A Family Affair

...And to judge from a pencil portrait of the son by the father, Alberto's drawing technique of faint, webby lines????never one where half a dozen would do ????was largely inherited...

...Everything," he said, "remains just another study...

...Alberto Giacometti saw anxiety as the natural human condition, but he did not blow himself up as the spokesman for his time...

...He was also somewhat promiscuous in his choice of individual influences, being attracted in turn to Gauguin, Van Gogh, Hodler...

...A mixed German and French ancestry, coupled with an evidently mercurial temperament, may account for his vacillation between the two national approaches to painting...

...Yet this rather endearing side of his character was smothered by his intellect????it was, after all, a science-mad period...

...As early as 1898 and predating Kandinsky by a decade, he was experimenting with small, squarish designs derived from Art Nouveau motifs...

...Nevertheless, he was precisely that...

...Doubtless these characteristics were exacerbated by a lack of money, since his father, being a poor farmer and innkeeper, was unable to help him financially...

...Their travels notwithstanding, all three artists were home-based, a fact that makes their performance especially remarkable for being technically and intellectually unpro-vincial...

...F M rancoise Gilot, in Life with Picasso, describes Giacometti as a wiry man with a large leonine head and a deeply furrowed face (he was also handsome and had Harpo Marx-like curly hair...

...To her, the artist, his surroundings and even his wife Annette, of whom he did countless portraits, were all of a gray piece with the monochromatic paintings and attenuated sculptures...

...The latter was primarily a stained glass window designer, trained in Zurich and Paris...

...Without speculating too much on the part played by time and place in an artist's ascendancy, one may assume he would not have become famous had he stayed at home...

...Possessed of great determination, as his work reveals, Giovanni did not find his style until he was almost 40, when he discovered the most single-minded master of them all, Van Gogh...

...Soon, however, they yielded to fauve landscapes and groups in which his flair for strong color was released...

...they have to breathe the same air: Competition keeps the adrenalin running...

...and social congress defines the image that is so crucial for the public's grasp of an oeuvre...

...He himself wrote shortly before he died, like his father, at the age of 65: "I don't know who I am, nor what I'm doing, nor what I would like to do...

...From this period comes a half-length portrait of the young Alberto, his head close-cropped, standing in dark clothes with a hand reaching up to his collar...

...His pared-down men and women, the meek heads and melancholy paintings of figures sitting out eternity in that studio, have been melodramatized into symbols for concentration camps...

...they do not come off as pictures, for his overly neat touch was very much that of the designer...

...The catalogue notes, too, that along with his metaphysical leanings, Augusto showed "a tendency toward misanthropy...

...Measurement was everything to Augusto and????combined with the intensity he apparently shared with his cousin????it resulted in works of icy, mathematical efficiency...

...Singly or in groups, the pieces are always surrounded by a space that is almost palpable...

...Besides receiving instruction in painting from his father, Giacometti studied with the sculptor Bourdelle, to no visible effect...

...From all accounts, his own and others', Alberto was a neurotic, obsessive man who projected an attitude of "earnest despair...

...Alberto worked in the same small studio in Paris from 1927 until the year of his death...

...This was his second and greatest period of celebrity...

...Even in the early Cubist bronzes and carvings and those affected by Oceanic art, he was ever tentative...

...There followed well-drawn canvases painted with authority and a feeling for the weight of bodies in landscapes patterned with sunlight...

...There was nothing unusual about his swimming with all the currents of his time ?Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism????but he did it in rather a fitful manner...

...As it is, they are not a family background to be ashamed of...

...An acute observer of nature, Augusto wanted to know "whether it would not be possible to discover the laws which govern the configuration of color in nature...

...The majority of his watercolors????landscapes and interiors????And a number of his oils are very attractive...

...The strength that was eventually to make him a good painter appeared merely as heavy-handedness...

...I don't know if I'm old or young, maybe I still have some hundred thousand years to live until my death, my past sinks into a gray abyss...

...Klimt, and Munch (to name the more obvious), perhaps because of their strength of character rather than their esthetic compatibility...

...Even the portrait heads in the exhibition seem machine-made...

...his figure compositions during the early 1900s were done in large, mechanical, impressionistic dabs...

...Until 1935, he had been well known as a Surrealist sculptor ????A maker of objects dcsagreables and of cage-like structures containing spiky, geometrical and organic forms, each more or less menacing...

...To return to the Giacometti family proper, Giovanni was acquainted with his cousin Augusto but they had little to do with each other...

...Though he repudiated the doctrine of Surrealism, his sculpture still retained its ambience...

...Scale and distance became such preoccupations that he would emphasize these qualities by placing tiny figures and heads on disproportionately large bases...

...The entire exhibition is engrossing, whether viewed as an investigation of dynastic talent or as art history...

...Most memorable are a study of mackerel clouds scudding over a black hilltop and a delicately drawn head of Herman Hesse, vestigally painted in dark flesh tones...

...How his essence will be interpreted in another decade is beyond guessing...

...and Augusto Giacometti (1877-1948), a second cousin of his father's...

...Except for a brief period in Switzerland during World War II...

...The more affluent Cuno Amiet, Giovanni's close friend and fellow student, never found precisely the right expression for his considerable talent...

...Giovanni had developed a strong, Cezannesque technique...

...Death at the age of 65 did indeed cut the father off in his prime...

...An editor, rearranger and destroyer of both his work and his biographical details, he was convinced nothing he did would "ever be finished...

...Conversely, their presence adds weight to his contribution by lending him background and so arresting the process of mythicization...

...At first, this influence was not too felicitous...

...Like Kandinsky, he wrote well on color, bringing a common-sense approach to a subject that was then more frequently treated mystically...

...The Guggenheim's sizable retrospective (through June 23) is preceded, on the upper tiers of the building, with a selection of paintings by three of his countrymen: Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933), who was his father...

...Yet despite his choice of the more concrete medium, he lacked his father's certainty and his attack...

...Giacometti pere was well endowed as a colorist and draftsman, yet painting did not come easily to him...

...each dab of knifed-on paint is calculated for its exact relationship to its neighbor...

...Assisted by his brother Diego, who in addition sat for him interminably and who took care of technical matters such as the casting...

...Amiet's natural facility was...

...in any event, the German finally won out...

...Cuno Amiet (1868-1961), his godfather...

...if anything, an additional hindrance to his intellectual progress, though it produced quite as many delightful works as it did disasters...

...Whether artists actually hang out together or not...

...As a personality, the show's catalogue notes, he was somewhat introverted and given to depression...

...Since he was perpetually coated in clay dust, Gilot was not surprised to find that in his studio "there was never the slightest color accent anywhere to interfere with the endless uniform gray that covered everything?brushes, armatures, bottles of turpentine...

...Had they been able to remain in Paris, they could easily have made the grade as collectable minor masters on the international market...

...By the teens...

...Alberto is of course the star, but his antecedents do not suffer from the juxtaposition...

...While undeniably nonobjective...

...Giacometti produced basically the same matchstick figures for the last 20 years of his life...

...Consequently, Giovanni's period of study, in Munich and later Paris, was shorter than it should have been...

...the Guggenheim Museum introduced the work of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), who, though venerated in his own country, was relatively unknown here...

...Now absorbed into history, Gia-cometti's work is harder to "see" than it was...

...But his influence on art has been immense, particularly in England, where for years after World War II young sculptors were divided into neo-Moores and neo-Giacomettis...

...This year, as if in reversal, the museum has wrested the reputation of Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) from the School of Paris and restored it, in effect, to his native Switzerland...

...His presence here is justified by a number of abstract canvases...

...Becoming more absorbed in theories of color, he produced large arrangements, in oil and pastel, of misty discs that are astral in effect...

...There must, he felt, be principles behind the distribution of dark green patterns on the silver body of a fish, and "the red comb and white ear of the black hen...