The Failure And Success Of Alberto Giacometti (Stanley Tucci: 'Final Portrait')

Alberto Giacometti, 'Portrait Of James Lord', Oil On Canvas, 1964

There are certain artists I always come back to over the years, regardless of how much, or how little, they influence my own work directly.  The sculptor [1.], Alberto Giacometti is one, so it’s no surprise I found myself at Leicester’s Phoenix media centre the other night, to watch Stanley Tucci’s film, ‘Final Portrait’ [2.].

Actually, it’s been a good year for Giacometti enthusiasts - with Tate Modern also staging themost recent in a series of excellent retrospectives that I’ve attended across the decades [3.].  Whilst I (seemingly alone) have a few reservations about the way the work was displayed in the Tate survey, I have very few about the actual selection.  And I definitely have none at all about the enduring power of those works to move me profoundly – even those with which I have become very familiar through repeat encounters.

'Giacometti' Exhibition, Tate Modern, London, 2017

Alberto Giacometti, 'Bust Of Diego', Plaster, c.1956

It was a thrill to experience once more, the particular variety of perceptual ambiguity exerted by Giacometti’s blade-form portrait busts, the disturbing sense of sexually-charged alienation embodied by ‘Four Figurines On A Stand’, [4.] or the inexplicable power of a tiny head to hold one it’s thrall from the far side of a crowded room.  All that sense of human presence, of energised space around his figures, or of one’s grip on perceived reality slipping away, the harder one stares, should be getting old by now – but it all still moves me every time.

Alberto Giacometti, 'Four Figurines On A Stand', Cast Bronze, 1950-66

'Giacometti' Exhibition, Tate Modern, London, 2017

Clearly, Giacometti’s work and preoccupations have little correspondence with my own current output.  However, as a student, and for many subsequent years of wrestling unsuccessfully with my own hang-ups about drawing, and how to even make art at all, he did seem to represent a kind of mountain I might yearn to climb – but never successfully scale.  The irony is, of course, that he was beset by much the same kind of self-doubt, even whilst operating at an elevation of which I (and most others) might only dream.  In fact, as Tucci’s film serves to reinforce – he really is the No.1 poster boy for a particular form of angst-ridden artistic authenticity.

Ernst Scheidegger, 'Giacometti In His Studio', 1958, (Foundation Ernst Scheidender/
Giacometti Estate

It’s a habit of thought in which it’s hopeless to even dream of producing anything of real value; in which all attempts are doomed to failure; in which the very task one has set oneself is impossible; and yet one that still compels an individual artist to sacrifice their whole life, happiness, and even sanity, in its pursuit.  It manifests itself in works which, however profound their effect on others, mostly feel like disappointments, wrong turnings, or aborted excursions along the way - and in a sense that the struggle is far more significant than any individual artefact thrown-up.

'Giacometti' Exhibition, Tate Modern, London, 2017

All this focus on futility, despair, and other such portentous stuff, clearly ties into what philosophers call Existentialism.  At its most profound, and in the hands of its most sincere exponents (Giacometti, Samuel Becket, Harold Pinter, even Ian Curtis, perhaps), it can cut deeper and more uncompromisingly than most other stuff.  It notably captured a distinct twentieth century zeitgeist, and Giacometti has often been identified as one of the few visual artists to fully engage with the genocidal implications of World War 2, in its immediate aftermath.  If he did so, it was through a stripping-away of everything other bar the essentials of human existence (what it is to simply inhabit this body, in this space).  Of course, all that soul searching can all too easily slip into affectation too (something that, the film suggests, even Giacometti was aware of).  It can become a performance or a form of indulgent self-sabotage.  It can surely become an alibi for failing to complete, or to advance by setting achievable goals.  Indeed, “If I can’t be as good as I want to be, it’s all meaningless – so I won’t do anything at all”, was my own sulky mantra for far too many years - I now realise.

Geoffrey Rush As Giacometti In: Stanley Tucci (Dir.), 'Final Portrait', 2017

‘Final Portrait’, might therefore just have been a vicarious excursion through the entertaining psychosis of yet another obsessive artist.  Certainly, it pulls few punches in examining Giacometti’s legendry eccentricities, and Geoffrey Rush brings an intensity commensurate to that of his subject’s reputation.  We first encounter him as a shuffling, hunched ruin of a man, who proceeds to chain-smoke and hack his way through the remainder of the movie – one minute frozen in despondent immobility – the next, leaping impulsively into an outburst of frustrated anger, or some inexplicable action.

But we’re far from the Hollywood excesses of ‘Lust For Life’ [5.] or ‘The Agony And The Ecstasy’ [6.] here.  This film is actually based on American author, James Lord’s celebrated factual account of sitting for a painting, ‘A Giacometti Portrait’; late in the artist’s own life.  I think he’s generally accepted as a pretty reliable narrator.  Aside from those periodic demonstrations of ‘artistic temperament’ and the bohemian lifestyle choices, the real experience of modeling for Giacometti, it would appear, was one of a baffling endurance test.  As his wife Annette, and heroically stoic brother (and studio technician), Diego attest, the artist really knew how to torture his sitters.

(L.) Armie Hammer As James Lord, And (R.) Geoffrey Rush As Giacometti, In:
Stanley Tucci (Dir.), 'Final Portrait', 2017

Thus, Lord finds himself sequestered in the Spartan, cave–like environs of the Giacometti atelier - a place where the standard rules of time, consideration of a model’s other commitments, and clearly defined deadlines, are all sacrificed to the artist’s obsession.  The insights into Giacometti’s unorthodox domestic arrangements, openly triangular (and emotionally abusive) love life, and totally cavalier disregard for money, actually represent colourful, if disturbing, punctuations, it transpires.  Otherwise, it’s mostly an interminable process of sitting immobile, as the days tick by and the artist goes through his cycles of attempting to really ‘start’ (drawing with the small black brush) and collapsing in despair at the impossibility of his task (obliterating with the large, grey brush).  It might be ‘Waiting For Godot’, by another name.

(L.) Sylvie Testud As Annette, And (R.) Geoffrey Rush As Giacometti, In:
Stanley Tucci (Dir.), 'Final Portrait', 2017

It would be foolish to ignore the fact that, aside from creating a cauldron of existential drama/non-drama, within four walls – the film’s other real strength lies in the power of its five main performances.  Geoffrey Rush himself pulls-out what feels like one of those ‘career-defining’ turns as Giacometti - tempering the forbidding aspects of his subject with moments of genuine vulnerability, and even wry amusement at his own acknowledged character defects.  His achievement is to depict with considerable nuance, his selfish disregard for the feelings of others, and apparent appreciation of the sacrifices and discomfort they endure on his behalf.  We are left with the sense of a fallible but deeply ‘human’ personality (if not exactly a humane one).

Alberto Giacometti, 'Portrait Of Annette', Oil On Canvas, 1964

Alongside him, Armie Hammer depicts the growing exasperation of the initially urbane Lord with aplomb, whilst Tony Shaloub proves eminently convincing as the disengaged, but palpably benign Diego.  Clemence Poesy’s depiction of Giacometti’s paid-for mistress, Caroline, has a certain built-in caricature quality, but is enjoyable nonetheless.  Sylvie Testud, on the other hand, feels immensely relatable as his wife, Annette.  She’s a woman carelessly spurned, and yet heroically aware of her enduring importance as the mainstay of Giacometti’s domestic (and, as we discover - emotional) wellbeing.  It’s a tough role to play with dignity over victimhood – in drama, as in life.

Alberto Giacometti, 'Caroline', Oil On Canvas, 1965

Actually, for me, there’s a sixth member of the cast – namely, the recreation of post-war bohemian Paris.  The surrounding streets and cafés of Montparnasse reek of seductive bohemia, but shun excessive romanticism - preferring a more convincingly gritty squalor  [7.].  The Studio and adjacent courtyard, at Rue Hyppolite Maindron, appear to have been very faithfully reconstructed from various familiar documentary photos.  And while we’re at it - whomever did Mr. Rush’s costume, hair and make-up would definitely get my vote for Oscars.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, 'Portrait Of Alberto Giacometti', 1961

I’m sure many keen moviegoers will have succumbed to the perennial temptation to adopt the demeanor of a favourite character, on emerging into the ‘real world’.  So it may just be that I exited Phoenix with a slight Existentialist’s trudge, or possibly surveyed the car park with a particular weary gaze.  However, the fact is I no longer really identify with all that stuff.  My own creative re-awakening actually came when I consciously gave up fetishising ‘the struggle’, accepting that it’s okay to actually finish things - and even to take pleasure in the process, and in one’s achievement.  If something’s not good enough, these days – that’s just a reason to look forward to making something else.  Certainly, my own work no longer aspires to looking or proceeding anything like Giacometti’s (like that was ever possible!) - and I’m happy to just try to make the kind of art I probably should have been making all along (for better or worse).

Geoffrey Rush As Giacometti In, Stanley Tucci (Dir.),  'Final Portrait' 2017

My  love for Giacometti's oeuvre, and my fascination with the various accounts of his life and times, remain undiminished though.  I no longer want to live and work that way - but I'm glad he did.

Alberto Giacometti, 'Small Man On Plinth', Cast Bronze, c. 1939-45

[1.]:  Giacometti painted a lot for someone primarily thought of as a sculptor.   They must be some of the least 'painterly' canvases ever made however.  Anyway, it's my view that (in terms of his his mature work, at least), pretty much everything he did was actually drawing - regardless of the medium. 

[2.]:  Stanley Tucci (Dir.), 'Final Portrait', UK, Olive Productions, Potboiler Productions, Riverstone Pictures, 2017

[3.]:  'Giacometti', Tate Modern, London, Until 10. 09.17.  (There's still just time, if you're quick).

[4.]:  Famously, Giacometti linked this piece to a memory of viewing four prostitutes in a brothel.  It was an experience, he claimed - in which sexual desire was combined with a sense of the seemingly uncrossable distance in the room, between himself and the women.  Giacometti's psycho-sexual hinterland - and indeed, his sexual politics - were more than somewhat 'complex'.  His four figurines are both remote, and quite literally - on a pedestal.

[5.]:  'Vincente Minelli (With George Cukor) (Dir.), 'Lust For Life', U.S., John Houseman/MGM, 1956).  Kirk Douglas does his best raving madman impression, in Hollywood's depiction of the life of Vincent Van Gogh.

[6.]:  Carol Reed (Dir.), 'The Agony And The Ecstasy', U.S., Carol Reed/C20 Fox, 1965.  A physically implausible Charlton Heston, as Michelangelo, tries to complete the Sistine Chapel ceiling, as Rex Harrison's Pope Julius II looks on in exasperation.

[7.]:  It turns out the best way to recapture the flavour of post-war Montparnasse, is to shoot your film in Stoke Newington.  Who knew?