In Giacometti's Studio

Michael Peppiatt, In Giacometti's Studio, New Haven, CT, and London, Yale University Press, 2010 220 pp., 79 b/w illustrations, 1 colour, £35.00. ISBN 978- 0-300-09393-3'Nothing is more difficult than to know exactly what we see' Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945This statement, from Phenomenology of Perception, which Michael Peppiatt quotes in this beautifully produced book, serves as a preface, not only to his own quest, but to that of every interpreter of Giacometti's art since 1945. His intention is to show, in word and image, how Giacometti's studio 'crystallized his work, personality and life in a single compact space': the 15½ by 16 foot studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the Alesia district of Paris, which he took in 1927 and where he lived and worked for the next forty years. Peppiatt's personal journey began in 1966 when Francis Bacon gave him a letter of introduction to Giacometti, but before he could make use of it the artist had died. There is a sense of apology in pursuing a quest without the personal imprimatur of his subject, unlike the one he implicitly received from Bacon, whom he knew well and about whom he wrote a telling and widely acclaimed biography. Although missing out on Giacometti, he amply made up for it as an art critic in Paris by meeting Giacometti's biographer James Lord, his friends Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, his lover Isabel Rawsthorne (whose voice at the opening of Bacon's Grand Palais exhibition in 1971 he hauntingly evokes after guests became aware of the death of George Dyer), as well as many more from Giacometti's circle. He is particularly good at anecdote and atmosphere, and can summon up the ghosts of these and other departed spirits at will, including Breton, Sartre, Genet and even Samuel Beckett, whose conversations with Giacometti, he concludes, were marked only by long silences.The visual record of the studio during Giacometti's surrealist years is slim, but includes Brassai's photographs published in Minotaure in 1933, which Giacometti did not like (he also criticized some of Man Ray's photographs of his sculpture). Instead, Giacometti made two pencil drawings of the studio in 1932, showing his surrealist sculpture in situ (Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel). The commentary and questions raised by them are revealing: 'This is less than a studio and more like a presentation room, even a shop. Where are the traces of creation - the tools, the eloquent rubble of discards and accidents underfoot? What is the point of a studio if it is not the archive of the tortuous ways in which a work of art comes into being or dies? Why does everything look so unnaturally neat, like a peasant family in their Sunday best?' Peppiatt's book searches for answers to such questions, after Giacometti 'found his real self'.Over the years the studio as a place of creativity and accident gave way to the studio as myth, assisted by 'scores of photographers - from the most famous international stars to nameless snappers - [who] captured the lowly space in thousands of shots. They were lured by something irresistible in the conjunction of noble sculpture staring hollow-eyed into eternity [...] By the power of his imagination Giacometti had transformed a dump into a palace, a "hole" into an intimation of eternity.' Paradoxically, if we accept what Giacometti said at face value, it was his awareness of the limitations of photography - and film - that became a defining factor for his art, 'so there was a curiosity to see more'. …