Perceptions at Play: Giacometti through Contemporary Eyes

Abstract

In a rapidly executed sketch dating from circa 1918–20, Alberto Giacometti captures a true-to-type moment in the quotidian life of his family. Intimately grouped around the table in the parental home at Stampa, his three younger siblings—Bruno, Diego, and Ottilia—are portrayed with a friend, playing a habitual game, one now extinct, known as jeu de char, a cross between chess and checkers.1 Performing a conceptual shift in paradigm, the topography of pawns as articulated on the tabletop in this early drawing presages Giacometti's horizontal gameboard sculptures of the 1930s and also his models for city squares punctuated by arrestingly thin silhouettes of 1948–50. This sense of play, congenial to Giacometti's oeuvre, is de facto indelible in the history of the avant-garde. To cite a noted example, Marcel Duchamp took up chess in the 1920s as a cunning approach to art. A chess champion with a taste for gambling, Duchamp engaged in unorthodox matches, saluting ad hoc competitions such as that featured at the opening of his first retrospective, organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963. Set against his classic work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass, of 1915–23, the Pasadena chess encounter acted simultaneously as one of the most cerebral episodes of artistic exchange and one of the most sexually charged since Duchamp's challenger, Eve Babitz, stripped for the event.