ISAKU YANAIHARA was no ordinary sitter for sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Not only was he an important model for the Swiss artist from 1956 to 1961, the Japanese existentialist philosopher was also a close confidant. It has been said that while the master sculptor conducted other affairs in what was a very Parisian or Bohemian arrangement, Yanaihara was to console Giacometti's wife, Annette, with Giacometti's full permission. 'Outside his family, Yanaihara was Giacometti's most important model,' says Mina Lee, the curator of an exhibition touring Japan that looks at the sculptor's art with particular reference to Yanaihara. 'In total, he posed for Giacometti on 230 days.' The importance of this contribution can only be fully realised by considering Giacometti's working methods. When he sculpted, usually in clay or plaster, he worked like a dog chewing a bone, restlessly nibbling away for hours until he broke through to the artistic marrow, which meant arriving at the perfect form that would later be cast into bronze. This lengthy process often required models to stay still for hours on end. Only someone with great patience or dedication to Giacometti's art could make this sacrifice. That's why Giacometti's chief male model was his brother and assistant Diego. It also explains one of the main reasons he married Annette in 1949 - she was one of the few people who could pose for lengthy periods for the fussy sculptor without fidgeting. Their patience and dedication is commemorated in many of Giacometti's sculptures at the exhibition, including Buste de Diego (1954) and several small elongated nudes based on Annette. But although both these models were patient and dedicated, their modelling ability pales in comparison to Yanaihara's, who came to Paris in 1955. He met Giacometti through the leader of the existentialist movement, Jean Paul Sartre, a close friend of the sculptor. 'Whereas Annette and Diego wanted to take a break every two hours, Yanaihara never moved,' Lee says. 'It's even said that he had enough patience to pose for 10 hours at a time.' Another advantage Yanaihara had was his ability to converse with Giacometti, while he worked, on the many intellectual subjects that interested them both. 'They became close very, very quickly,' says Lee. 'Every year, when Yanaihara came to Paris, he would go straight to Giacometti's atelier and pose. He did nothing except modelling. That's why Giacometti said to him afterwards, 'This work is our work.'' At the exhibition, in addition to two plaster busts of Yanaihara from 1960 and 1961, are several preparatory sketches and oil paintings of the Japanese intellectual, including paintings of Yanaihara from the front and side. These, like most of Giacometti's paintings, portray the subject emerging from a greyish background. Just like his sculpture, however, they reveal a laborious and time-consuming working method that must have been equally trying for the models. But Yanaihara not only had the calm patience to put up with Giacometti's artistic perfectionism, he was also an important factor in helping the sculptor get over a difficult artistic period, says Lee. 'In 1956, Giacometti was having trouble about how to see and what to see. With the help of Yanaihara, he found the way out from this difficulty.' To understand this, it's important to appreciate Giacometti's earlier career. From 1929 to 1934, Giacometti came under the influence of Andre Breton and the Surrealists and started to create sculptures that showed women as objects, such as Femme Couchee (1929), in which the female form is reduced to a simplified receptacle, and objects that were merely ambiguous and somewhat unnerving, such as Objet desagreable (1931), which looks like a cross between a sex toy and a medieval torture device. But Giacometti's interest lay in sincerely depicting the human form, something the Surrealists considered beneath them, leading Giacometti to leave their camp. His involvement with Surrealism, however, gave him the formal flexibility to approach the depiction of the human form in new ways. The Nose (1947), a work that combines surrealist and figurative elements, shows how this flexibility allowed him to play with the human form. A head suspended from an open cage is given a Pinocchio-like nose that reaches out to threaten the viewer, just as our line of vision reaches in. What Giacometti did to the nose here, he started to do to the human form, creating the increasingly elongated works for which he is now most remembered. This formal flexibility also allowed him to reinvigorate his approach to busts. In particular, he became interested in the discrepancy between the front view of the head and the profile and the fact that neither can be inferred from the other. This problem of bringing two separate planes together was also one of the problems tackled by Cubism, a movement Giacometti had been influenced by in his youth. Much of his sculpture from the 1950s is an attempt to deal with this, with the heads becoming increasingly thinner, viewed from the front. In Buste de Diego (1957), the face seems almost to sit on a knife edge. By standing directly in front we can still get a recognisable front view of the subject, but by swaying slightly to the left or right we get the beginnings of a profile. It was at this point, according to Lee, that Giacometti's relationship helped him to find new paths of expression. 'Before, in his busts, we can clearly find the face of Diego. He is focused on the proportions and the technical problems of art. But through his relationship with Yanaihara, we see that he starts to look at art in a more symbolic way.' Lee says Giacometti switched from creating art as he saw it to creating art as he synthesised it or felt it in his mind. Although subtle, this switch was from external references - visual contact with a person - to internal references, intellectual or spiritual contact with a person. As an example the curator cites Buste d'Homme (1961) and Buste d'Homme (New York II) (1965), both these works having a more expressive or emotive atmosphere than their predecessors, and giving us a greater sense of how the sculptor felt about them. Exhibitions of western art in Japan often go out of their way to 'prove' a Japanese connection. This is particularly the case with exhibitions of the Impressionists and Vincent Van Gogh. But this is one exhibition where the focus on the Japanese influence is well founded and valid. Alberto Giacometti and Isaku Yanaihara; Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, until Jul 30. Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Aug 8-Oct 1. Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Oct 10-Dec 3
