As a participant in the symposium on the Portrait/Homage/Embodiment exhibition, I had chosen Alberto Giacometti’s Portrait of David Sylvester as the subject of my presentation to the other symposium participants. More specifically, I spoke about the issues of immediacy, mediation, and portraiture as they relate both to the painting and to the artist’s statements about his work. Reading over various comments that Giacometti had made over the course of his artistic career, I was struck by an ambivalence that he seemed to express regarding the role of mediation in his production of portraits. For example, Giacometti once stated that, “I know that it is utterly impossible for me to model, paint, or draw a head as I see it, and still, this is the only thing I am attempting to do.” Here, the artist seemed to be putting forth an ideal of portraiture based on an immediacy of direct observation or experience, while also acknowledging that this ideal was impossible for him to attain. At various other points, Giacometti indicated that some sort of mediation was necessary for him to carry out a portrait, as when he stated that “the more I looked at the model, the more the screen between reality and myself thickened. You begin by seeing who is posing, but gradually every possible sculpture interposes itself between the sitter and you.” Here, in sharp contrast to a notion of portraiture based on immediacy of the artist’s direct experience of the sitter, Giacometti seemed to feel that a necessary condition of portraiture was the intervention of what he called a “screen” of “every possible sculpture” between himself and the subject of the portrait. This same sentiment, in which his work is mediated by other artistic representations, is expressed slightly differently when he stated that, “the truer a work of art is, the more it has style. Which is strange, because style is not the truth of appearances.”

Turning to Giacometti’s Portrait of David Sylvester with these issues in mind, one of the most notable features of the painting is its heavily worked surface, one which reveals a fraught process of repeatedly delineating, partially effacing, and reworking the figure of his sitter in paint. Indeed, the explicitness with which Giacometti stages the constant undoing and reworking of the image seems intended to underscore the immense difficulty of representation in portraiture. It is this difficulty that he expressed in verbal form when he conceded that “it is utterly impossible for me to model, paint, or draw a head as I see it.” Perhaps this is why he sought out a “screen” of other representations to interpose between himself and the sitter, mediations that rendered the very act of representation possible for Giacometti.