Audio Stop 16

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Carved from a slab of white marble, the top surface of this sculpture is covered with shallow, cuplike and deep rectangular depressions of various sizes. We look slightly down onto the slab in this photograph. The surface is divided into three vertical sections, which are defined by incised lines. The cuplike depressions are in the sections to the left and right. Two tiny, carved, dark wooden objects, like game pieces, stand upright in a cup with one the left and one to the right. Each piece is flat with a symmetrical design and a point at the bottom that inserts into the cup. The left piece has a disk flanked by triangular protrusions with a clover shape at top. The second piece has four stacked, small circles, and a U-shaped form to suggest the outline of a person with raised arms. Three smaller but deep rectangular cavities are carved into the middle section, and each one has a lid. Two lids sit askew on the top surface of the board near their respective openings, and inside are additional wooden pieces. A blank, rectangular section outlined with lightly inscised lines in the lower right is carved with reversed script letters that read, “on ne joue plus.” The entire surface has beveled edges, so it sits on a stepped base.

Alberto Giacometti

No More Play, 1931-1932

East Building, Upper Level — Gallery 415-B

One of the great surrealist sculptors, Alberto Giacometti often incorporated themes of games and play into his early work, as with this sculpture. The form the artist used here resembles a board game with moveable pieces, yet the nature of the game is unclear. The ambiguous space and unknowable rules of the “game” represented in No More Play make this feel like an object one might encounter in a dream.

Read full audio transcript

HARRY COOPER:

This is one of Giacometti’s great works. I think what’s unusual about this is that it’s flat; it’s something we look down on. It is not in the usual space of sculpture. It looks much more like a game board.

NARRATOR:

Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art.

HARRY COOPER:

An equally good title might have been “Let’s Play,” because the work consists of a number of movable elements. Yet the title is No More Play, which has a darkness to it. I think we have these holes, these lids, coffins. The figures set up like little monuments coming up above this marble deck. Most obviously, there’s a suggestion of death, the end of something, the end of play.

NARRATOR:

Look at the adjacent piece too, also by Giacometti, The Invisible Object: Hands Holding the Void. It shares the same sense of disquiet and confinement ... and is thought to reference everything from the artist’s recently deceased father to Egyptian funerary art.

HARRY COOPER:

We don’t really know what kind of interactions are happening on that game board, nor do we know what this figure is doing, this upright figure with hands holding the void, holding nothing. It’s kind of an alien and seems to be trying to communicate something to us from another world. Maybe that’s not a bad way to think about both of these very mysterious sculptures.

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