ALBERTO GIACOMETTI Giacometti, the sculptor, gave one the impression of a tortured soul. Always dissatisfied with his work, feeling that he had carried it not far enough, or perhaps too far, he’d abandon it in his heaped-up little studio and start on an entirely new formula. When he turned to painting for a while, his colorless, line-searching figures seemed to express final resignation in a futile search of himself. Whatever the direction he took, the work was always a positive expression—a perfect reflection of the man. He could talk with lucid, voluble brilliance—on many subjects. I liked to sit with him in a café and watch as well as listen to him. His deeply marked face with a grayish complexion, like a medieval sculpture, was a fine subject for my photographic portraiture. During my period of fashion photography I disposed of a budget for backgrounds; I got him to make some bas-reliefs, units of birds and fishes which were repeated over a surface. One motif which he submitted, four legs radiating from a center, reminded me too much of the Nazis’ swastika—when I pointed this out, he destroyed the work. The others were taken up by an interior decorator, and it helped him to attract attention. I did a series of pictures of his more Surrealistic work, for publication in an art magazine. He rewarded me with pieces of sculpture of the period.
MERET OPPENHEIM One day, [Giacometti] introduced me to Meret Oppenheim, a beautiful young girl whose family had escaped from Germany to Switzerland, the country of Giacometti’s origin. Whenever she could get to Paris, it was to sit with the Surrealists. She created a sensation with her furlined cup, saucer, and spoon. Meret was one of the most uninhibited women I have ever met. She posed for me in the nude, her hands and arms smeared with the black ink of an etching press in Marcoussis’s studio. The latter, an early Cubist painter, wore a false beard to hide his identity as he posed with her in one of the pictures. This was a bit too scabrous for the deluxe art magazine for which it was intended; the one of Meret alone, leaning on the press, was used. Still, it was very disturbing, a perfect example of the Surrealist tendency toward scandal.
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