picking cichorium

Not a grand connoisseur of art, I know very few works.

I have walked past her several times, I am sure. This time around she attracted me. I did not look for a while at the title of the sculpture, did not even try to figure out what was in front of me. Instead I savored the fact that somebody has cast in bronze a familiar feeling, even a phobia.

Alberto Giacometti. Woman with Her Throat Cut. 1932 (cast 1949). Bronze, 8 x 34 1/2 x 25″ (20.3 x 87.6 x 63.5 cm)

Once I got home, I read in whatever art his literature I own and online about Giacometti and the Woman. Different critics interpreted the work differently, calling it anything from “a bronze construction of a dismembered female corpse” to “powerful image of sexual pleasure and violence.” The most thorough and thoughtful interpretation of the work that I found is by Laurie Wilson. You can read a four-page excerpt (p. 120) about the Woman in Wilson’s Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic, and the Man available via google books.

Still, how did he know, I wondered? How did he know this feeling of being defenseless yet dangerous, destroyed, yet dangerous, ripped open in front of the viewer, exposed, disfigured, yet graceful and, again, dangerous? The question that I am mulling on is “What kind of man is able to grasp this feeling, and what was his path to understanding it?”