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Giacometti

This photo was taken nine months before the Giacometti’s death. It shows Giacometti crossing alone, under rain, a street of Montparnase near his study. His head under the raincoat, and without getting his arms out, protected by the sleeves. His bent shoulders are hidden under the raincoat too.
Apparently we can see in this photo a man strangely carefree his well-being. A man who wore wrinkled trousers and old shoes, not ready for rain. A man whose preoccupations did not consider the change of the seasons. But what makes this photo to be great is that he suggests much more about the character of Giacometti. The raincoat seems to be borrowed. It could be said that he was not wearing anything under the raincoat, except for the trousers. He has the aspect of a survivor, but not in a tragic sense. He is done with the circunstances ; he looks “like a monk”. And I think he took his “symbolic” poverty with much more naturalness than most of the monks.
The work of the artists changes when they die. And at the end nobody remembers how they were in life.
Giacometti thought that no one could know anybody; without any doubt his opinion implied a critic against the society in which he lived. This proposal on which Giacometti based all his last work consisted on the impossibility for sharing the reality with somebody - and to him the only thing that he was interested was the contemplation of the reality. For this reason he thought that it was impossible to see a finished work, for this reason the content of anyone of his works is not the nature of the figure or the portrayed head, but the incomplete story of their contemplation by the artist. Watching was for him a way of praying; it become a way to come close to an absolute that he was not able to reach.