iliad and providing material for one of the enduring masterworks of world drama, King Oedipus by Sophocles, a fateful evocation of man's tragic search for identity. It has continued throughout subsequent centuries to compel the interest and admiration of discerning thinkers. Aristotle admired the myth and tragedy as perfect examples of tragic causality. Aeschylus, Euripides, and Seneca based dramas upon it. Freud affirmed that the primal sense of guilt amongst mankind as a whole, being the ultimate source of religion and morality, was acquired in thebeginnings of history due to the Oedipus complex. Sexuality, after all, is the heartbeat of human life. Oedipus's doom is the outcome of his obdurate determination to confront truth, ineluctable and absolute.The myth of Oedipus in its elementary form is widely known and, though difficult to understand, can be easily and briefly related. Laius, King of Thebes, and his wife, Jocasta, become parents to an infant son. Laius had been forewarned by the Delphic Oracle, however, that he was fated to be killed by his own son, who would then take Jocasta for his wife. It was decided, therefore, to do away with the infant. And although the father had personal reasons to fear the crime of infanticide, the mother was frightened by the prospect of incest; thus was the newborn child entrusted by Laius to a shepherd with orders to pierce one or both of his feet with a spike and leave him exposed on a mountainside to die. The baby was rescued, however, by another shepherd and brought to the childless rulers of Corinth, King Polybus and Queen Merope, who gladly adopted the infant as their own, naming him, because of his cruel wound, Oedipus, which in Greek means "swollen foot." Honored as a prince of Corinth, Oedipus grew contentedly to manhood. Having occasion himself to consult the Delphic Oracle, he learned to his horror that his fate was to murder his father and marry his mother. Believing his foster parents to be his true father and mother, he fled Corinth in order to forestall such a fearful eventuality. At a lonely crossroads he encountered a traveler who irascibly ordered him out of the way, whereupon the young prince, ignorant of theman's identity, attacked him with his staff and killed him. This traveler, of course, was Laius, and thus was one half of the dread prophecy fulfilled. Continuing on his way toward Thebes, he found the city terrorized by the Sphinx, who, acting as a destructive agent of the gods, killed all who could not answer her riddle. In the absence of Laius, Jocasta's brother Creon, having assumed the role of regent, had vowed that the man who could rid the city of its fearsome scourge would be crowned king and take in marriage his sister, the widowed queen. Daring and audacious, Oedipus presented himself before the half-woman, half-beast and answered her riddle correctly, whereupon the Sphinx committed suicide. Received with homage and rejoicing in Thebes, where Creon kept his word, Oedipus was crowned and wed Jocasta. Thus, though unknowingly, he had carried out the oracle's dire prediction and embraced his doom. An era of enjoyment and uneventful prosperity nonetheless ensued, during which the incestuous royal couple begot two sons and two daughters. Then a dreadful pestilence was visited upon the city. Creon consulted the Delphic Oracle, who declared that the only way to rid the land of its pollution would be to learn the identity of Laius's assassin and expel him from Thebes. Oedipus determines, no matter what the consequences, to see that this is done. Through a series of increasingly painful and damning revelations, brilliantly dramatized by Sophocles, Oedipus courageously confronts the truth. The oracle has been horribly verified. The king himself is both assassin and incestuous spouse. Jocasta, overcome by consternationand despair, hangs herself; while Oedipus, in an agony of grief, puts out his eyes and departs forever from Thebes to wander in wretched remorse till death.Now, it may seem untoward that a young fellow should kill an unknown wayfarer simply because he has been ordered, however rudely, to step aside at a lonely crossroads. But mythic symbolism is implacable. The order is given by the very man who is responsible for the fact that for Oedipus, a man with an injured foot, to take a step has a symbolic meaning which renders that order intolerable, rousing an otherwise illogical anger which is precisely the vengeance of a mutilated spirit, one which in symbolic terms is unable to stand upright. Nor is it any accident that the weapon of murder and retaliation happens to be the symbol of a fate ordained by Laius himself and of the oracle's sinister prediction: the staff, which the lame in antiquity bore as evidence of their infirmity. Meaningful also is the location of the crime, a crossroads, because it is there that Oedipus, having proven himself a man masterful enough to strike down anyone whose arrogance offended his most vulnerable singularity, determines to turn his steps toward a confrontation with the dreaded Sphinx, pleased to regard himself a conquering hero destined to achieve the highest degree of spiritual accomplishment, liberating the land from evil and distress and freeing himself from the fearful menace of the oracle.The Sphinx's celebrated riddle, though existing in numerous versions, is fundamentally changeless, concerning the nature, the conduct, and the evolutionof human life: "What manner of creature makes its way in the morning on four feet, at midday on two, and in the evening on three?" Oedipus, of all those challenged, was most apt to answer correctly, saying, "Man crawls on all fours as an infant, walks upright in the prime of life, and uses a staff in old age." It is profoundly meaningful that the riddle concerns the foot, symbol of the spirit and of life's perpetuation. In fact, the riddle is addressed to all mankind, because the true answer, for anyone, is "myself." And to solve the riddle is to be confronted by the fundamental philosophical challenge: "Know thyself." It is also significant that the riddle presents man as an animal, for mindless behavior reduces him to bestiality, and this, alas, Oedipus does not guess, failing to realize that the Sphinx's riddle alluded to his infirmity. Only perfect spiritual clairvoyance might have revealed that the riddle was the representation of his vital weakness, the inexpiable transgression still to come, of which he will be the hapless victim, despite a seeming mastery.The Oedipus complex, drawn from the myth of Oedipus and advanced as axiomatic by Freud, designates attraction on the part of a child toward the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry and hostility toward the parent of its own. This occurs approximately during the years three to five, resolution presumed normally to occur thereafter by identification with the parent of the same sex and by renunciation of sexual interest in the parent of the opposite sex. Freud considered this complex to be the nucleus of all human relationships. While acknowledging the significance of Oedipal influences upon personality development,many contemporary psychiatrists consider resentment of parental authority more influential than sexual rivalry. Mythic purpose does not wait upon the best intentions of those fated to serve it. Giovanni Giacometti and his wife, Annetta, decided by common consent to name their firstborn child, a son, Giovanni Alberto Giacometti. The deliberate sameness of name between father and son can hardly have led the parents to crave or anticipate a sameness of enterprise or aspiration. In all innocence, of course, that was nevertheless their first mistake, a grave one for a beginning, if mythic destiny can, in fact, be construed to have a discernible beginning. As it would have been excessive, to say the least, to have two Giovannis in one household, the child was always called Alberto, and that name certainly suited him, for it means "illustrious through nobility." What the son may have felt or thought about bearing the same name as his father must remain forever a matter of conjecture, because he never mentioned the fact, never signed a work from his hand with that name, never saw it printed in an exhibition catalogue or newspaper interview. Perhaps he more or less forgot that the name he made world famous did not divulge an entire truth. To be sure, it must have appeared on his passport, but that document was seen only by officials who knew nothing about the meaning to an artist of his name. Very few people outside the immediate family, I suspect,were aware that Alberto was also Giovanni, and I myself learned of it only when research led me to acquire a copy of Alberto's marriage certificate. That a vital truth about his birth should have come to light by virtue of his marriage is meaningful to an extent which can hardly be exaggerated and of which the light, indeed, may seem almost blinding when it comes time to consider that extraordinary event.Few people are chosen, pursued, seized, liberated, and celebrated by destiny. And that is doubtless just as well, for a destiny is a lifelong business. It will never let one go, nor will it ever let one down, whatever glory or infamy may lie in store. It demands to be followed from beginning to end along a road never traveled by anyone else, and its terminus--its destination--is not only the grave but the attainment of enduring legend, the mythic stature which mankind loves to idolize in order to mitigate the consternation of enigmatic life in an incomprehensible universe.The myth of Oedipus and the complex named for it are fundamental constituents of the life and art of Alberto Giacometti. His destiny, to be sure, did not duplicate the classic, Sophoclean scenario in a specific, chronological manner, and it would be foolhardy to contend that Alberto was, so to speak, a contemporary Oedipus. And yet ... and yet the likenesses and coincidences (if any fateful similarity can be considered truly to lack causal relation) are such that impartial judgment must suggest that this artist's destiny was Oedipal to an extent so significant that it became part and parcel of his heroic adventure. This, of course, isa challenge to discernment. The prospect of verifiable understanding is elusive, but it may lead to persuasive revelations if pursued with perseverance. The materials of the mythic structure of any individual's existence are rarely, if ever, set in place in such an orderly, foreordained manner as for Oedipus, King of Thebes, who was himself, after all, a purposeful creation of mythology. They are more likely to be assembled at random rather than added bit by logical bit to the coherent edifice of a destiny. An element essential to the foundation may not be provided until the structure itself is half-finished, and vice versa. This was certainly the case for Alberto. What is telling and indispensable is that the revelatory element ultimately finds a place, the one and only place, where it can foreshadow the mystery of a human life.Alberto was but six months old when his mother once more became pregnant, which caused her to wean her firstborn. Weaning at six or seven months is not unusual. At any age, however, it may bring a loss of that sense of primal security, of physical certainty and delight, which every infant experiences through contact with his mother's body. On the fifteenth of November 1902, a second son was born to Annetta and Giovanni Giacometti. He was named Diego, after Velázquez, whom his father admired, and he was to dedicate himself with selfless devotion to the work and well-being of his older brother for nearly forty years of his own life.While Alberto was still a very small child--barely more than an infant, though after the birth of Diego--he was frequently to be found in his father's studio.For the mother it was easier to look after one child at a time, and Giovanni as he worked could, without inconvenience, keep half an eye on his older son. Thus, coalescent with the primal development of his awareness of the world in which he must make a place for himself, Alberto became familiar with the surroundings and materials of a professional artist, and in this context he performed the very first artistic act of which memory has retained the circumstances. It was, however, a destructive rather than a creative act, because what Alberto did was to discolor one of his father's paintings. The true fact of the matter, though, is that he smeared upon it a very particular color, for as often occurs in the case of an infant, his own excrement provided him with material for his amusement, assuming that that is what it was, and accordingly added a vital and very messy symbolism to the fate of the father's creation. The destructive act brought about no punitive consequences, of course, since no intent could reasonably be presumed. Family consensus naturally regarded the infantile act as such, but it was nonetheless never completely consigned to forgetfulness. When mentioned, however, it was recalled with the humorous and right-thinking assumption that childish is as childish does, nothing more. Small children may not have conscious knowledge of the motives which determine their acts; but that knowledge exists, survives, and possesses, so to speak, knowledge of itself. Such knowledge can be dangerous. An artist's creation is a manifestation of faith in the prerogative of his birthright, a symbol of his will to represent himself as supreme in a world of his making andabove all an affirmation of man's obsessive craving for immortality. To deface or destroy an artist's creation is an act of aggression meant to deny the legitimacy of his raison d'être, to belittle the extent of his accomplishment, and to affirm that death for him will be definitive and in every respect evidence of nothingness. A profoundly meaningful adumbration of Alberto's mythic destiny had come about with fateful earliness.The very first memory which in later life Alberto asserted that he retained of his childhood was an image of his mother. Writing of it later, he said, "The long black dress which touched the ground troubled me by its mystery; it seemed to be a part of the body, and that caused a feeling of fear and confusion." The child must have been two or three years old, at least, when he formed this image. His mother was thirty-two. Alberto's reaction is surprising and attracts attention. Confusion and fear are not feelings which most people associate with childhood memories of their mothers. To be sure, powerful psychic forces from later periods often shape and color the memories that seem to remain from childhood, and though children's memories do retain what is important, a kind of symbolic representation often occurs which is not unlike the symbolism of fantasies or dreams. That Alberto was troubled by the mystery of his mother's dress which seemed part of her body, causing fear and confusion, should not be surprising, because the mystery concerns the sexual interest of every child, which is directed primarily to the problem of birth, leading him to wonder what sort of intimacy exists betweenhis parents. He wants to see what goes on when they are alone, and this impulse to see, the importance of it, the ability, the act of looking or watching, and all the circumstances of vision, are intensified by the longing to know what is at the basis of life. A certain dread, however, is inevitably provoked by his inability to pierce this mystery by grasping the facts of sexuality, which lie concealed behind the mother's clothing. Both the longing and the fear coalesce in the childish unconscious, rousing a desire for greater intimacy with the mother than would be possible, or tolerable. However, it exists, this desire--it may be lifelong--and its power seeks expression by symbolic means.When Alberto had lately passed his fourth birthday, the family moved to a neighboring village in the mountainous valley, Stampa, and there they remained for three quarters of a century in modest but comfortable lodgings. The move was a happy one for Alberto, because he had reached the age when his curiosities and desires relating to nature could more happily and easily be explored than around Borgonovo. A tumultuous mountain stream coursed through the center of Stampa, and beyond it steep meadows studded with glacial boulders rose to the peak of the valley's highest mountain, the Piz Duan. Concealed beneath one of these boulders lay a cave caused by erosion. Alberto's father took him to visit it for the first time not long after the family's arrival. One cannot help musing upon the significance of the paternal initiative inasmuch as the importance of the cave became momentous for the son. The entrancewas a long, low slit between stone and earth like a half-open mouth or, given an imaginative predilection, some other giant orifice of human likeness. The interior was dim and low, narrowing at the rear to a rounded space nearly hidden and dark. Though the cave was known to all the children of Stampa, Alberto had an exclusive feeling for it not shared by his brother or other playmates. "From the first," he later wrote, "I considered that stone a friend, a being full of good intentions toward me ... like someone one has known long before and loved, then found again with surprise and infinite joy." Every morning when he awoke, his first concern was to look out the window to make sure that the stone was still there, and even from a distance he felt able to distinguish its minutest details. Nothing else in the landscape interested him. For several years the cave was the most important place on earth--or, one should say, in the earth. His greatest pleasure, he said, came when he penetrated as deeply as possible into the narrow crevice at the rear of the cave. "I attained the height of joy," he asserted. "All my desires were fulfilled." The fulfillment, to be sure, was symbolic, but the desires were not. They are felt by all children, though Alberto's case was exceptional. It called for expression. One day, the little boy thought that he might need some nourishment while curled up securely in the depths of the cave. So he took from his mother's kitchen a portion of bread, carried it to the cave, and hid it deep in the recess at the rear. Once he had done that, his satisfaction must have seemed to be the greatest that life can give, for in a sense he never got over it. Thepassionate attachment to the cave, and especially to its depths, was clearly a nostalgia for the womb and a desire to be physically united with Mother Earth. The portion of bread from his mother's kitchen--the proverbial "staff of life"--brought her symbolically into Alberto's hidden life, sustaining it and him not only by her presence but also by her unknowing confirmation of a secret experience.One day, while playing near the cave, Alberto wandered a bit farther afield than usual. "I would not be able to remember by what chance," he later wrote. It's odd that he felt compelled to preface his account with a failure of memory and the intervention of chance. In truth he recalled only too well what happened, and chance had nothing to do with the consequences.I found myself on a rise in the ground. In front of me, a little below in the midst of brush, rose up an enormous black stone in the form of a narrow, pointed pyramid, of which the sides were almost vertical. I cannot express the emotion of resentment and confusion I experienced at that moment. The stone struck me at once as a living being, hostile, threatening. It threatened everything: us, our games, our cave. Its existence was unbearable to me and I felt immediately--being unable to make it disappear--that I must take no notice of it, forget it, and speak of it to no one. Nevertheless, I did go close to it, but with a feeling of surrendering to something reprehensible, secret, improper. I barely touched it with one hand in disgust and fear. Trembling at the prospectof finding an entrance, I walked around it. No sign of a cave, which made the stone even more unbearable to me, and yet I did experience one satisfaction: an opening in that stone would have complicated everything and I already felt the desolation of our cave if it had become necessary to be concerned with another at the same time. I ran away from the black stone, I didn't mention it to the other children, I dismissed it and never went back to see it again.That Alberto should have remembered this incident with such detailed clarity many years later, should have felt impelled to describe it in writing and to make public and permanent such a strange, intimate aspect of his childhood by publishing the account in a literary review, is more than reason enough, if any at all were needed, to search for the symbolic meaning of his experience. The black, erect, pointed, living, hostile, unbearable stone seemed in all likelihood to have been a representation for this child of that part of the male anatomy most secret, hidden, menacing, portentous, and aggressive, albeit at the same time a source of pleasure condemned by conventional morality and the awesome, mysterious, fortuitous donor of life. Namely, the paternal penis. To a child who sought and found bliss in the entrails of Mother Earth, where he enjoyed indispensable nourishment taken from her, the stone's symbolic presence could only have roused unbearable confusion and resentment, because it threatened the fulfillment of the self hidden in his cave.And yet, with a sense of surrender to what is reprehensible and secret, he nevertheless approached the stone and touched it with disgust and fear. The games of children are rightly regarded by adults as child's play, because a child cannot be judged by a moral and legal code as if mature and lucid. Alberto probably did not speak to his parents of his encounter with the black stone, but it did occur, and such experiences in childhood have vital significance both as evidence of innate constitutional tendencies and inasmuch as they cause and foster later development. They provide insight into the child's sexual life, and so into that of humanity as a whole. The symbolic meaning of Alberto's encounter with the black stone--and his devotion to the cave--would more forcefully than ever demonstrate the oracular power and strategic instrumentality of the mythic affirmation in his life. Nor is it idle to speculate already that the encounter with the black stone would reverberate, so to speak, in the first of the two most dramatic and traumatic adult events of his lifetime.During these early years, Alberto formed an obsessive habit which seemed odd, though innocent, to the other members of his family. Every night before going to sleep, he took particular care in the arrangement of his shoes and socks on the floor beside the bed. The socks were flattened and laid out side by side so that each had the appearance of a foot in silhouette, the shoes placed in a precise position beside them. This painstaking ritual, repeated without variation every night, amused Alberto's brothers, and sometimes, to tease him, they would disrupt his arrangement, provokingoutbursts of rage. For the rest of his life, Alberto continued to be obsessively concerned with this arrangement of socks and shoes before going to sleep. His passion did not extend to other articles of clothing, however; only the socks and shoes. It belabors the obvious to interpret this obsession as the intimation to an immature mind of the symbolic significance of the foot, both spiritual and sexual, the foot as the guiding symbolic factor in pursuing life's unpredictable and perplexing path, the foot also as a source of gratification in acts of deviant perversity. The safety and protection of the foot, both physically and symbolically, is naturally of vital concern to one marked for a mythic destiny. Mention of Oedipus in this context is superfluous but compelling. Alberto would have to wait some thirty years till fate took pains to endow him with the telltale infirmity of the Theban king, and that was the second of the two dramatic events he himself affirmed to have been decisive for his art and life.Giovanni Giacometti occasionally made short trips to Geneva, Paris, and elsewhere to visit friends or endeavor to further the slow progress of his career. During one of these periodic absences, Alberto suddenly found himself unable to recall his father's physical appearance. This failure of memory, seemingly equivalent to a deliberate elimination of the paternal presence, is especially surprising inasmuch as the house in Stampa contained numerous self-portraits, portraits, and photographs of Giovanni. Distraught by his incomprehensible amnesia, Alberto burst into tears and began screaming, "I can't remember my father'sface." His brother Diego, to whom he turned for consolation, simply laughed and said, "You know, he's that little man with the red beard." The temporary amnesia may have been incomprehensible to Alberto, but it looms with meaning upon dispassionate and forewarned consideration. Though the fatal crossroads still lay distant, it could not now be passed by with impunity en route toward the confrontation of Alberto Giacometti with himself.On the fifth of August 1911, Annetta Giacometti reached the age of forty. To celebrate that event, she made an outing to the border town of Castasegna with her husband and four children--a daughter, Ottilia, and a third son, Bruno, having been born in 1904 and 1907, respectively. While in Castasegna, they posed for a local photographer. His picture is a remarkable document. Diego, seated in the foreground, looks ill at ease, his hair cut short, while the luxuriant locks of his older brother are still long. Ottilia, wistful and pensive, kneels between father and mother. Giovanni is seated in the center of the group, but he does not dominate it; holding his youngest son on his right knee, he glances downward, an expression of contentment on his gentle features. Bruno appears placid, almost impassive. Annetta, attired in her long black dress with a flowered shirtwaist, is seated to the extreme right and is the largest figure in the group. She sits calmly, her hands joined, looking at Alberto, who is opposite her on the far side of the group, and he returns her look with a stare of rapt fixity. It is the intensity, the quality, and the meaning of their reciprocal gaze which dominates the picture. Ofthis the others are unaware, as if Annetta and her eldest son were in fact alone together. Everything about Alberto, his clothes, his posture, even his physical existence, seems subordinate to the spellbound gaze which he fixes upon his mother, her person combining absolute
Reviews
Mythic Giacometti is not a straight forward biography, but it's more telling as to the subject's character than almost any true "biography" I've read. Lord's raison d'être here is casting Giacometti in the light of a mythological hero--hence, we may suppose, the title.The conceit feels a bit hokey at first, and even at the end I must say I'm not entirely convinced that Giacometti is descendent from Oedipus, but the conceit allows Lord to explore Giacometti as more than an amalgamation of facts but as a whole rounded artistic entity. And that point of view is surely more enlightening for fans of Giacometti's remarkable artistic career.