1. Existential Dimensions: Alberto Giacometti’s Caroline
Anna Bean
Art History 4495: Research Methods in Art History
Instructor Maureen Quigley
May 11th, 2015
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Giacometti's Caroline is an example of how he used existentialist art principals in his
figure drawing to express his personal anxiety from his own life. Whatever drew him to other
people and that he expressed was also tied to his projection of his own anxieties and fears. It is
also possible that the twilight of his own life along with the baggage from his youth added to the
psychological qualities of this artwork, and with how it was presented. His use of space in his
portraits, especially with the 1964 oil painting Caroline, will also be discussed in this paper, and
how it pertains to existentialism and his outlook during the post-war period of his mature artistic
life. This will go into the relationship between the themes of alienation and how perception of
space functions in Giacometti’s portraits.
The goal of this paper is to explore the kind of existentialism could have been a method
for Giacometti’s art output, and how it pertains to his 1964 painting oil painting Caroline.
Giacometti himself was a Swiss artist who lived from 1901-1966, and he had completed this
painting along with its siblings a short time before his death over the course of a few years. It is
also possible that his own fading body and the youth of his subject affected how he executed the
artworks of his young lover Caroline, especially his 1964 painting of her. This paper also
intends to explain existential concepts with Giacometti and perhaps other artists in similar
traditions, and with their history of using human figures to express their own subjective inner
realities.
Existentialism emerged relatively recently in the grand scheme of art history as it was so
prominent in the 20th century, yet can still be poorly understood even today. But it often focused
on trauma, alienation, and anxiety. It was an influential undercurrent throughout the 40s and 50s
during the 20th century, aiming to explore the role of sensory perception, especially vision,
during the thought process, and therefore subjectivity.
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Some artists demonstrate some of its principals and points of emphasis such as the focus
on the special character of the individual and its subjective experiences. The use of figurative art
in particular, and could be widely understood as an expression of anxiety about the fate of
humanity in the contemporary and atomic age. Jean-Paul Sartre is the philosopher most
associated with existentialism, often writing essays about Giacometti, and was an important
aspect of translating the terms of philosophy into visual art. Giacometti was influenced by
existentialist ideas about how objects in space are perceived, which provides a framework for
how Giacometti the painter would have identified with his models and sitters, especially during
the post-war period. 1
There will be an approach that assumes that existentialism as a concept explained the
common emotional and psychological experiences at Giacometti’s time period. Existentialism as
a concept can well explain Giacometti well as an artist as well given what is known about him
and about what he created. The concepts it discusses as an intellectual and philosophical
movement in particular can be used to help explain the creation of Caroline and its sibling
paintings. This will also explore how Giacometti executed existentialist ideas in his portrait
painting such as Caroline and how it affected his relationships with his sitter and how she is
subject to his gaze.
The subjectivity and foreboding sensibility discussed in existentialism can also help
explain the relationship between Giacometti’s love affair with the woman who was his mistress
1
Zurakhinsky, Michael. "Existentialism in Modern Art - Modern Art Terms and Concepts." The Art
Story. 2014. Accessed May 1,2015.
This website source explains the history of existentialism as a philosophy and especially how it pertains
to 20th
century or post-war artists, including visual art like painting and figure drawing. This article draws
from various sources such as books and articles on existentialism. Due to the broadness of
existentialism’s concepts,the webpage goes over its own ideas filtered through particular key artists for
its explanations.
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and model. The art pieces he was able to create over the course of their years together are
remarkable for their finish and also just for how productive Giacometti was during this period of
time. The kind of persistent sense of uncertainty and failure Giacometti felt through his mature
career can also be attached to this method, especially with the influence taken from existentialist
ideas about perceptions of space. It also can be tied to the harsh life of the woman he based his
1964 Caroline painting and its other versions and how existentialism pertains to trauma and
alienation.
Alberto Giacometti’s 1964 oil painting Caroline (Figure 1.) is not a dense image,
portraying a seated woman in a sketchily defined studio, where what could be a door can be seen
in the background. It was 36 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches. (Or 92.1 x 65.1 cm). The background shapes
and their details are defined in loosely drawn rectangle shapes as well, serving as a contrast to
the upright organic figure to the forefront of the composition. The painting is mostly rendered in
neutral colors, especially with various shades of dark grey. The frame for this painting is an
upright rectangle, standing up like the figure sitting upward, with both full of straight lines.
The seated figure has her arms or wrists cross over. The body, her bust, bare shoulders,
arms, and hands, are loosely defined, but the face is unique in the composition. It has a three
dimensional, sculptural property compared the rest of the painting due to its thick and rough
application of oil paint. Her hair might be done up in a bun, and she has an aged, weathered
visage. Her neck has lines suggesting wrinkles. Her eyes are intense, radiating heat. The figure
drawing is done in a way where the head looks smallish compared to the body. It creates the
effect where this one small portion of the painting has a dense level of visual information and
detail compared to the rest.
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The uneven application of paint is also a remarkable aspect of the painting. The head is
pushed to the forefront due to how detailed and heavily applied it is compared to the thinner,
more loosely defined body and background. It creates a kind of composition where the most
densely detailed aspect of the painting projects towards the viewer when the work in seen in
person, being an example of existentialism’s sense of objectivity and rejection of objective
presentation of the subject and their environment.
I think that in many ways, just the art style can be connected to existentialist concepts.
The subjectivity of Giacometti’s vision for this painting is readily apparent, with the small head
and wispily defined body and background for the model. The model is also alone, not interacting
with anything in her environment, only gazing back the one gazing at her. It is easy to read a
sense of alienation in the model, or at least whatever is being projected on the model in the
execution of this painting. The sense of space also immediately reads as odd, where it is hard to
say if the figure in the painting has a small head or if there is perspective that makes her head
look disproportionately small.
Giacometti once famously said that he believed the only thing that really counted was
drawing, and was the basis of everything he created artistically. He also once described his sense
of vision as how every time he saw a glass, it seemed to change, relating to the hazy, uncertain
contours of his later drawings.2 This is a useful insight for how it shows that even Caroline as a
painting has a strong basis in drawing and even resembles a heavy charcoal drawing on canvas in
2
Phillips, Ian, "Alberto Giacometti: Drawings from the Atelier," The Lancet 357, no. 9259 (2001): Pages
891–892, accessed March 8,2015, doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(00)04188-X,
http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.umsl.edu/.
This article by Philips Ian shows severalof Giacometti’s drawings, and has an account by him about his
art process and the value he placed on creating his drawings.
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many aspects. In a sense, he seemed to consider painting behind drawing, where painting as a
medium is useful to the extent that it can officiate and display his drawing ideas for his figures
and portraiture.
Rosalind Krauss argued that Giacometti’s approach had some primitivist values, in order
to dispose of transcendent aspirations. Giacometti would say of himself “The older I get, the
lonelier I am. . . . Yet, even if everything I've made up to now doesn't count at all . . . and in spite
of my certainty that I've failed up to now, and experienced that everything I start runs between
my fingers, I have more desire than ever to work. ... I don't understand it, but that's how it is. I
see my sculptures before me: each one ... a failure.” It is possible that sculpture for example has
the illusion of representing particular human life. He also believed that it was "impossible [for
him] to grasp the whole of a head [or body] ... to arriv[e] at the ensemble . . . [because] there is
no fixed point, no limitation of view, everything escapes". Another quote of his was “If I were
ever able to render a head as it really is, that would mean I could grasp hold of reality - I would
be omniscient. Then life would cease.”3
These various strange quotes speak for his generalized method and view of how he
arrives at his artworks. Looking at the 1964 Caroline, even as a painting it managed to attain
three-dimensional qualities due to the thick layers of paint, especially around the face and eyes
which has a scratchy impasto quality. It makes the intense eyes of the subject radiate outward
more than they would otherwise in a painting with a more flattened, smoothed out, worked over
3 Lane, Christopher, "The Hunger for Death: Giacometti's Immanence and the Anorexic Body.,"
Discourse 19,no. 3 (1997): 13-42,161, accessed March 6,2015.
http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.umsl.edu/.
This article by Christopher Lane goes into the more morbid aspects to Giacometti’s focus, and on the
potential psychology of this. There are also Giacometti quotes that shed light into his insight of his work,
along with visual analysis of said figure work.
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finish. There is also a kind of conflict between his fascination with a real life person’s features
and the inadequacies of visual representation to capture that person as they truly are. It adds to a
frantic and frustrated quality to his painting finish on his human figures.
Giacometti’s belief that his works were often failures often fueled his production, and he
described himself as feeling lonelier in his older age. He pushes and pushes to capture the head,
or the person, as accurately as possible, but would be as impossible as becoming omniscient and
ending the existence of all life. He sees doing well as an impossibility that would destroy reality,
yet still tries.
Giacometti’s parents, Giovanni Giacometti and Annetta Giacometti-Stampa, and his
home life helped create him as a subjective individual consciousness as he developed.
Giacometti had a façade of an idyllic existence with his family early in his life, in an Alpine
valley on the Italian edge of Switzerland as the eldest son of a supportive artist father and a
strong mother who both provided him a stable existence. However, the strict tutelage of his
mother and how he and his siblings were subjected to his father’s artistic gaze as nude models
may have contributed to his anxiety later in life. The nude modeling also may have contributed
to Giacometti’s later-life sexual difficulties. Many who knew him said he was endlessly
obsessed with death. There were also several deaths of female relatives in the family, and it may
have created in his mind an inseparable link between femaleness and death. Later on during his
young artistic life he was also somewhat torn between Tintoretto and Giotto as artistic
influences, especially with how they drew human figures4.
4
Wilson, L., & Giacometti, A.: Alberto Giacometti: Myth, magic, and the man . (New Haven:Yale
University Press,2003), pp. 1,6-7, 10-11, 17-23.
Laurie Wilson’s book on Giacometti goes into his biography along with a psychodynamic interpretation
of it. The author has a particular analytical take for Giacometti’s life, and goes over his early artistic
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Later in life, in October 1959, Giacometti met Yvonne Marguerite Poiraudeau, a
prostitute who called herself ‘Caroline’. There was a certain age gap, her 21 and him 58. She
would soon start to pose for him. She was apparently adept at using her eyes seductively. She
had lived nearby in Montparnasse. She was an unwanted child of a large family, her father an
unsuccessful pimp who committed suicide. After she left home, she would take to the streets
after landing in reform school and attempting suicide herself. Giacometti persisted with the
relationship even after her arrest and warning from the police and judge. Though she was his
lover, the paintings of her were strangely non-sexualized. It suggests there was something to the
relationship other than sexual appetites and why Giacometti continued to associate with her5.
Artists and their gaze can have a strange relationship. They can objectify others and be
objectified themselves. The parental gaze upon a child might be a common first experience with
the troubled power dynamics between object and subject. Being underneath a parental gaze,
whether from a disciplinarian or artistic standpoint, can be a source of pressure and anxiety for
anyone. Even if the situation between the father and his children never escalated, they may have
had undergone a process of grooming by their artist father. Expectations are built up just from
this dynamic of gazing and being gazed upon. Giacometti from a young age already had his own
experiences with the complicated power dynamic of being able to see another person as an object
of adoration and obsession.
Giacometti and Caroline would seem a clashing pair, himself a child of relative privilege
and her with a background full of trauma and abandonment. His was a life of conventional
influences in both his family and in his studies as a young artist. ‘Caroline’ as a person and mistress are
also discussed in this book.
5
Wilson, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, magic, and the man, 287-288.
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success while she was a person of the underground who kept dangerous company. But there
may have been a bond forged between sitter and artist, over whatever mutual anxiety had a hold
over them. Why did Caroline call herself by a pseudonym, as a worker in the underground of
France? Even within herself, there was a split in her identity and a construction of herself with
her artist lover and client. She may very well be an example of why existentialism regarded truth
and subjectivity as topics to be approached with trepidation. Even lovers cannot always present
themselves completely truthfully, even when presenting themselves to an artists’ gaze.
Caroline had a parent who attempted suicide, and she would unsuccessfully try herself.
Both could have had preoccupations with death, only Giacometti formed a bond with someone
with worse experiences but wound up surviving. The basis for this bond provided Giacometti
with something familiar, yet still outside of his own experiences and advantages in life to explore
and discover another person’s inner life. His interest in the intense eyes of his sitter was also an
intense interest in her troubled life in her lived experiences and possibly her inner life. Even
close identification however can become a distant, depersonalized gaze in the execution of a
portrait painting.
Giacometti’s preoccupation with death may have been a part of the draw for his
relationship with Caroline the woman of the underworld, a person of hard living and harsh
childhood background. In a sense, he could have been looking for something outside of himself
as a by most standards successful and privileged man with someone with such a radically
different background and lifestyle. Giacometti’s behavior with her would suggest desperation to
keep her in what life he had remaining. The space between himself and Caroline as his mistress
and sitter pertains to the ambivalent sense of space in his existentialist paintings, and how
painting becomes a struggle to close the distance. The ways he may have unconsciously
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associated femaleness with death, and maybe mortality period, might be apparent in Caroline as
well. Caroline’s model does have a certain deathly stillness to it as she sits down staring down
the viewer.
Giacometti met the twenty-one year old woman from the underworld in the bar Chez
Adrien in the rue Vavin who called herself “Caroline”, and she would appear under this name in
Giacometti’s paintings until 1965. He had developed a powerful interest in her as a lover,
spending a great deal of money on her, such as giving her a luxurious apartment to live in.
Giacometti also said something relevant to how executions of his drawings and paintings: “If the
gaze, that is to say the life, is the most important aspect of the figure, there is no doubt that it’s
the head that really counts. The other parts of the body are reduced to playing the role of
antennae making the life of the individual possible-the life that is found in the skull.” This may
have been related to his concept of reproducing the ‘totality of life’6.
Giacometti saw the skull as the container of what made humans as living things
individual entities. In Caroline, the body plays a limited role compared to using his paint strokes
to define her eyes and skull. In this painting, the totality of Caroline’s life could be found in the
contents of her skull. This explains the definition of the model’s head in this painting, as from
Giacometti’s standpoint, he was putting the upmost work into defining the source of Caroline’s
self in this portrait of her.
6 Giacometti, A.,Schneider, A., & Hohl, R, Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, paintings, drawings (New
York, New York: Prestel,1994), pp. 34-35, 75.
This is a book on Giacometti published by Prestelwith severaldifferent authors submitting content.
Pages 34-35 are from a chronology of Giacometti’s life by Reinhold Hohl. Page 75 is from Angela
Schneider.
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The woman’s body in Caroline is only just defined enough for it to make sense
something for her skull containing her brain and gazing eyes to be mounted on. The body is
necessary to the extent that it makes the presence of the skull make sense to the viewer and to the
artist. For the female figures, it also might make sense to Giacometti’s vision for the body to be
inert as well, functioning as a kind of sculpture with organic material that happens to be grated
on to it. The way Giacometti deemphasizes bodies is a idiosyncratic form of objectification of
his female subject.
But the skull is only important as its function as a vehicle for the gaze as the source of
life in a human subject of an artwork such as Caroline. Even with the skull in Caroline with its
defined facial features is in service to those steely eyes. The facial expression itself is unclear or
neutral, not quite resembling a human emotion that can be readily nailed down and described by
an observer. It’s a depiction that transcends visual storytelling with movement and emotion with
a more transcendent and abstract mood.
It’s also notable in particular that the 1964 Caroline has hands which are sketchily
defined almost to the point of nonexistence. The gesture of the hands at rest is captured well
enough to be recognizable, but the presence of the hands themselves is only hinted it from
context and line. It furthers the interpretation that Caroline does not possess a conventional
functioning and utilitarian body in the human and mammalian sense. Giacometti’s take on her
within his artwork is an entirely different beast of his own creation suiting his own needs as a
man and as an artist.
Giacometti throughout his career had a fascination with vision, which leads to frustrated
execution of his works. "You never copy the glass on the table," Giacometti noted, "You copy
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the residue of a vision." He would face the impossibility of recreating reality, and declare his
work unfinishable. He would say to James Lord "One should try to succeed in undoing
everything and then doing it all over again very quickly, several times in the same sitting. I'd like
to be able to paint like a machine."7
Giacometti’s mistress herself as his late-life love and art object in many ways, his art
production for a period being owed to her presence in his life. The artistic fixation and great
expense he took pat in for her speaks for a profound obsession. Even his mistresses became not
just potential sex objects, but objects of artistic fixation, as evidenced by his massive artistic
output that was inspired by her. There must have been a profound contrast between the two, an
artist already well past his middle age and a young woman in her early twenties with intense
eyes. What could have this Caroline brought to the table for this poor, anxious artist and his
incessant need to create and recreate? She was his mistress for years, and maybe he believed that
even with object after object, he could never quite capture her. The years-long pattern of anxiety
was all-too apparent in his affair and art situation with Caroline. There may have been a
seemingly intractable distance between them as lovers even with the time they spent together and
what they may have put up with from one another. This is something that existentialism talks
about, the way that humans are autonomous and alone as individuals.
Seeing what he is able to draw as the residue of the thing speaks for a sense of alienation,
and a desire for some kind of inner life in whatever he constructs. He describes wanting to paint
like a machine, to be less man and more of a productive art mechanism that could churn out
7
Marcoci, Roxana, "Perceptions at Play: Giacometti through Contemporary Eyes," Art Journal 64,no. 4
(2005): 6-25. Accessed March 9,2015. http://www.jstor.org/.
This article by Roxana Marcocidiscusses contemporary interpretations and perceptions of Giacometti’s
art. This also has a revealing look from Giacometti about his regard towards his own artworks
and being able to complete them.
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various interrelated works. He also seemed to want to capture the authenticity of the moment
from a particular sitting, and hence desires to frantically create and undo in a short period of
time. His works can seem messy because he was actually a perfectionist. His perfectionism
might be related to how he took from existentialist themes for his sense of the perception of
space, where the subjectivity and uncertainty created awkwardness and insecurity. The sense of
space in Caroline is distant from the viewer, with only her steely gazed fixed forward. The small
head also lends itself to an odd sense of perspective.
From the late 1930s to the late 1940s, throughout the era of World War 2, Giacometti had
started his serious attempts at the human form, but ends up struggling with placing human forms
in space. Aesthetic concerns can connect with moral concerns when they fail to occupy the same
space. The idea of having a complete body is important to many people’s thinking, and there can
be a conflict between the imagination and lived reality8.
Binary conflicts between reality and construction occur in art-making, especially if there
is a crisis in confidence with how to depict figures and what mode of stylization versus realism is
correct or appropriate. Giacometti’s imagination and projections are part of this conundrum.
There may also be a sense of unfairness to it. Why can it be hard to deal with the moral aspects
of art, along with its aesthetic and decorative aspects?
Caroline and his acquaintances were often only depicted head-on, and it often seems like
the more he concentrated on a subject, the smaller the heads became. The diminution observable
in many of Giacometti’s portraits might result from the artist’s depth of vision being narrow,
8
Matthews, Timothy.,"Touch, Translation, Witness in Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez," Oxford
Journals 61,no. 4 (2007): 447-59, accessed March 6,2015
http://fs.oxfordjournals.org.ezproxy.umsl.edu/.
This article by Timothy Matthews goes a great deal into Giacometti’s process and ideas of executing
human figures, with the sense of space and the meaning of bodies.
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focusing on the eyes of his sitters. The sitters can also seem to recede in space due to the forced
perspective. Caroline in particular had 20 portraits and one sculpture devoted to her as his
demimondaine, the woman he supported as her wealthier, older lover. Giacometti’s approach to
human figures almost seems to speak for an artist who struggles to reconcile with his own and
others’ identities as physical, corporeal beings.
Giacometti also had a particular painting style in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was a simple,
non-lavish approach to oil painting, using a limited pigment range of greys, blacks, browns,
somber reds and greens, and the highlights were white and dominant areas with primed canvas.
The pigments were thinned with turpentine, and then lightly laid down on the canvas and even
often trickled down in some areas. Giacometti brushed in large areas which he then went over
with a finer brush over the form remaining, like he was drawing with the finer bristles. His
pictures arguably reinforce the dimensional affects of his statues. His habit was to paint the
background and body first, leaving them about the same in subsequent sessions with his sitters.
Giacometti would apply paint, scrape it off or wipe it away with turpentine, and then painted
over it again.
David Slyvester, an art critic and friend of Giacometti, saw his anxiety through a
philosophical sense. “Like Cezanne (who, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘thought himself impotent
because he wasn’t omnipotent) Giacometti brings together in his work his suffering through
reality’s elusiveness and his affirmation of its inevitability.” Another quote by Giacometti also
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adds to this idea. “It’s impossible to paint a portrait…It’s impossible to reproduce what one
sees…”9
The way Giacometti applied his paint affected the density of visual information in his
1964 Caroline painting. Within the frame, only the face strongly projects towards the viewer,
whether or not they realize the process which the oil painting was created. Oil painting may
have been an extension of Giacometti as a sculpture due to the properties of the type of medium,
how it could be layered and carved in many ways. Giacometti had noticed Caroline the woman’s
radiating gaze, and made a painting where it could be the central focal point not just from the
composition, but also from the layering of the paint. The texture of the oil paint on her face has a
rough, organic look at feel to it that strongly contrasts with the smoother finish of the body and
background. His limited color palette could also have advantages to Caroline as a painting,
lending itself simple visual intensity and focus on the textures.
This method also helped Giacometti project his love for his lover’s eyes and face. It
creates that famed effect of how when alone with a beloved one, everything else in the room
tends to either fared or disappear. In a way, Giacometti’s neglect of the room behind and
surrounding Caroline, and even her clothed body may indicate the kind of interest he had in her.
He was in for her soul, or for whatever was instilled inside her skull that he could have been
constantly attempted to crack out in his artworks of her. What Alberto Giacometti was doing to
Caroline fits under the male gaze, yet it is a different type of masculine gaze not typically
9
"Caroline,1964 by Alberto Giacometti." JC Bulletin (St. Louis Art Museum) New Series 14,no. 3
(1978): 54-58. Accessed March 8,2015. http://www.jstor.org/.
This is an article published by the Saint Louis Art Museum about Giacometti’s Caroline,the topic of the
paper, and also discusses his oil painting portraits. This same article also has a quote from Giacometti
that brings insight into his regard towards painting.
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associated with the term. It was a different, spiritual, and neurotic kind of love and romance.
There may have been something to Charlotte’s character that lent itself well to Giacometti’s
artistic vision and projections.
Color is also a particular aspect to Giacometti’s portrait painting, especially with
Caroline. Caroline could be judged to have the look and feel of an incomplete painting, with its
limited colors and its lack of range of life-like hues in terms of the figure’s colors and in the
definition of the studio in the background.
On the other hand, there may have been a conflict between how Giacometti’s work was
commonly interpreted and how he saw his own work. The existentialist approach to Giacometti
dates back to 1948, from an influential catalogue essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist
philosopher. While the work was commonly interpreted as being about the anxiety and
alienation of modern life, Giacometti saw himself as a realist attempting to do the impossible
with representing the appearance of things as he saw them while acknowledging people’s
comprehension of the perceived world is not fixed and is often subject to changing.
How oil painting was uniquely suited to registering traces of precious states was newly
important to this method of art making. Another reason for the way he fixates on eyes, such as
he did with Caroline, was stated by him to be “I saw that the only thing that remained alive was
the gaze. The rest, the head which transformed itself into a skull, became bit by bit the equivalent
of a death’s head.”10
10
Umland, Anne, "Capturing Giacometti's Gaze," MoMA 4, no. 8 (2001): 2-7, accessed March 9,2015.
http://www.jstor.org/.
This is an article by Anne Umland that discusses Giacometti’s art career,and the unique components of
his style and what he thought of it. It reveals key information about Giacometti’s method in portraiture,
and it also explains aspects to how he became associated with existentialism in the art historical sense.
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I find it fascinating how Giacometti had this sort of interesting, conflicted idea of what
realism was and how it could be utilized artistically. His figures lack surface realism because he
did not believe that was possible with just his own eyes, and hence he struggled with something
else. In a way, his idea of realism was staying true to himself and his own difficulties with
reality as existentialist concepts. This benefits Caroline the painting, with how it was inspired
by and based on a real person, objects, and setting. Caroline’s kind of realism is to the extent of
how Giacometti notices the model’s features, their energy, and the sense of presence as they sit
in his studio as he paints their portrait. Realism was basically was as far as Giacometti
understood reality.
Giacometti in his own way tried to capture what was unique to Christine, and maybe at
the expense of other elements of the 1964 painting. But Giacometti’s sense of realism is still
idiosyncratic, because realism is only real when it comes to things he is interested in. In many
ways, he ends up enacting the classical difficulties of defining art categories. Caroline serves as
an example of how there may not even be a clear distinction between objective and subjective in
execution of a painting, which in its own way still fits a lot of the concepts discussed in
existentialist works of art. Artists do not necessarily reject the real world, but can honestly
believe they are portraying something real when they put their marks down.
In another sense, his realism can also be an honest expression of his biases and
obsessions as a male and as an aging artist. To him, seeing things as he saw them are the extent
that he could portray the real world, and hence he could be true to his idiosyncrasies and
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fixations. Giacometti’s realism is the realism of Giacometti the mind and artist. Being realistic
for Giacometti could have meant being true to what he saw in the sitter and of what he sees in
himself and his own perceptions. The repetition in his work might also stem from the insecurity
of his vision from this self-regard.
Giacometti may also just be being honest about how perceptions and expression can
work. To most people, their individual subjective observations and beliefs do intuitively seem
like objective facts that are fairly gleaned from the real world. One possible flaw with
existentialism as a concept is that most people see their perceptions as accurate, and have their
own methods to try to overcome the general alienation common to post-industrial or
contemporary society. Giacometti had his friends, family, lovers, and supporters, and while he
still retained his sadness and alienation, they existed as concrete, specific things he could channel
his anxiety through.
Finally, David Sylvester had his own opinions about the artist. The art critic has noted
that in Giacometti’s paintings, the world he presents rarely extend beyond the walls of a room
which is evidently a studio. The figures are rarely engaged in their own activities, posed so that
the viewer can see them clearly. Female figures especially tend to be motionless, like remote
deities. His works could be said to possess a sense of dualism between masculine and feminine
in their forms and execution. Female figures in particular seem to exist for viewer to see them,
and for them to return the gaze. Giacometti had an interesting remark on this. “When I’m
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walking in the street, and see a whore from a distance with her clothes on, I see a whore. When
she’s in the room and naked in front of me, I see a goddess.”11
Giacometti said about himself that when he was young, he was confident when it came to
his art. There was little to no obstruction between what he saw and what he did. His father was
successful as an artist, but not to the point of giving Alberto Giacometti the kind of complex
children of celebrities can develop and hence could have a strong supportive role. Giovanni
subsidized Alberto well, sending him to study in Geneva, Italy, and Paris. As he worked more
from models, he would look at a model and see more of a screen between reality and himself,
where every potential artwork came between him and the sitter. Earlier in life he could see
things clearly, where he felt intimate with everything and the universe, and then it became
foreign. He was himself, and the universe was something that was this outside and obscure
thing. It was as if his good start in life as an artist gave way to a crisis in confidence in his ability
to perceive and interpret reality12.
It almost sounds as though at some point, what Giacometti described was him developing
a strong sense of disassociation. A formerly happy and confident child becomes an anxiety-
ridden, uncertain adult who still feels a need to create and interact with the outside world. This
sense of obscurity and disassociation may have affected the artist’s regard towards females, and
why they can seem so inert, and yet so fixated in their viewers. To what extent is he portraying
11
Slyvester, D, Looking at Giacometti (New York,New York:Henry Holt and Company, 1996), pp19-
21.
-David Slyvester was a contemporary and friend of Giacometti and this goes over his account of the man
and artist. He wrote this book over the course of forty years starting from his first visits to the artist’s
studio, compiling his reactions to the art. Giacometti’s words and accounts can also be found in this
source to provide insight into his own
12 Slyvester, Looking at Giacometti,89-92.
20. 19
the person as they are or a chimera of his model and his own mental states? This might be the
kind of alienation that he felt even in his intimate relationships, where he can struggle to identify
with those close to him as people as opposed to artistic objects.
Females in particular may have been remote objects of Giacometti’s anxiety, and may
have been particularly impacted by the gap between his potential and what he could actually
potentially do. In the painting Caroline, his studio became an enclosure painted in a thin limited
oil palette for his model, himself, and their gazes toward one another. The role of artist and sitter
can be a constricting trap that becomes a huge aspect of someone’s identity. It makes the limited
definition of the setting in Caroline interesting, where it is described with bare minimum of
details in order to capture his sitter. Maybe non-sentient material was not subject to his gaze in
the same way people are, because of how physically and emotionally complex real-life, bodily
human beings are even when an artist tries to objectify them with the power of their gaze.
But the woman’s body in Caroline has similar under-definition, relegated to non-sentient
worldly material as its surroundings. It has strange overtones for Giacometti’s regard for his
lover and her body, but also makes sense in the context of what he said earlier about where he
believed people’s life force or mind came from primarily. The body has greater definition than
the walls behind it mostly because it is closer, and more detail implies the perspective of the
contents of the painting.
He may have just lost what youthful exuberance he had as he entered advanced
adulthood, and the uncertainty of artistic execution started to settle in more strongly. Yet, by
many accounts from those who knew him, he was always at least somewhat sad. It may just also
be that in a sense, people just become more themselves as they get older. His preexisting issues
21. 20
only became more apparent with age, and this also showed up in art artworks of Caroline his
mistress.
My research has led me to various readings of Giacometti’s work and insight into the
artist’s mindset and method as a painter. It also gave me a finer understanding of how
existentialism could be appropriated by different artists. It also demonstrated the potential gaps
in the philosophy when it comes to art-making, and how artists may have to fill them in with
more personal aspects. Giacometti used existentialist concepts, but his sitters, friends, family,
and lovers, were vehicles for that self-expression. Giacometti’s work on Caroline demonstrates
the strengths and gaps in existentialist philosophy, and maybe a great deal of the 20th century’s
thought and ideas period.
22. 21
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Fig.1. Alberto Giacometti, Caroline. 1964, Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 65.1 cm. The Saint Louis Art
Museum, Missouri. From: The Saint Louis Art Museum,
http://slam.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search@/0/title-asc?t:state:flow=e08a339b-
e9f0-4948-a2a4-31761e3228d2 (accessed May 7th, 2015)
