I was recently asked what color sad was. I floundered about, mentally picturing color after color trying to find a fit, finally deciding sad did not have a color. Sad is emptiness, it is what is left after mad, after grief, after all the other emotions have flamed out. It is a stuck place where there is no forward or backward movement. It is texture-less, colorless. It is a void.
Then I realized, that I while I could not settle on a color for sad, but I did envision an image - The Invisible Object, Hands Holding the Void, by Alberto Giacometti.
His later pieces, the ones he is most known for, do resonate with isolation and sadness, but I was surprised when the word sad triggered Hands Holding the Void. I have always loved this piece, because she appears to be just on the verge of being able to tell me something important, something life changing. She does have a certain helplessness, a quiet desperateness, but she also seems so earnest, engaged, even hopeful - in spite of the curious rectangular slab pressing against the front of her lower legs.
It is hard to find good pictures of this sculpture. Most are full frontal images, where it is hard to grasp that she is actually represented sitting on a chair and in some versions there is even a bird sitting beside her. Everything is skewed, but logical except for the slab pinning her legs together, preventing the independent movement necessary to stand and move on, trapping her in place.
Giacometti wrote that he "could have destroyed it. But I made this statue for just the opposite reason - to renew myself. Perhaps this is what makes it worthwhile." It was one of his last surrealist pieces. He would later struggle to finish work. His brother Diego sometimes arbitrarily emptied his studio to force him to begin new pieces. Was Hands Holding the Void his last heroic effort to get a grasp on the sadness and isolation that was about to descend, an attempt to capture and hold it so he could set it aside and move on? Was in the end he left with emptiness, resigned to letting it settle into his life without further fight?
Maybe Hands Holding the Void is my image of sadness because it was the last piece by Giacometti that engaged the viewer, that grappled with emptiness, that tried to communicate emptiness. Every figure afterward stares back at the viewer dispassionately, in the world but not part of the world, seen but not heard.