Narrator: The Palace at 4 AM was made in 1932 by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. It’s made of wood, glass, wire, and string. The sculpture is 25 inches high, 28 inches wide, and 16 inches deep. In metric units, it’s about 64 centimeters high, 72 centimeters wide, and 40 centimeters deep.
Giacometti’s sculpture is like a dollhouse stripped down to the outlines of its rooms. A thin, caramel-colored wooden platform with curved edges serves as the floor. Planted across its surface are skinny dowels, roughly the thickness and texture of chopsticks. They stretch upward to meet horizontal dowels and together create a scaffolding. Because the wooden base sits atop a black cylinder, about 3 inches high, it appears as if the sculpture is floating. The palace has a number of rooms and spaces delineated by this scaffolding, but no solid walls or roofing. Giacommeti described the sculpture as a “skeleton in space.”
Several unexpected objects and figures populate the fragile, air-filled sculpture, giving it a fantastical and mysterious quality often associated with Surrealism. This artistic movement was dedicated to exploring dreams and the subconscious mind. In fact, Giacometti said the sculpture “presented itself to my mind entirely completed. I have limited myself to reproducing it…without changing anything.”
Let’s tour the structure as if we were an inhabitant of the palace. Imagine north is straight ahead of us as we look at the sculpture. We begin inside a triangular prism-shaped room on the west side of the palace. Thin rods reach up to support the frame of a wide triangle tilted back 45 degrees. This triangle creates the illusion of a pitched roof on a house.
Standing in the center of this room, we encounter the wooden figure of a woman who is often identified as Denise, a former lover of the artist. She faces east, toward the palace’s other rooms. The simplified figure is roughly the size and shape of a chess piece consisting of a small head, an angular chest without arms, and a cone-shaped skirt covering the bottom half of her body. She is made of a darker-colored wood. Behind her are three vertical rectangular panels spaced evenly so there is a gap between each, large enough for us to walk through. Painted off-white and affixed to the armature of the house, the panels are nearly one-and-a-half times the height of the woman.
Moving deeper into the space, we enter the north side of the palace where a tower extends vertically. The tall rectangular prism is delineated by four dowels of varying heights. A few strands of twine and wire wrap around the top of the tower, which is the tallest part of the palace.
As we turn to face south, we come upon a rectangular panel hanging vertically from its narrow end and covering the middle part of the tower. It is the same off-white color as the panels in the first room. If we move around it to inspect the other side, we’ll notice it has an oblong wood object affixed to the front. It looks like a brown pea pod that’s been cut in half, revealing one pea near the bottom of the pod.
Directly above our heads hovers a thin horizontal piece of glass, like a catwalk. It is about the size of a standard six-inch ruler and is suspended in the air by two U-shaped wires that wrap around horizontal dowels. The glass catwalk starts near the outside perimeter of the first room, stretching across and into the east side of the structure. If we turn east and follow its length, we will enter the final room in the palace.
It is an ample room defined by five thin vertical dowels. In the center of the room is a tall rectangular cage made of the same wooden dowels as the rest of the structure. A wooden human spinal column with articulated vertebrae dangles from a delicate wire. It is about the same size as the wooden figure of the woman in the first room.
High above our heads, beyond the cage and the outline of the room’s upper boundary, a square frame is attached to a single horizontal rod. There we encounter the wooden skeleton of a winged creature slightly smaller than Denise. It has a large beak-like mouth, long neck, round body, and protruding tail—a silhouette similar to that of a pterodactyl mid-flight.
This sculpture was inspired by Giacometti’s relationship with a past lover. Imagining the story unfolding within the palace’s walls, the artist once said, “We constructed a fantastical palace in the night—a very fragile palace of matches. At the least false movement, a whole section would collapse. We always began it again.”