Existing comment:
Alberto Giacometti
The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932
In the Surrealist periodical Minotaure, Giacometti described the process that brought into being this fragile, air-filled sculpture. "This object formed little by little toward the end of summer 1932," Giacometti recalled; "it gradually became clearer to me, the various parts taking their exact form and their particular place in the ensemble. Come autumn it had attained such a reality that its execution did not take me more than one day." By privileging an interior mental image over the physical act of making, Giacometti affirmed his commitment to Surrealism's call for the near-automatic recording of visions achieved in a dreamlike state.
Within his palace's spindly, tenuously defined spaces, a slender sheet of suspended glass connects its rooms from left to right, adding to the structure's vulnerable appearance. At right a delicate bird skeleton and sinuously curving vertebrae float, suspended, in space-frames or cages; at left a chess piece–like figure of a woman stands before three panels; at center is an enigmatic elliptical shape that the artist identified with himself. In the Minotaure account, Giacometti compared the whole to a "fragile palace of matches" that he and a woman he loved would build every night, only to watch it repeatedly collapse. His words give voice to key Surrealist preoccupations, including all-consuming desire, the power of memory, and the relationship between Eros and Thanatos -- love and death. |