The Giacometti Institute in Paris brings together works and documents illustrating the short period during which the artist worked under the influence of André Breton.
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The universal celebrity of naked and bronze and bronze heads that Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) has modeled from the late 1930s tends to forget, sometimes, part of his work so captivating: Its surreal moment, in the first half of this decade. He is intense, but lasts little. It is restless of quarrels, and the personal relations of Giacometti with the members of the surrealist group are irregular and changing. It is therefore not easy to deal with its relations with André Breton (1896-1966), as the risk the Giacometti Institute.
The exhibition is called “Surrealist friendships”, but the notion of friendship is hardly verified. Between the poet, founder, theoretician and leader of the group, and the strange hermit of Hippolyte-Maindron Street (Paris 14th), which settles in 1926, two years after the first manifesto of surrealism, there are brief periods of agreement and others, longer, misunderstanding and removal.
The letter of March 9, 1932, which opens the series of archival documents, is so friendly: “Dear Breton, I read your brochure and I regret having to tell you that I do not approve it On any point. I do not see his goal, I do not find that it is dialectic or led by a revolutionary idea. “The” brochure “is called poetry and the defense of Louis Aragon (1897-1982 ), attacked for subversion because of its red front poem (1931): “comrades / go down the cops / farther further to the west where are sleeping / rich children and first-class whores.”
Symbolic power
The police gets involved, and humanity disavrans Aragon. Breton is one of the few to defend it, but judge Red Front “poetic regressive”. Giacometti, whose political conviction is then intense, approves at first misery of poetry, then sends Breton its letter of protest of March 9, before returning to it in another letter, on May 16: “I I was wrong when I claimed that the position you were doing to poetry was conservative. “He continues:” I continued at the same time my work, which can not go, I believe, that in the same direction as your research and those of other surrealists. “
On this point, there is no doubt. Giacometti creates forms between abstraction and schematic figuration, loaded with a symbolic power all the stronger as several interpretations are possible. This is the case from the hanging ball (1930-1931), splinter sphere rubbing against the central edge of a croissant that ends in the point, the two volumes of wood inside an iron cage. The sexual part is quite explicit.
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