Models wanted...

Okay everyone probably hates the notes on NYTimes articles, because the links take you to some "Register to Read" page (or some "Pay for the Archive" for those of you reading this too late) but this one is about one of my favorite sculptors in the history of art: Giacometti. Some of his work is here at the Art Institute of Chicago which I love to go see when I have time. Sure I've only been there a couple of times, but both times I spent a large percentage of my time in front of his works. I really recommend seeing his work in person whenver you have the chance (as with any sculpture, which can be done little to no justice in 2-D).

Anyway this is regarding a show at the PaceWildenstein Gallery in New York (up through December 17) which focuses on Giacometti's female models and the works created from them. I am not sure how fullfilling the show would be...but I like the concept. The model is really an interesting figure in the art world. I won't wander off into that void today (already spent my wandering credits with the last post), but I did want to post a comment by one of his models, Paola Caròla:

As for Ms. Caròla, she remains strikingly beautiful, with a slender, compressed look that seems tailor-made for Giacometti's characteristically elongated, pared-to-the-quick figures. She said that in her youth she and others felt that Giacometti's bust didn't resemble her at all. "But now I think it's a very good likeness - because I am older, maybe I am thinner," she observed. "The bones are very well placed. The resemblance was a sort of inner resemblance, which comes out with age."

She lives with the bust and encounters it daily. "Sometimes I feel it's a stranger," she said. "And then there are times in which I really very much feel like that bust. It's a piece of sculpture which changes, as if the sculpture had a temperament."

I just found that to be a rather beautiful statement about art and age. I mean when you contemplate the Dorian Gray tale in comparison in which the work of art, in a way, absorbs the aging of the model, there seems to be something sad about age. However here...the age of the work becomes something into which the model evolves. As is often the case with my crackpot theories and empassioned contemplation, I have spoken before I thought this through. I much more enjoy the search than the solution (if one ever exists), and I also enjoy passing that search on to others in the process. I often babble on endlessly and constantly question and challenge things, but it is because that is the fun of it. So enjoy thinking about this contemplation into art imitating life and maybe life aging into art...