In post-war Paris, the friendly and artistic trio Beauvoir, Sartre, Giacometti

In March 1941, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who had been imprisoned in a stalag near Trier, Germany, returned to Paris. There he met Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). A few weeks later, one of her students, who was also his lover, Nathalie Sorokine (1921-1968), introduced them to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), perhaps at the Lipp brasserie, according to Simone de Beauvoir's account in The Prime of Life (1960). Shortly after, Giacometti returned to his native Switzerland. When he returned to Paris in the fall of 1945, relations between the couple and the sculptor resumed. The cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain are the scenes of their conversations, when they do not take place in the artist's dusty studio.

The exhibition "Beauvoir, Sartre, Giacometti. Vertigo of the Absolute" at the Giacometti Institute in Paris tells this story. It borrows part of its title from the preface Sartre wrote in 1948 for Giacometti's exhibition at Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York, entitled "The Search for the Absolute." Sartre's typescript is presented in a glass case, and one must try to decipher Giacometti's handwritten annotations and corrections, which Sartre paid little attention to. It can be seen in the first and most historical room of the exhibition, along with photographs, a few letters, pencil-drawn portraits of Simone de Beauvoir—in 1946—and Jean-Paul Sartre—in 1949—and small plaster heads of the writer, the most famous of which, lightly painted, belonged to her model. In these studies, we find Giacometti's style, proceeding alternately by accumulations and erasures of lines and varying the poses – face, profile, three-quarters – in order to obtain the most complete X-ray of the head he is observing.

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