GIACOMETTI'S GENIUS : Angst & wit.

I first came across the works of Alberto Giacometti (1901- 66) in a 1958 issue of Paris Review. The works reproduced there were not the elongated dark sculptures for which he is best known, but drawings--still lifes and figures and rooms rendered with edgy, restless, almost buzzing lines, full of an energy that seemed to radiate outward or gather in toward the subject. I loved them. Later I encountered the sculptures, but usually only one or two at a time. So it was good to see a thorough retrospective of his work recently at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The retrospective included the sculptures as well as many drawings and paintings. Beginning with an extraordinarily assured self-portrait, painted when he was twenty--the color work is clearly influenced by Cezanne--the exhibit moves through early paintings and sculptures into Giacometti's surrealist period, where his work, though influenced by Brancusi and other contemporaries, was not at all derivative. One piece--the haunting The Palace at 4 a.m.--came to him in a dream.

Finally, he made a break with surrealism: The human figure began to fascinate and frustrate him. Andre Breton, who more or less decided who was and who was not a surrealist, was appalled that Giacometti had become fascinated with work done from live models. "Everyone knows what a head is," Breton said. Giacometti knew that this was false: The body was full of mystery, could never be truly comprehended, and for the rest of his life he made heads, hands, human figures standing, striding, on plinths and chariots, isolated in framed spaces. His tortured, elongated, isolated dark figures came to represent the period between the two great world wars.

The Modern's retrospective both reinforced and subverted a common reading of Giacometti's work. Yes, it can be seen as something uniquely of his age, an expression of existentialist angst and human isolation; and he did hang out with people like Sartre and Beckett. Beckett's works could be illustrated with photos of Giacometti's sculptures (and for all I know have been).

But as with Beckett, there is something else here too: wit, for one thing. In his dark humor Beckett often has more in common with Flann O'Brien than with Sartre.

Similarly, Giacometti's Nose--a tormented head, hung, with an impossibly long Pinocchio-like nose--is both dark and funny, and so are some of the titles: one of the surrealist sculptures is called Disagreeable Object.

The most impressive aspect of the sculptures at the Modern, though, had to do with a mystery that strikes you as almost ancient: The paradox is that although it is impossible to think of Giacometti as having worked at any time other than the period he marks so powerfully, he has something more in common with the ancient Etruscans than with most of his contemporaries. I kept thinking that these statues, full of mystery and even a longing for mystery, could have been excavated.

After I saw the exhibit I returned home and dug up the old issue of Paris Review. There I found an extraordinary statement by Giacometti. He had been assigned by a French magazine to visit an auto show, and was asked whether the "beauty" of a car could be compared to that of a statue (the assignment seems peculiarly French). Giacometti wrote:

"A wrecked car, or any broken machine, is useless; it becomes scrap iron. Yet if a Chaldean statue were broken into four pieces there would be no such loss of value. In the place of the first, four distinct works of art would emerge. And each separate part would be worth the original whole; each would retain, as would the whole, its power and its meaning.

"A maimed Egyptian sculpture, a faded Rembrandt, scarred, and grown dark with time, these never lose their beauty. Unlike those objects which refer to nothing but themselves, a work of sculpture, or a painting, always lays claim to something beyond its own limits. But here another fact--of recent origin, like the machine--must be accounted for: the fact of 'abstract' sculpture...It creates and seeks to create a self-contained object, as self-contained and finished as a machine, without reference to anything beyond itself....

"One wonders what might become of abstract sculpture and abstract painting. How would a statue of Brancusi look if it were chipped or broken; or a painting of Mondrian if it were torn or turned dark with age? One wonders whether they belong to the same world as Chaldean sculpture, as Rembrandt and Rodin; or whether they form a world apart, closer to that of machines." There is no danger of that loss of mysterious presence in Giacometti's work.