Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [29]
Every detail of Alberto’s work habits would come in handy.
Was he right- or left-handed?
How did he hold the brush?
What kind of light did he favor?
Was he prone to reworking a painting ad infinitum?
Was there ever a sense of closure, of satisfaction with the outcome?
For Giacometti, there was not. He considered many of his masterpieces failures and could never manage to leave a work alone.
“The more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it,” he once said. One artist and writer called his artistic process an “obsessive paring down.” When Giacometti was sculpting, his hands “would flutter up and down a piece, pinching and gouging and incising the clay, in a seemingly hopeless, even heartbreaking, struggle for verisimilitude.”12
Giacometti began to resemble his own creations. His frame
became thinner, his face more haggard, his hair ever paler with plaster dust. It was as though he’d been boiled down to his essence. In the end he resembled an armature of a man, a bonhomme of gnarled steel and chicken wire, smoking in the corner café. Once, when he was already rich, a lady saw him sitting forlorn, took pity on him and offered to buy him a cup of coffee. He accepted at once, his eyes brimming with gratitude and joy.13
Myatt could definitely relate, but that didn’t seem to help much. His canvas was a plain composition of a nude woman emerging from blue-gray shadows, a copy of one of three basic figures Giacometti had painted again and again: the standing nude, the seated figure, and the walking man. Ever since he was an art student, Myatt had admired them. He thought they were simple constructions that would be easy enough to imitate. He was wrong.
The Swiss artist had his own unique energy, painting in a tangle of lines that seemed both calculated and frenzied. His nudes were full-figured and so evocative that Myatt could almost feel the bones beneath the flesh. His mysterious images seemed to emerge from the canvas as if they were about to step out into the room.
How had Giacometti managed it?
Myatt lashed at the canvas, then stood back. The nude looked emaciated. He moved in again and worked on the torso, dabbing at the rib cage to put meat on the bones. This improved things a little, but the arms looked wrong.
The more he tried to copy Giacometti’s style, the more elusive it seemed. He’d already scrapped one attempt at the standing nude because it was utterly lifeless, like a puppet on a string. He’d tried hard to correct it, to harness Giacometti, but it was no use. He’d lost his focus. Now he was failing at his second attempt. He began to question his own talent and consider the potentially disastrous consequences of his new endeavor. What would happen if he got caught? He would never survive the loss of his children and his farmhouse.
In a fit of anger and frustration, he took a bucket of white paint and splashed it onto the canvas. The nude disappeared. When he finally calmed down, he smoothed the surface over with a brush and set the canvas aside to dry. He would use it again to give the nude one more shot.
Myatt’s third attempt began promisingly enough, but again the figure he envisioned vanished with each brushstroke the more he worked on it. It would have been easier if he’d been able to use a live model, as Giacometti had. The artist had always painted from life (his wife was one of his favorite models), demanding absolute stillness and concentration from his subject. He would spend months on a single painting, sometimes sitting a few feet from the model while he worked. He would ask her to look straight at him until she was within his gravitational arc, and then he would reel her into the canvas.
Myatt feared it would be too risky to bring in a model, so each night, after he pulled out his old Winsor & Newton easel and put