7 AUTHENTICITY OF EXPERIENCE 8 IDIOMATIC COLOR / A REQUIREMENT OF THE

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AUTHENTICITY OF EXPERIENCE

IN L’ATELIER D’ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, Genet recalls an experience of gazing at the sculpture that seemed to be everywhere around his friend’s studio: “I know only the statues of women for which Annette has posed, and the busts of Diego — and each a goddess and this god — here I hesitate: if, in the presence of these women, I feel I am in the presence of goddesses — of goddesses and not statues of a goddess — the bust of Diego never attains this height.… Instead it might be the bust of a priest belonging to a very high rank in the church. Not a god. But each very different statue still belongs to the same proud rank and somber family. Familiar and very close. Inaccessible.” Genet cannot quite resist the impulse to place a sacred overlay on these gures, and maybe it was inevitable, given his rather ripe, rakish romanticism.

But if Genet stops short of the obvious conclusion to this view of the work, we, certainly, are free to consider it: in an earlier time, Giacometti might have been a religious artist, an insight that may be taken as an early, prophetic recognition of the skill with which Giacometti recreated in modern sculptural terms the enigmatic appeal of formal idealization that we often nd in religious statuary.

176. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1982

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177. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer View of Alberto Giacometti’s studio with un nished sculptures, c. 1962

OPPOSITE 178. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme debout (Poseur II) [Standing Woman], c. 1954 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

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As still another way of thinking about the humanist impulse in gurative sculpture after the War, the point holds, and Neri, too, has permitted the entry of a loosely religious ambiance into his work, a latent Catholicism that lies in the background of his characteristic form: the real delicacy of standing gures that can evoke the innumerable statues of Mary in Catholic churches the world over, reminding the faithful of the spiritually obedient young woman on whom has fallen the humbling, mysterious destiny of divine purpose. Here we return, as well, to the desire of Giacometti’s gures, and Neri’s, to demonstrate the persistence of a numinous presence in modern art, in the gure. In Neri’s case, it is an additional element that distinguishes his handling of the motif from that of the Bay Area gurative painters, whose use of the form is utterly secular and oriented toward a sense of the necessities of painting at that moment.

Both Giacometti and Neri are now familiar enough that we accept without question Genet’s invocation of the religious af liations that adhere to their work with such ease, associations that depend on the ef cacy of cultural memory. It is for this reason, surely, that when they are installed in museums, the standing women — Neri’s as well as Giacometti’s — are almost always placed with their backs to the gallery walls — whether by curatorial intuition, habit, or conscious determination — thereby requiring that we enter their eld frontally. Giacometti might not have approved. Better that the viewer be allowed to navigate around them, that our perspectives remain continuous and variable from all sides, thus offering a more open-ended perceptual experience. On the other hand, if this mode of display is routine enough that we no longer think much about it, our very response may be a measure of Giacometti’s success at reestablishing the gure as a modern sacral form, and Neri’s success at sustaining this element in his own work.

Of course Genet may simply have been stating the obvious, acknowledging that a frontal approach to the standing gure is in fact no more than a well-conditioned cultural re ex whose deepest origins do indeed lie in religious practice and spiritual need: when the form is gurative and female, frontality can transform the (secular) space of modern sculpture into a site of (religious/ spiritual) encounter. Neri is sensitive to this response, and utilizes it with gures of animate poise that stand as if awaiting the arrival of some precipitous event or visitation. Frontality is effective because it does so readily invoke the isolate, hieratic status of ancient religious and commemorative statuary, not as a manifest religiosity, but with a suggestiveness, an ambiguity, that enables the artist to address a human need that secular culture alone cannot quite satisfy.

The form of Giacometti’s standing women derives, as we know, from the vertical liform gures of ancient Egypt, Osiris in particular, though the artist’s strategy crucially did not go as far as his source in the quest for formal puri cation. His slender gures not only possess the general physical attributes of the model, they are nudes. Giacometti never desexualizes the form, but attenuation and terseness of pose relieve it of the delimiting obligations of sculptural eroticism. The gures are released, in other words, from the traditional demand that the sculpted female nude be displayed frankly before the (male) viewer,

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179. Malcolm Park, Photographer Alberto Giacometti sculptures in retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, May 8, 2017

OPPOSITE 180. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1945 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia and, at the same time, they are freed from related narrative exposition that would bind the gure to any particular sculptural past. The work thus achieves an undeniable formal objectivity, or objectness, and as scale shifts from among gures almost always smaller than life, they are utterly concretized, above all creatures of (our) perception.

Giacometti then forced the point with some of his most distinctive sculptural tactics, not least of which was the rejection of contrapposto, one of the most venerable techniques ofWestern sculptural realism, as a means of formal enlivenment. Although this does not of itself generate an inherently “religious” presence in the nished work, in practice it tends to act in that way upon us.

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But this response may also signify our own desire, correspondent with that of the artist, to grant a spiritual intention to contemporary gural sculpture. The gures appear to have emerged from his hand in answer to an extra-artistic necessity, seeking an existence independent of the secure means of traditional sculptural depiction. Only a short leap brings us to Marini’s standing gures, above all the Pomonas, which are similarly creatures of both history and modernity.

Sheathed in anonymity, and with the bodily composure we often nd in antique gures, the Pomonas also withdrew themselves from the tempests of debate that commanded the attention of the postwar intellectual world: because they have a character whose effect as sculpture is “archaic” in its essence, they seem to us unbound by the tragedies of the twentieth century, and perhaps by any topicality. Their otherworldliness belongs to the realm of myth, free from the bondage of time and the inevitable limitations that de ne a human (rather than a godly) existence. If the Pomonas are indeed goddesses, their pearlike bodies and roughened surfaces gently tug them back in the direction of the human realm, enabling us to accept them into our space, not as one of us, perhaps, but as (sculptural) beings sympathetic to our circumstances.

“Pomona” is the goddess of gardens and cultivation, a deity indigenous to Roman mythology, and in her traditional iconography, she often carries an apple in her hand. But Marini’s invocation of the classical/mythic/cultural past — like that of the Giacomettian gure, though here enclosed in local reference — is also a way of mitigating against the intrusion of personal taste regarding female appearance. This in turn releases the gures from the eye of (male) desire, understood by the artist as a malign signi er of the implication of Eros in every form of the (male) will to power. Marini typically presents her in a posture of domesticity — humble, bene cent, self-possessed — a formal character that further declines the voyeurism rampant in sculpture of the preceding century, asking us to contemplate instead her identity both as a gure and as sculpture. For all their human referents, these gures act in ways that never really require the topical or historical as sources of meaning. Yet their appeal to ancient traditions is surely empathetic with the spirit of humanism reemerging during the postwar era.

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Would Giacometti, Marini, and Neri have been religious sculptors in an earlier time? It is an intriguing question, but any answer only points in the general direction of ambitions that re ect a much broader background to their work — their response to a problem that has haunted gurative sculpture in the post-Enlightenment West, what could be described in simple terms as a deterioration of the integration of religion and society that has occurred since the eighteenth century, and some of its consequences for the life of culture. The Enlightenment brought an end to sculpture’s long partnership with religious representation, the great common ground enjoyed by religious belief, society, and art. This shift would eventually require that sculptors seek their own pathways through the thickets of modern insecurity and doubt, a challenge heightened in the postwar environment by the questions impressed by wartime events on philosophy, theology, and art. Artists could no longer assume the absolute truth of anything, and in the twentieth century, art almost necessarily takes up this quest for authenticity of experience and insight in secular terms.

Still, even before World War II, that task had also presented gurative sculptors with a truly open eld. What form(s) would this “new” gure take? How can personal truth be communicated sculpturally, with an ef cacy and depth that will justify its appeal to the viewer’s attention? What is the appropriate setting for the “new” gure? And the status of the gure in that setting?

Although the Christian tradition was hardly dead, it had been jettisoned from the main currents of European cultural life and practice. We are speaking of formal modalities, in any case, and as Giacometti and Marini sought a sacral ambiance for their work, the pre-Christian gure offered an escape from unavoidable associations with the magni cent mausoleum of the Christian sculptural tradition, an iconography and a history implanted in Western cultural memory. But Giacometti and Marini were born at the very beginning of the twentieth century, at a moment when Monet, Degas, and Cézanne were still alive and working, when Rodin reigned over French sculpture, when Picasso was just beginning his career. Their sense of the social possibilities of art, sculptural or otherwise, differed from those of Neri, who, as a postwar American, exercises an even less stable partnership with the past, art-historical or

otherwise. His work, once again, coexists with them in a situation of continuity, not of direct discipleship or imitation.

Neri has no qualms, therefore, about allowing his gures to behave in ways that Giacometti’s and Marini’s simply do not. They share our scale, and like us, they may bend, kneel, twist, look aside, shrug, or gesture boldly. They belong with us, among us, on the same ground, and as a result, they tend to operate most effectively when they are installed in fairly open spaces, without the explicit demarcations that insist on their separateness as “art.”

181–183. La Palestra No. 5, 1988 Private Collection

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Although Neri also minimizes explicit facial features and expressions, the details of identity and psychology, he departs from his predecessors by encoding explicitly expressive information into the gestures of the sculptural gure in its totality. Thus the model maintains her anonymity as an individual, while the gestural body is highly communicative, assisted in its expressive capacities by the artist’s own tracings and inscriptions across the entirety of the surface. Because Neri’s constructive naturalism is so physically precise, he can abandon the determinations of psychological and/or narrative content conveyed by facial depiction without compromising the entirety of the form. Such gures provoke a startling degree of empathy, a level of physical identi cation that enables the work to grip us in the experience of immediate, bodily encounter.

At the same time, and this is true of all of the sculptors under discussion here, the evocative nature of touch, as a material transcription of making itself, suggests the creation of forms “in touch” with the fragility of the human spirit as it confronts the situations of modern life. Touch becomes a token of individual commitment placed on the surface of the gure for all to see, the assertion of an essential human identity in objects that, as a result, tend to become talismanic as well as sculptural. Neri could not have expected to repeat the tactics of his predecessors, nor did he want to, especially as his work matured during the 1970s and 1980s in the long series of standing gures and gural reliefs. The individual utterance demonstrates its own necessity, and thus he was able to incorporate surface as a constructive element, available to his use, one that, in combination with the motif, answered his need to speak truthfully on his own behalf, through the hand.

It is on these grounds that Neri declares himself the nal source of authority in the work and so makes his own assertions regarding the place of the contemporary sculptural gure. If his ties to postwar European guration remain important to his development and indeed to his position in the trajectory of the naturalist gure during the latter twentieth century, Neri’s sources are many, and can come from almost anywhere, not just the art museum. In his engagement with the formal vocabulary of the sculptural past, he has also discovered that distance in time from an earlier sculptural form does not exclude or deny his sense of its relevance. Quite the opposite. Temporal

OPPOSITE 184–185. Kneeling Figure, 1991 Denver Art Museum

186–187. Annunciation No. 1, 1982 Yale University Art Gallery

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distances often unloosen a form from its original application or setting, giving it a freedom and objectivity of its own, which in turn may amplify Neri’s af nity for it. If he can draw such information into the present, he knows that he has uncovered a crucial vein of continuity, a durable human theme, still viable as a sculptural resource. Even as this becomes a substance inextricable from all the other formal transactions occurring in his work, its unaffected absorption assures us that certain human traits, expressed by the physical body, are indeed fundamental and always have been.

Whatever Neri can use is useful, a drive that shows itself as early as Beach Figure (1958), which interrogates the walking man of Rodin. In those years, Neri would have known the pose only from books, yet he made it his own by altering gender, adding an atmospheric setting, and applying paint. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Bull Jumper and La Palestra series tested ideas drawn from Cretan and Mycenaean sculpture, and during the same period, Neri also worked with poses that had originated in pop culture and advertising, poses with which he evoked the presence of (absent) props. By the mid-1980s, when Neri began

OPPOSITE 188–189. Armless Figure III, 1970 Private Collection

190–191. La Palestra No. 6 (Cast AP), 1988; Cast 2007; Patina 2016 University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames

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192–194. Prietas Series II (Cast 1/4), 1993; Painted 1994 Private Collection

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the large Arcos de Geso and Mujer Pegada relief panels, series embedded with references, his formal colloquy with the past had achieved remarkable density, as if he wished to take up the whole history of the form in a single sweeping embrace. When these kinds of visual echoes occur in the individual gures, they are normally uent, unforced, inexplicit, sensed rather than seen in the course of our encounters with them. It is an intimate relationship with the form, based on the artist’s faith in the kinds of human concerns that reappear in art, sustained through time, or by time. But continuity with the sculptural past, as Neri knows, cannot be sustained by the manipulation of form alone, whether as reference or quotation. It must be integrated into the modalities of artistic consciousness.

Much of the mid-twentieth-century gurative sculpture of humanist orientation is similarly synthetic, typi ed to one degree or another by a receptive attitude towards the canons of the form. Aspects of the past are reoriented through the means of the individual artist, and thus borne into the present. This seems almost de nitional, insofar as this group of sculptors has striven to reinstate a recognizably human creative spirit in their work as an expression of af rmation and renewal during the postwar era.

Yet the presence of the distant past suggests that these sculptors also yearn to somehow situate their work outside the accelerating tattoo of action and reaction in modern art. This need governs the very choice of the human form in a postwar setting not entirely hospitable to it, just as it governs their handling of the form. A relationship with sculptural pre-modernity allows each artist in turn to invoke the originative energies of the gure, that in doing so the gural body may reveal a reality more enduring than the cycles of call and response that have become so familiar, all the spinning cogs of novelty, ideology, visual pleasure, plurality, fragmentation.

But the humanist sculptors in postwar Europe — and Neri, too — were working, once again, in an ostensibly post-Christian world where the spiritual resources of the past — the commonly understood images of Presence, the visual vocabulary of divine revelation, the iconography of spiritual order — were no longer suitable to their enterprise. Sculptors of humanist orientation were almost necessarily required, therefore, to reinvigorate the connection

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between art and hope, or something like it. To do so, they had to address themselves to the same feeling of spiritual absence at the heart of the society, with all the attendant, insatiable anxieties, that the merchandisers of capitalism and technology were learning to exploit so ef ciently.

They would ask of the gure that it serve as a carrier of some of the oldest, least acculturated mysteries of human existence — mysteries older than memory — and so offer itself as an alternative to the platitudes of the age. To accomplish this task, Marini turned to the recuperative serenity, or sanity, of the Pomonas. Giacometti’s gures, too, might be tattered goddesses, icons of adaptability, their very survival a cause for encouragement, however guarded. Such gures can easily become metaphorical objects, not “likenesses” as such, and indeed they now seem less concerned with disturbing the familiarity of the motif than with de-familiarizing the stance of the form within the eld of sculpture itself — with, that is, loosening re exive views of the gure as knowable or secure, bolstered by cultural assumptions about representation that willingly accommodate the viewer’s delectation.

As Neri continued to develop and expand the means of gesture — the gure’s and his own — his sculptural gure became the material projection of his “speaking” voice. His subject, we might say, is not really the gure as such. The gure is simply the form that provides him with a just, reliable vehicle for exploring and communicating subject, and his treatment of the form draws him, paradoxically, into a history that, as it turns out, is not actually past and never entirely lost.

In an interview with curator Jan Butter eld in 1981, Neri observed: “I’ve always been intrigued with the spirit that the gure conveys. Not necessarily in Christian terms, but in relation, for example, to the Greek heroes with their dirty feet and curious morals — they were heroes just the same. It is this God-spirit that I think is the real God for us. It is this thing inside of us that I want to talk about in the gure. I can deal with it only through the work.”

Almost twenty years later, he returned to the idea in another interview: “The rst sculptors made use of the gure for a reason, which is because it has so much power.”

195–197. On the Up No. 1, 1992 Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

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