20. Kubus

Between 1933 and 1934, in Paris, an artist born in the Bregaglia builds a polyhedron and calls it a cube.

Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 in Borgonovo, in the Val Bregaglia, a few kilometres below the Maloja. At Maloja, on the shores of Lake Sils, the family bought a holiday house in 1910, where his father Giovanni set up a second studio.

Kubus is not a cube. It is an irregular polyhedron that the title goes on calling by the name of the regular solid it seems to come from. Critics have recognised in it a quotation of the polyhedron in the Melencolia: the same geometric block, the same flawed regularity. Giacometti called it his only abstract sculpture, but he also said that he had in fact conceived it as a head.

Every rotation produces a different silhouette, a configuration of faces and edges that does not repeat itself. There is no privileged position, no canonical view. The solid has no front.

It is the condition of the erratic: a form that can only be understood by walking around it.

Dürer truncates two vertices and leaves the solid beside a figure who does not act. Giacometti makes it a body, almost a head. Souvenir di montagna makes it a stone, and brings it back to the Bregaglia, on the pass above the village where Giacometti was born.

Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago

Alberto Giacometti, Kubus, plaster model: a white irregular polyhedron on a pale background

Alberto Giacometti, Kubus (plaster model), 1933/34. Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung

Giacometti's bronze Kubus on display at the Kunsthaus Zürich, with a bust on a pedestal behind

Alberto Giacometti, Kubus, 1933/34 (cast 1959)
Bronze, 95 × 54 × 59 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, inv. GS 025

Made towards the end of Giacometti’s involvement with Surrealism. The surface of the bronze bears fine scratched lines that the artist incised in the plaster at the end of the 1930s, traces evoking the studio and a self-portrait: later erased from the plaster, they survive only on the bronze.

Giacometti's bronze Kubus, its surface dark green and brown, at the Kunsthaus Zürich

The bronze Kubus on display at the Kunsthaus Zürich.